“The toughest decisions in organizations are people decisions—hiring, firing, and promoting people. These are the decisions that receive the least attention and are the ones that are the hardest to ‘unmake.’”
—Peter Drucker
In 2016, an outpatient mental health group outside Baltimore had just hired an NP who interviewed extremely well and said all the right things during the interview. After just a few weeks, this NP proved to be mean and nasty. Patients refused to come to the clinic and gave the group bad reviews online. The NP drove co-workers crazy, to the point that they said, “She needs to leave or we are leaving.” At this point, the practice administrator contacted us and told us the situation. We let her know there were better NPs out there that we could land for her. She then felt empowered to terminate this NP and have us do the search. We filled the position three weeks later. This can happen easily, and it happens often when groups are inconsistent and not thorough in their hiring process. They often end up with the wrong players on their team.
Let’s talk about the players you want to recruit for your team. I divide players into three categories: A, B, and C. In the simplest terms:
- A-players are people who exceeds your they bring more value to your team than their total compensation.
- B-Players are people who meets requirements about 70 percent of the
- C-Players are people who only meet expectations about 30 percent of the Most of the time they are falling short of minimum requirements.
The key to success is being vigilant at hiring only A-players. Or, as importantly, when hiring younger workers who haven’t had the time to establish themselves as A-players, getting B-players who can be coached into A-players.
What percentage of your hires have been A-players? According to Avoid Costly Mis-Hires! By Dr. Bradford Smart, statistically, only 25 percent of all hires are high performers. He also said that 50 percent of hires are mishires. The goal is to get that A-player percentage as high as possible. In a perfect world, we would all love having eight out of ten hires being or turning into A-players. But I think that’s unrealistic, especially with this future workforce. With them, a more realistic target is hiring 40 percent A-players, and then making sure that the other 60 percent are B-players with the majority of them showing signs that—given the right tools, resources, and mentorship—they can grow and develop into A-players.
If you can get that ratio of 40 percent or even 50 percent A-players and the rest promising B-players, then you will greatly improve your company’s success. In this difficult recruiting and employment landscape, that’s important. Because it’s a younger workforce, they need to be trained and mentored into the A-player category. While you’re going to shoot for the A-player, what needs to happen more often is hiring somebody who is a B-player, who meets the requirements about 70 percent of the time, but who, with training over the course of two to five years, will likely become an A-player.
I believe you must incorporate into the recruiting and hiring equation talking about how you develop your team members. Organizations across most all fields spend about 40 to 80 percent of their money on people (salary, employee benefits, PTO, etc), but they spend only about 1 percent on training and ongoing development.8 If companies can find good people, and if they focus on mentoring and training, they can turn those B-players into A-players.
The good news is that this future workforce really does want training. They want to learn. They want constant feedback, they want clear expectations, and they want to be held accountable. I think accountability has been lost in the workforce. Sometime in the last ten or twenty years, it has become uncool to hold people accountable. But this younger workforce actually responds well to accountability, and they want it. ftey want to know where they stand and how they can improve their skills. Giving that to them is important. It helps them turn into A-players, which your organization needs in this highly com- petitive environment.
- Carol Deeb, “Percent of a Business Budet for Salary,” Chron, https://smallbusiness.chron.com/percent-business-budget- salary-14254.html.