Why You Shouldn’t Hire B Players

“A players hire A players; B players hire C players, and C players hire D players. It doesn’t take long to get to Z players. This trickle-down effect causes bozo explosions in companies.”

This also applies to replacements. People keep bubbling up until they can’t handle the level of incompetence they’re dealing with and quit. Then, the company has to replace them, and the cycle restarts itself.

Hiring is so tricky because there are very few people who would be an actual improvement over the previous person.

I’ve seen some companies hire people I would have fired within the first week of working with them. It’s common to see someone hired who is less qualified than someone they replaced.

If you keep hiring B players, it will get increasingly harder to find enough A players to make a difference–mostly because A players will not want anything to do with your organization.

Your company strategy should be to find genuinely great people and work together to provide them with a unique environment where they can do what they do best every day. Recruit those great people and then work to keep them.