Every leader wants A-players. Walk into almost any company and ask the CEO who they’re hoping to hire next, and the answer is usually some version of “the best.”
But here’s something Mike Dixon, President and COO of Hoops, says that tends to catch people off guard: “most jobs inside a company are not A-roles.”
That’s not a knock on your team. It’s just the truth. And once you really sit with it, it changes the entire way you should be thinking about hiring. Not every role is as critical as the next, nor should they be treated as such.
The concept of an A-player itself comes from Bradford Smart’s Topgrading research, which has been used by companies like General Electric and Honeywell for decades. A-players make up roughly the top 10% of available talent for any given role, B-players the next 25%, and C-players the rest. Smart’s research also found that statistically about half of all hiring decisions result in a mishire of some kind, which is part of why getting this right matters so much.
But here’s where Mike’s insight diverges from the conventional advice. Most frameworks push you to chase A-players everywhere, in every seat, all the time.
Mike’s, and Hoops’, advice is more practical (and cost-effective) for growing companies: you don’t need an A-player in every seat. You need to know which 10 to 15% of your roles actually require one, and put your energy there instead of spreading it thin trying to upgrade everything at once.
The Mistake Most Leaders Make
Mike and our team hear this constantly from leaders: “we have all A players at this company,” as if that’s the goal.
It’s a nice sentiment. The problem is it’s not realistic, and honestly, it’s not even necessary. Mike puts the real number at 10 to 15% of roles in any organization being truly critical A-roles to driving business results. Everything else still matters, but it doesn’t carry the same weight, and the company can still thrive with strong B and C-players in those roles (while saving real money and time you’d otherwise spend competing for A-players everywhere).
He uses an analytics company as an example. The person running your data infrastructure and pulling client insights out of it is critical, because if that role fails, the product stops working and client deliverables stop showing up. Your corporate controller is important too, but for a different reason. If that person leaves, the business has time to backfill, the financials still get handled, and there’s usually a deeper bench of qualified people who can step into that role quickly. The specialized analytics role is harder to replace quickly with a solid candidate, while the controller role isn’t as hard-to-fill.
That’s the distinction Mike’s pointing at. Critical isn’t about how important a function sounds. It’s about what happens to the business in the near term if that specific seat goes empty or isn’t filled with an A-player.
This is where most companies go wrong. They jump straight to “let’s hire A-players” without ever doing the work of figuring out which seats actually need one. So they end up either overpaying and over-recruiting for roles that don’t move the needle, or under-investing in the handful of roles that genuinely determine whether the business hits its numbers.
How to Actually Identify Critical A-Roles
Before you think about the right person, think about the right role. Mike’s approach is to ask what specific experiences and behaviors separate someone who’s excellent at this specific job from someone who’s merely qualified.
Take a head of sales role as an example. Most job descriptions default to asking for “5 to 10 years of experience” and leave it at that. The problem is, experience isn’t the differentiator. The real question is whether someone has a track record of scaling a new product across markets, or consistently beating their sales targets rather than just hitting them. Whether that took them two years or ten matters less than the fact that they know how to do it. As Mike puts it, “do you want someone who’s really good at achieving those sales goals and maybe beating them, or do you want somebody that has three years of experience?”
Those are two very different hires, and most job postings can’t tell the difference because they’re written around years, not outcomes.
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The Job-Hopping Reframe
Most hiring managers see a resume with several job changes and immediately treat it as a red flag. But we see it differently, with a major caveat.
If someone has changed roles every two to four years specifically to take on more responsibility, not just to bounce around, that’s often a signal of an A-player who’s been actively seeking growth. This shows up especially in narrower fields like HR or finance, where the ladder inside any one company tends to be short because of a smaller team. A-players in those fields often have to move externally to keep climbing, then sometimes come back at a higher level.
However, we want to be really clear about this distinction. Job-hopping because of poor performance, lack of loyalty, or for the sake of it is a real concern and is a red flag. But job-hopping in service of increasing scope and impact is something else entirely, and we actually believe is a green flag.
What Actually Predicts an A-Player
A few traits show up consistently in our experience, and they line up closely with what Topgrading research has found across thousands of interviews:
- Scarcity. Not everyone at your company is an A-player, and that’s the point. If every single person seems like a 10 out of 10, you’re probably not being honest in your evaluation (or grossly overpaying in roles you don’t need to be).
- Above-average intelligence. This is one of the most consistently supported predictors of workplace success across roles and industries. For people-facing roles specifically, like sales, leadership, or client management, emotional intelligence tends to matter just as much, since reading people and managing relationships well becomes part of the job itself.
- Personality fit for the specific role. An extroverted, relationship-driven person makes sense for a sales role. Someone who’s energized by long stretches of focused, independent work might be a much better fit for a deep technical role. There’s no universal personality profile for an A-player. It depends entirely on what the role actually requires.
- A track record of taking on more. This is the throughline. A-players tend to seek out increasing responsibility and then actually deliver on it, which is different from simply wanting a bigger title.
The Question Most Managers Can’t Answer Honestly
Here’s the test Mike points to in determining the real A-players on your team, borrowed from Bradford Smart’s research: are you willing to stake your reputation on this person to get the job done?
Sit with that question for a second, applied to your own team right now. Smart’s research backs up just how revealing that question really is. Across more than 40,000 executives surveyed, when asked which of their direct reports they’d rehire without reservation, the answer was consistently limited to their A-players. Not their B-players. Not the people who are fine, dependable, and get the job done most of the time. Just the ones they’d bet their own credibility on.
Most managers, if they’re being honest, can’t say yes to that question for most of their team. That’s not a crisis, and it doesn’t mean you need to go replace them. It just means most roles were never meant to carry that bar in the first place, which loops right back to the earlier point: figure out which roles actually need an A-player before you go looking for one.
What This Looks Like in Practice
If your hiring process hasn’t been updated since before AI became part of the employee toolkit, here’s where to start:
- Identify your critical A-Roles, the 10 to 15% of roles that actually require an A-player. Look across your org chart and ask which roles, if left vacant or filled poorly, would actually disrupt revenue, slow down delivery, or create a bottleneck nobody else can absorb. These aren’t always your leaders or execs. That’s your starting list. You can read more in our former blog on how to do this well.
- Rewrite what “qualified” means for those roles. Drop the years-of-experience requirement as your primary filter. Replace it with the specific outcomes and track record that actually predict success in that seat.
- Ask the reputation question about your current team. For each of those critical roles, would you stake your reputation on the person currently in it? If the answer is no, that’s not necessarily a reason to make a change tomorrow, but it’s information worth brewing on further.
- Stop trying to make every role an A-role. Save the energy, the comp budget, and the recruiting effort for the seats that actually warrant it. The rest of your team still matters, but they don’t need to clear the same bar. You will reduce your operating expenses while reaching the same revenue targets if you properly identify your critical roles right.
Know the Seat Before You Chase the Person
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