Cracking the Code: Why It’s So Challenging to Find Exceptional Talent

Are you struggling to find exceptional new hires to add to your team? You are not alone. Finding top-quality, A-player talent is difficult for a lot of business owners.

In this excerpt from my book, “How to Hire the Best: The Entrepreneur's Ultimate Guide to Attracting Top Performing Team Members ," I walk through not just why hiring is such a prevalent challenge for business owners, but why it is critical to the success of your business.?

“Threat #1: The Challenge of Finding Exceptional Team Members?

Consider that any population consists of about 10% A-Players. This means 90% of the people you encounter are B-, C-, D-, or F-Players. Furthermore, A-Players are rarely unemployed, reading job ads, and looking for work. They probably work elsewhere. A-Players typically move from one opportunity to the next. This explains why utilizing standard hiring practices typically results in mishiring. The odds really are stacked against you until you find better strategies for finding and hiring top team members.?

Your attraction and hiring strategies need to align with how A-Players move from one opportunity to the next. Typical hiring strategies are out of alignment with the behavior of A-Players. What I’ll be teaching you aligns with A-Player behavior, and it will make your hiring process much more effective.?

Because the challenge of finding exceptional team members seems difficult, you may feel as if you have no choice but to lower your standards. By lowering standards, you end up building a team of marginal members. They need excessive management, create problems with work ethic and quality,? and bring others down. You might as well be spraying A-Player repellent all over your business.?

Time and time again, owners who lower their hiring standards confide in me that they spend way too much time managing team member problems.? Some even say they long to simplify their business and go back to the days before they even had team members.?

“There was no consistent way to engage with the people we wanted to come and work with us,” says Brian Hayes, co-owner of Ohio Property? Brothers. “It was always something that was kind of made up either on the spot, or there was no initial recruiting process. It became time that I needed? A-Players to work with us. A year ago, we were just grabbing people and trying to make them fill roles. We weren’t organized enough.”?

Spending too much time dealing with marginal to poor team members can have a lasting negative impact on you. Some owners sour on the idea of growing with team members and end up working too hard for too little money, essentially moving from owning a business to owning a job. They go back to being a one-person show, doing all the selling, work, paperwork,? and billing. When they don’t work, they don’t make money. That means no vacations, no growth, and sometimes no hope. As David Houk of Houk Performance Therapy confided about his last vacation, “That was the most expensive vacation I ever took!” In that scenario, taking vacation means revenue stops. For business owners without a reliable team, vacations are nightmares in which the ticking clock reminds you of lost revenue while the rest of your family relaxes and has fun.”?

This excerpt just scratches the surface of why hiring top talent is both difficult and important. At this point, you might be thinking, “I know I need to find A-players, but I just don’t know how.” Join me at my free workshop, "3 Simple Steps to Hiring Your Next A-Player," on May 17th at 1 PM Central time to learn how you can find exceptional talent that will not just keep your business running smoothly but thrive!?

Click the link to register: https://tapthepotential.com/hirethebest/

About the Author

Sabrina Starling, PhD, PCC, BCC, The Business Psychologist, is the bestselling author ofThe How to Hire the Best Series and The 4 Week Vacation?, as well as the founder of Tap the Potential LLC and host of the Profit by Design podcast. She and her team atwww.tapthepotential.com are on a mission to support entrepreneurs in taking their lives back from their businesses.