How to Stop Hiring Like an Idiot: A Step-by-Step Guide to Hiring A-Players

Created at 2025-05-06 11:23:39

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Here we will analyse typical hiring mistakes and learn how to become a top 5% hiring manager simply by avoiding these errors. The ideal outcome from reading this is that you will learn to hire more systemically, with a high percentage of successful hires (AERS), and a lower percentage of dismissals during the probationary period.

Part 1: Hiring in the Business Context

Very often, hiring is used like “a microscope for hammering nails”, where any new task or goal in the company leads to the thought “that means we need to hire someone”. This is a common mistake. Mindlessly increasing staff numbers leads to an inflated headcount, increased complexity, slower processes, worse results and possibly subsequent redundancies. I preach the philosophy: if you can avoid hiring, then don’t hire.

To ensure that hiring is genuinely necessary and will be beneficial, it must be integrated into the entire business context. Before hiring someone, you need to go through and think through a whole chain:

Company/Business Goals: What overall result do we want to achieve (financial indicators, entering new markets, increasing profitability).

Company Strategy: How the business plans to achieve these goals (which bets it is making).

Team Strategy: How your and your team’s initiatives will help the business achieve its goals.

Roadmap: An artefact describing exactly what we will do and when, to implement the strategy and achieve the goals.

Target Team Structure: How the team capable of implementing the roadmap should look (which players, how they interact, which competences).

Current Team: Assessment of the current team composition.

Change Plan (Team Roadmap): The delta between the current and target teams. This plan includes steps for development, grade increases/decreases, dismissals, and only one of the steps can be hiring a specific player.

If you do not understand how your current hiring fits into this broad structure and context, try to refrain from hiring and go through this chain. Only then will it become clear exactly whom you need to hire.

Common mistakes often made when hiring:

New task appears = need to hire someone. Increasing staff, complexity.
A “directive” has arrived. There must be another product manager. Went to hire because product managers are ordinary people.
Relying on “gut feeling” and intuition. Thinking that everything will become clear straight away during the interview.
Not treating the candidate as a potential player. Not selling the company to them, but acting as if “working in our bank is a great honour, and everyone should queue up”.

By avoiding these mistakes and integrating hiring into the business context, you take the first step towards hiring A-players.

Part 2: Why Bad Hiring is Expensive, and How to Understand Exactly Whom to Look For

Bad hiring is a very expensive undertaking. Unsuccessful hiring leads to many losses:

Loss of Money: Costs for recruiters, job boards, hiring tools, salary for the unsuccessfully hired player, termination payments.

Loss of Time: Months spent searching, probationary period, ignoring problems, attempts to “fix” the player, starting a new hire, handover of duties. In the worst case, you can lose a year by hiring an unsuitable player.

Lost Opportunities: Over a year with a weak player, the company does not achieve the expected progress, competitors pull ahead, market opportunities can be missed.

Team Demotivation: When strong players see that a weaker and less performing colleague is working alongside them, it reduces their motivation. And a weak player can bring other weak players into the team.

To avoid this, before you hire anyone at all, you need to create a player card. A player card is a description of the ideal person we want to see in this role. It includes:

Role Mission: A short sentence answering the question of why this role is needed for the business at all.

Expected Outcomes: What specific results we expect from this player.

Competences: What skills and knowledge will be needed to achieve these results.

Leadership Skills / Soft Skills: Necessary for success in this role and team.

Cultural Peculiarities: Of the team, the company, and the hiring manager, which are important to consider.

Let’s analyse this using the example of Resume.io, a B2C SaaS product for creating CVs in English-speaking markets. The company’s goal is to double its paying users by entering new markets (Spanish, Chinese, etc.) and expanding the product-market fit of the current product.

Product strategy: helping the business grow by expanding the set of tools for job searching after creating a CV, in order to increase CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value).

Target product team structure: one Product Manager for acquisition, activation, retention, and localization. The current team is smaller, so the change plan includes hiring the missing managers.

Example for Product Manager for Retention:

Mission: Grow customer retention by increasing product value after creating and downloading a CV.

Expected Results over 12 months:

Proven CLTV growth by 20% (proven — confirmed by tests).
Established hypothesis testing process (benchmark — 6 hypotheses per quarter).
Built a strong cross-functional team where >70% are A-players.

Numerical indicators for results are very important. In the next part, we will discuss how to turn these results into a list of competences.

Part 3: Whom Exactly to Look For (Continued): Competences, Soft Skills, and Cultural Fit

Turning expected results into a list of competences is a critically important step. To do this, you need to be an expert in the area you are hiring for, or call upon such an expert for help (for example, Head of Analytics for hiring an analyst, Team Lead or CTO for hiring a developer). The expert must understand the business context and your expectations and provide a vision of the necessary hard skills.

Let’s continue the example with the Product Manager for Retention for Resume.io. Reminder of the context: mass market B2C SaaS in HRTech, main market USA, senior multifunctional team, marketing in the Netherlands, everyone is English-speaking. The main lever for this player’s influence on the goal (CLTV growth) is to quickly conduct strong A/B tests. From this context and lever, we can derive the necessary Hard Skills

Hard Skills

Conduct research to understand customers and generate hypotheses.
Analyse data to find insights.
Prototype and quickly test hypotheses.
Set up processes in the team oriented towards speed.
Analyse experiment results from the perspective of product and business metrics.
Deliver functionality qualitatively.

Soft Skills

Soft Skills and Leadership Qualities are also derived from the business and team context. For our vacancy, they include:

English language no lower than C1, as you need to conduct interviews with customers and interact with English-speaking stakeholders.
Readiness to understand and do things yourself for which there is no dedicated player in a small multifunctional team (configure emails, tag events for analytics, etc.).
Ability to lead people without formal authority, as the team is cross-functional, consists of seniors, and you will not have direct reports who are developers or designers.

The Cultural Peculiarities of the hiring manager and team are also important. The personal preferences of the manager need to be considered, otherwise they will remain implicit and will be the reason for rejections or compromises leading to problems. My personal preferences for a player in the team:

High level of autonomy and proactivity.
Organisation and systemic thinking (better than mine!).
High energy level, quick thinking and speech.
Ability to argue, defend your opinion, and say “no” to the manager if they are wrong.

By gathering all these characteristics (hard skills, soft skills, leadership qualities, cultural fit), we get a complete description of the ideal player. Now we know whom to look for. In the next parts, we will discuss how to find and select this player.

Part 4: How to Filter Candidates and Select the Best (Part 1)

Now that we clearly understand whom we are looking for, we need to learn how to filter and select the best from a large stream of applicants. The main principle of skill assessment: there are competences that predict success in a role, and there are signals that indicate the presence or absence of these competences. Signals vary in strength and difficulty of extraction. The goal is to obtain the strongest and most accessible signals with minimal effort.

Competence levels can be represented from complete ignorance to A-player level (better than 90% of other people). We assess each important competence of a candidate on a scale from E (lowest) to A (highest). Ideally, an A-player is A everywhere.

Sources of signals about a candidate:

What they say about themselves.
Their experience and achievements from the outside.
What others say about them.
How they demonstrate themselves in practice during the selection process.
Facts from their life that can be verified.

It is important to distinguish the strength of signals:

Weak signals (low reliability): Candidate’s words about the future (“How would I solve such a task”), theoretical cases, unconfirmed or unrehearsed past experience, abstract colleague assessments (“good person”). These signals should be avoided.

Medium-level signals (medium reliability): Specific cases during interviews, solving a practical problem, confirmed and rehearsed past experience applying competences, specific cases from colleagues. Our selection funnel should be structured to collect as many such signals as possible.

Ironclad signals (high reliability): Successful achievement of goals during the probationary period. But this takes too long to wait for.

The Candidate Selection Funnel

The Candidate Selection Funnel in general terms looks like this:

CV filter.
Short screening interview (or text/video questions).
Test assignment (likely).
Hard skills interview.
Soft skills and cultural interview.
Topgrading (optional, for the most diligent).
Reference checking (likely).
Paid trial period (likely).
Offer.

Let’s analyse the first stages of the funnel:

CV Filter: The goal is to filter out the maximum number of those who definitely do not fit. Objective indicators are checked: years of work experience, presence of leadership experience, experience in a specific industry. At this stage, we filter out those who clearly do not fit.

Screening Interview: A short call or text questions. The goal is to filter out unsuitable candidates based on characteristics difficult to see in a CV (level of English, experience starting from scratch, experience managing a large number of people). This is also a good time to discuss HR questions (employment type, work format, salary range). Often conducted by a recruiter.

Test Assignment: Needed to check specific hard competences. The result is a finished artefact (document with conclusions, feature description, working code). The competence for which the assignment was created is assessed based on the artefact. Important: the assignment should not be large (2–4 hours), it needs to be well “sold” to the candidate (show value), and it should check a specific competence, not be “generally useful”.

In the next lesson, we will delve into interviews and reference checking.

Part 5: How to Filter Candidates and Select the Best (Part 2)

Let’s continue analysing the selection funnel. If a candidate has reached the interview stage, it is assumed that their assessment for the previously checked competences is A or A+. If the assessment is B or lower, you need to consider: is this a critical competence or not? A non-critical one can be improved or covered by the team, but this is a compromise requiring effort.

Hard Skills Interview: The stage for finding signals about the presence and level of hard competences. Golden rule: if it is important for you that the candidate can do X, look for signals where they successfully did X in the past. Successful application of competences in the past is a strong predictor of future success.

How not to ask questions: Hypothetical, theoretical questions (“How would you solve such a task?”, “What do you know about A/B tests?”). Candidates will tell you the theory, but this will not show how they act in practice.

How to check correctly: Look for specific practical cases from the past. Ask: “Tell me how you successfully solved such a task?”, “Tell me how you conducted an A/B test that led to growth…”, “What problems arose and how did you solve them?”. Ideally, the candidate’s answer should follow the STAR framework (Situation, Task, Action, Result). Your goal as an interviewer is to get an understanding of all four stages. If any point is missing, it is unrehearsed experience — a weak signal.

Examples of questions for a Product Manager for Retention (Resume.io):

Tell me how you created a roadmap for 6+ months (using STAR).
Tell me how you conducted research that led to a strong product hypothesis (using STAR).
Tell me how you delivered a valuable feature that impacted business metrics (using STAR).

Soft Skills, Leadership, Cultural Interview: We check non-hard skills using the same methods — through cases from the past. Examples of questions:

How did you act when there was a task but no resource?
How did you increase your team’s speed and how did you know the speed increased?
How did you refuse or reject your manager’s idea? (Reminds of the importance of the ability to argue, mentioned in Part 3).

If the candidate showed A or A+ everywhere, that’s great!. If there are B ratings, you need to decide how critical this competence is, if someone can cover it, and if you are ready to invest 3 months in improving it. If the answer to at least one of these questions is “no”, it’s better to decline.

Topgrading: A stage for the most “obsessed”, following The A Method methodology. A process of collecting maximum signals from the past proving that the candidate is an A-player (achieved high results, got promotions, built great teams, is valued, reflects on failures). Questions are asked about every place of work over many years.

Reference Checking: Not a stage for checking competences, but for finding unexpected red flags that might have been missed in the interview.

You need to formulate clear, specific questions in advance.
Ask different respondents (managers, colleagues, subordinates).
Look for specific observations about behaviour and performance.
Examples of questions: “What tasks were they best at?”, “What was their biggest success/mistake?”, “What were they responsible for, how did they achieve results?”.
You can ask: “On a 10-point scale, how satisfied were you with working together?”. If less than 8 — dig deeper, look for a red flag.
It is better to collect references yourself by voice, not delegate.

If red flags are found, either it is a “no-go”, or you need to discuss them with the candidate, understand the rationale for their actions (again, using STAR), and if the mistake is acknowledged and learned from, you can move forward, taking this peculiarity into account.

Part 6: What to Do to Get A-Players to Accept Your Offer

Many people think that selling the position starts at the offer stage. This is a mistake. Selling happens throughout the entire selection process. At each stage, we increase the candidate’s motivation for the desired action. We show value, address “pains”, handle objections, remove obstacles.

Stages of the funnel where we sell:

Job Description: Goal — motivate the candidate to click and open the description. Tools: concise title, indication of salary range to increase CTR.

Reading the Description: Goal — motivate them to apply. Tools: write a great role description, provide business context, talk about tasks, challenges, resources, team, manager, culture. You can add a video message.

Screening Call: Goal — motivate them to attend the call. Tools: say the call is short, the candidate will quickly understand if there’s a match, they can ask questions.

Test Assignment: Goal — motivate them to complete it. Tools: show value — immersion in a new area, a case for their portfolio, detailed feedback, opportunity to learn. Address the “pain”: if you don’t do it, you won’t get into a great team. Preferably, the assignment should come from the manager with a personal address.

Hard Skills Interview: Goal — motivate them to attend. Tools: it’s only an hour, you’ll get feedback, practice your interviewing skills, be able to ask questions.

Soft Skills Interview: Goal — motivate them to attend. Tools: you’ll get a feel for the management, focus on soft skills, check chemistry with the manager, it’s almost the end.

Reference Checking: Goal — motivate them to provide contacts. Tools: it’s an opportunity for growth (you’ll find out how you’re perceived), the last step before the offer. This will be done anyway, it’s better to participate and influence the choice of respondents.

Offer: Only here do we formally make the offer. If we started selling only now, we would have missed 7 stages of influencing motivation.

Accumulated knowledge about the candidate (their goals, desires, fears, life context) are our sales points. We use them to adapt and present the offer. Just like in product marketing: the more knowledge about the “customer”, the higher the probability of “purchase”.

How to Present the Offer So It Is Accepted:

Document: A beautiful landing page/document summarising all the sales points formulated during communication.
Personal Presentation by the Hiring Manager: A call where you personally tell the candidate why they are great, why you want them on the team, and how you will help them succeed.
Two-way Conversation: After the presentation, ask for their opinion, reaction, doubts. Gather objections to address.
Meeting with the Future Team: Allow the candidate to interact with future colleagues so they can “make them fall in love” with the team.
Follow-up: After the offer, ask about their thoughts, doubts, offer help, assist them in formulating the next steps for making a decision.

The more knowledge about the candidate and the more touchpoints where we “warm them up”, the higher the chance that the offer will be accepted by a strong player.

Part 7: How to Create Conditions for a New Player’s Success in the First 90 Days

When a candidate has accepted the offer, the hiring manager’s task is to create conditions for their success in the first 90 days (onboarding). Good onboarding answers many questions and provides the widest possible context so that the new player needs less intervention in their work in the future.

What onboarding should include:

Business Context: What the business model looks like, how the company earns/spends money, the value chain, unit economics, P&L, competitors, business goals and strategy, team strategy. The player must understand why their work is needed for the business.

Player’s Long-Term Goals (Outcomes): A clear formulation of their work results and how they will affect business metrics. How these results are measured, in which dashboards, what previous values were, what has already been done in this direction. This will help the player avoid reinventing the wheel.

Values and Principles: What behaviour is welcomed (and for what people are promoted, with examples), what is not welcomed (and for what people are dismissed), how communication is typically done.

Short-Term Results: What leading metrics show movement towards the big goal. The annual goal is a lagging indicator. Faster indicators are needed. What the stages of movement towards the goal are, where all this is tracked.

Plan for Moving Towards the Goal: What exactly needs to be done. If there is a plan, explain how and by whom it was built, and on what assumptions. If there is no plan, help the player build the next steps, what needs to be researched, studied, whom to talk to, so that a plan emerges, and define checkpoints.

Organisational Structure Around the Player: Who are the manager(s), their goals/plans. Who are the peers, stakeholders, their goals/plans. How the player’s goals relate to the goals of others. How decisions are made and conflicts are resolved.

Resources: Who is on the team, what is the budget (for hiring, infrastructure, tools, training), which decisions can be made independently, what needs approval, how to review the budget/headcount.

Workflow (Day-to-day): About chats, channels, regular meetings, rituals. Planning and approval process. Contact points with other teams/stakeholders. Where knowledge, experiments, plans are stored. Synchronisation rituals (weekly focuses, business reviews).

Whom to Contact: A list of people to go to with different questions.

Product Understanding: Go through the product together, show different states, provide access (customer, admin) so the player can get a feel for the product “at their fingertips”.

Even doing half of this will make onboarding significantly better.

Instructions for Working with the Manager: A challenge task — give the player an understanding of your personal peculiarities and how to work with you effectively. For example, if you don’t like “hand-holding”, immediately provide broad context and goals, and in the first weeks expect the player’s action plan. This will show whether you value autonomy and proactivity.

Tips for Onboarding:

Create a document with links to all important files, dashboards, chats, people — an onboarding plan.
Meet frequently with the player in the first couple of weeks, help them navigate the onboarding plan.
Then switch to weekly meetings or a couple of times a week.
Set up a shared space (Notion) for questions, agenda, links.
Make an intro post in general chats where you introduce the player, and they talk about themselves.
Observe the player in team meetings: how they ask questions, whether they exhibit expected qualities.
In face-to-face meetings, ask open questions more often (“Who have you managed to talk to?”) instead of closed ones (“Did you talk to…?”). This helps the player navigate independently. Ask what they based their planning on, what they considered, what assumptions they made — this way you will understand their logic, not just the fact of completion.
Apply situational leadership: manage senior players at the goals level, intermediate at the projects level, juniors at the tasks level. Micromanaging seniors is demotivating, managing juniors at a high level of abstraction is ineffective. Build a plan on how to increase the level of abstraction of management for the player over time.

Applying these onboarding principles will significantly increase the new player’s chances of success in the role and, consequently, your chances of achieving the results for which you hired them.

We have covered the entire path: from integrating hiring into the business context, understanding the cost of bad hiring, defining exactly whom we are looking for, to filtering and selecting the best, selling the position to strong players, and creating conditions for their successful start. This framework helps to hire systemically and increase hiring success.

I hope this article will be useful for you and help you hire smarter!