🧲 A’s Hire A’s
📝 Paid Practical Test
✂️ When to Fire
🧲 A’s Hire A’s
A’s hire A’s, and B’s hire C’s.
The best businesses hire the best talent. That doesn’t mean small businesses can’t attract top talent. You may not be able to afford a senior salesperson or developer, but you can find exceptional up-and-coming talent.
A junior superstar is still a superstar.
The companies that commit to hiring remarkable talent — whether junior or seasoned — go further, faster. Working with great people is like stepping on the gas. It’s surprising how fast you can go and what you can accomplish with a few A’s.
Weak talent slows you down and stunts your company’s performance. It’s like driving on bald tires. You can make progress, but it takes an inordinate amount of energy. You spin your wheels just doing the basics.
A successful business attracts better talent, but people work for people. Great talent choose great leaders.
Your organization’s ability to attract, hire, and organize A’s is a skill. It can be humbling to hire and manage people who are better than you. Let alone giving them the runway to run ahead of you.
Assess your organization’s hiring and management capabilities: Are you hiring and retaining A’s or C’s? That’ll give you a powerful insight into your leadership.
📝 Paid Practical Test
Hiring can feel like you’re kissing frogs to find your prince or princess. And no matter how effective you are at interviewing, you’re always questioning how someone will perform in the role.
One of the most effective tools I’ve adopted in our hiring process is Paid Practical Tests. These are structured assignments that demonstrate on-the-job skills.
For example, when hiring a marketing manager, I might task them to evaluate our social media channels with pointed questions:
- If you took on the role, what would you do differently with the content?
- What steps would you take to grow the social media following and engagement?
We ask for a presentation with a recorded video, like a Loom, for the candidate to explain their findings and recommendations.
The test not only demonstrates the candidate’s understanding of the role, it reveals how they work. It shows their attention to detail, especially with grammar and spelling. And it’s surprising the number of candidates that miss a submission deadline.
I believe these tests must be paid for two reasons. First, there are scummy companies that use Practical Tests to get “free work.” Second, it elevates the expectation for the candidate.
Set the assignment to take no longer than three hours with a reasonable compensation. I aim to pay between $100 to $750 per test, depending on the role and its seniority.
The insights are invaluable. Over 50% of our top picks have been eliminated during the Paid Practical Test. The tests reveal our biases and help the exceptional candidates rise to the top.
📊 One Stat to Watch
$320 Billion
in bonds issued by Big Tech this year to finance their AI data centers. That’s roughly 15% of all U.S. investment-grade bond issuance. When a boom is funded with stock, investors take the hit. When it’s funded with debt, everyone is exposed.
✂️ When to Fire
There’s an old management maxim, “The right time to fire someone is the first time you think about firing them.”
This can seem harsh or unreasonable, until you realize how often managers do the opposite.
Every manager has made the mistake of holding onto someone for too long. We’ve all done it. It’s the natural evolution of learning how to manage and lead.
When you’re in it, you make excuses. You look for ways to prop someone up or help them. You accept some bad behavior or poor performance, because there are glimmers of progress. But then it gets worse, again.
It’s a circular conversation until you can’t avoid it any longer.
Letting someone go is hard. It’s probably the worst part of any manager’s job, but it’s an essential skill. Your ability to assess, diagnose, and decide is a learned skills that only comes with experience.
When you know, be decisive. Skip the performance improvement plan. Do the right thing for the employee and the company. Create a graceful exit plan and act swiftly.
This isn’t to say fire everyone. The other management maxim balances this: “If everyone is a problem, chances are you are the problem.”
🤔 Thoughts on Today’s Issue?
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