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Based on the work of Bradford D Smart. Top-grading - filling every role in your business with ‘A’ Players. ‘The job no leader should delegate; having the right people in the right place’ (Larry Bossidy).

Having ‘A’ players in your team helps you to grow your business faster, to succeed further, to recruit similar ‘A’ players and for sure, it can make your job easier! It can be hard to implement top-grading processes, but only because of your own limitations as a business owner (time, constraints) and whether you are prepared to put up with mediocre or poor performance from your teams and/or individuals. Often we are faced with a gap within our team and quickly fill it with someone who can seemingly do the job – it might be that we heard of someone with relevant experience that just happened to be looking for a new opportunity. Often the recruitment process is short with no standardisation or clear process.

Bradford D Smart recommends that we determine who are the ‘A’ players on our existing team and focus on them during the hiring process. Ask your ‘A’ players to be involved in the hiring process, find out if they know other ‘A’ players – the chances are, they are likely to mix in similar circles to themselves.

When recruiting consider the following: Scorecards, Adverts and Telephone Screening

Create scorecards/checklists which clearly describe the accountabilities, KPI’s, values and personality traits that an ‘A’ player would demonstrate to show that they would fit into your team

Ensure that your advert describes the ‘A’ player in detail by focusing on the content of your scorecard, thus helping you to attract the right calibre of candidate to your role

When you receive the CVs and pull out only the best ones and conduct a telephone screening call with relevant applicants, find out about their education and career history:

• Educational grades
• Employment for every year and month since they began working
• Base pay and bonuses for each role
• What they liked most and least about each role o What they are good at and not so good at professionally
• What their career aspirations are
• How their previous employers would rate their performance

The aim of the process is to weed out the ‘B’ and ‘C’ players and get a shortlist of ‘A’ players Top-Grading Interviews When conduction top-grading interviews it is recommended that you undertake two interviews on separate occasions and that these could take up to three hours each.

The top-grading approach focuses on a CIDS format – Chronological, In, Depth, Structured - for every job the candidate had in the past, ask the following:

• What were they hired to do?
• What were their major achievements?
• What failures or mistakes were made and what did they learn from them?
• If they managed staff, what calibre were they when inherited?
• If they managed staff, what calibre of staff did they end up with?
• What was their boss like and how would they rate them?
• Why did they leave each role?

Ask questions focusing on the desired competencies for the role as outlined on the scorecard, remembering that past performance is the best predictor of future performance