Few levers that have helped me get 'A' players for Tech & Senior levels

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As this post encompasses insights which are very experiential, the flow for this post would be Insights + Differentiating Practice undertaken on ground. Equally important here is to note that, the objective here is to create an 'A' Team, rather than get Top Performers who might be unwilling to get moulded in Team setup.

  • Insight 1 ( All of them are drawn from our experiences): Good Team + Great Culture (of High Performance, Trust, Empowerment & Skill growth) = Great Product / Great User experience. 

Differentiating Practice: Good team needs High Performers / High Potentials, Great Product needs a strong Employer Branding which projects the Culture in strong light to external stakeholders. Directly impacting all these 3 premises helped getting high performers onboard, shaping a growth mindset culture & projecting it rightly to candidates across social media.

  • Insight 2: A high performing Engineer / Product contributes around  2.5-3x at least as a medium performer. At an Executive level, the value is easily 8-10x if the fitment has hit the sweetspot

Differentiating Practice: Identifying key behaviors/traits that are prerequisite to high performance (Few critical behaviors are listed here: Talent Acquisition + Culture). This is where experience & proven competence of building high performance team comes directly in to play.

  • Insight 3: Hiring decisions needs to be backed by Data & Science, especially the Executive ones. These can make or break the Product/Company & Bad Hire onboarded means huge value erosion & loss of momentum, setting entire team back by at least 6 months !!

Differentiating Practice: The hiring recommendations especially for Senior Hire & Critical Tech Hires need to be data backed & scientific. For Executive Search, I generally leverage DISC (highly reliable & valid globally) amongst various psychometrics & for Non Exec levels, I leverage the Startup based psychometrics. These help validate the thought process, build a strong conviction, aiding the decision making process.

  • Insight 4: ‘A’ players get other ‘A’ players & like to work with the same kind. Drop in standards is substantial, visible, & sets the wrong culture, where retention of ‘A’ players is inevitably difficult.

Differentiating Practice: Getting high performers onboard sets a positive chain reaction, but it's equally important to keep them Aligned, Engaged, with visibility of overall growth, their impact, their skill growth & career growth etc. This builds a strong culture & acts as strong talent magnet for talent pool of 'A' players.

  • Insight 5: Quick Execution, Constant Communication, First principles thinking & aligning to Why are key constructs to creating High Performance & sustainable value.

Differentiating Practice: Picking things real quick. Iterations & incremental changes are more important than perfection, & hence execution wise, we need to be real quick, cos good talent is scarce, an extremely scarce resource indeed. Cos that’s what high growth setups thrive on !!