What Is An A-Player?

What Is An A-Player?

Sean: Hey, guys. Welcome back to the show we have right now today the founder of Recruiter Mill, and guess what? He is all the way from Hungary, which is the first time we’re ever going to have a guest from Hungary. And he’s based in Budapest. Definitely, a place that I want to visit someday. And his name is Ugis Balmax. Now, this is going to be a very interesting episode, especially for those of you who are thinking of hiring really good people, or maybe a lot of you’re thinking, “I want to have my dream team. I want to hire my dream people in the business, in the company.”

Sean: I was there. I had no idea how to do it before, and I hired a lot of horrible people. Let’s try to spare you that experience as you listen in to the show today. Hey, Ugis, thank you for being here in the show.

Ugis: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I am excited to be on.

Sean: OK, so this is the first question we usually ask people, which is – what brought you to where you are today? I understand you had a previous business that you were a part of before Recruiter Mill, and that gave you some experiences. What led you to starting ‘Recruiter Mill’ as a company?

Ugis: Yeah, absolutely. It’s funny that you mentioned making these horrific hires. That’s where I was about six or seven years ago. I mean, there were just some horror stories and, you know, absolutely atrocious hires. Even despite that, somehow someway our business was growing, so we needed a team. And of course, everyone wants a good team. So you try and figure out how to make that happen.

Ugis: And over time, we did get better. And at one point kind of started noticing that whenever I’m just chatting to other business owners about different stuff when it comes to hiring, it’s almost as if they take out their notebooks and start making notes and kind of copying what we’re doing. And I now see people copying our job ads, our processes, everything, and that’s awesome because it helps them get really good people.

Ugis: So but it kind of, you know, for a few years now, I’ve had this feeling that, OK, we probably had something special there, and that’s something that not every business has. So then when we got – we were quite successful with the previous business, by the time I sold my shares, we had reached high seven figures in revenue and a seven-figure profit. So that was kind of going well. But you know, that chapter ended for me. So I was thinking, what do I want to do next and how can I be helpful to other business owners, to the world? And that’s kind of how, yeah, I realized that recruitment – I still saw, you know, a ton of opportunities to help other businesses. So that’s how I got started with this one.

Sean: What would you say would differentiate Recruiter Mill from all the other different companies out there who are headhunting businesses?

Sean: Yeah. So I mean, the kind of process, especially if you’ve been in the industry for a while, it’s kind of not that super special in my eyes, especially, I’m realizing it recently. You always need job ads. You need to reach people, whether its job boards, whether it’s writing to them directly on LinkedIn, or whatever other method you need to filter them somehow. And that’s kind of how the process works. And everyone does it to kind of one extent or another.

Ugis: I think where my kind of expertise lies is, first of all, making sure that we’re not losing people at any step of the way. So everything’s really smooth. We really take care of our job ads, of the process that candidates have just to be sure that we’re not missing the good candidates that we were able to reach. But for some reason, we didn’t do our part. And that’s to me, it seems obvious for some reason, not everyone does it.

Ugis: The other part is this kind of creativity and you know, your experience and what you can bring to the client. It’s a little hard to define, of course, but you know, kind of the results I have that I can bring for my clients, they kind of speak for themselves in this regard.

Sean: So you mentioned that the focus of Recruiter Mill is hiring A-players for your clients. And we were talking pre-show behind the scenes, about what an A-player is? Because in my head, when you said A-player, what was going through is, “Oh, these are those people who had a high pay grade and package and have X amount of years and the skillset that you need doing whatever for big enterprises out there.

Sean: And you’re now going to hire them and pay them a boatload of money, which might hurt a startup or a growing company compared to the enterprise-grade where you know their packages are, they don’t really give a lot of thought about it because they have so much money to pay these A-players. And I love the definition that you gave earlier for what an A-player is. Can you define that for the listeners?

Ugis: Yeah, absolutely. And just kind of as a side or background, you know, it is a job market, we call it the job market. And when you go to the market and you’re shopping, one of the things that you’re looking for is the best prices as well? So that’s a part of, you know, getting a good deal and that’s a part of what I help my clients get.

Ugis: But how do we define A-player? They don’t need to be, you know, have this like high credentials or high pay or anything like that. Actually, high paying can hurt, as I just mentioned. How we define A-player is someone who is in the top 10 of the people who are willing and able to do the work that you want them to do, at the pay rate that you have in mind. So even if you have planned a really low salary, that can be fine if you truly know that’s what you want to do because you’re still going to select one of the – someone in the top 10 percent for that range.

Sean: I want to start with what you mentioned earlier, which are the job ads? All companies pretty much run job ads now today. Right? I don’t know if you agree, but a lot of companies, if not a majority or if not all companies run some sort of job ads, either it’s going to be in front of their store or in the newspaper or online. A lot of companies I know to do it online.

Sean: So the question is, what would be the best, most efficient job ad for you? Are there some best practices that we should do for our job ad? How does it look like? How should it sound and what is your best advice for someone who’s doing it for the first time?

Ugis: Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, don’t do what you’re used to. And so what I imagine when someone says a job ad or a job description is someone who has three bullet-point lists. It’s something like, “OK, here’s what we’re looking for. Here’s what we offer. These are our requirements.” So something along those lines, and it’s usually you don’t even understand what the job is about from the job description.

Ugis: And that’s the point of the job description. It’s supposed to describe what the job is about. So how I approach it, and it did take me some time to get there, especially if you’re familiar with the kind of copywriting and ideas behind that. What you do is put yourself in the candidate’s shoes. Think about what are the things that you would want to know if you were applying for a job. And those things are not that complicated.

Ugis: First of all, everyone wants to know the salary if you don’t put it in your job, they will ask you in the first step of the process, you might as well say it out, right? And it’s a separate topic where people are kind of like, Well, what if I get it wrong in the interview process? You can kind of understand what’s a good offer to the candidate anyway, and you can explain to them that, you know, I’m still going to make you a good offer. It’s might even be slightly lower than the range I put there.

Ugis: So, you know, and if you see that no one’s applying or that’s there’s no response to your job description, then maybe it’s one of the first things to fix. But usually, people will also say that “okay, salary is just too low and everything else sounds great.” So that’s how you get feedback. So but yeah, the point stands that’s just put the salary range in and see what the feedback is.

Ugis: So that’s one thing you would want to know as a candidate. You want to know why this opportunity is interesting, exciting. What’s happening in the business? Why are you hiring right now? What is the challenge of the role? And if you’re looking for A-player, so someone intuitively, we imagine someone who is doing a really good job, who cares about the results that they put out, they will want to know these things. They want to know the challenge and kind of what’s the meaning behind what they’re doing? So put that in, explain it as well as you can.

Ugis: Talk about your company, but not too much. Like everyone cares about themselves, they’ve just heard about your company, especially if you’re just starting out. They don’t want to read paragraphs and paragraphs about you. They want to learn things that matter to them, basically.

Ugis: And I guess the last point makes it really easy to read. So because especially if you’re in a job where people have like maybe 10 seconds to decide if this is for them before they move on to the next one, make sure it’s really easy to understand. So just before this podcast, I was writing on a job, and the title says this leading cloud software review website is looking for an experienced editor for long-term, part-time remote work. So we kind of show credibility that this is a leading website in an industry that we want the candidates to be interested in. So cloud software reviews what we’re looking for an experienced editor. So if if you’re not interested in editing, it’s not for you and it’s long term and part-time which, you know, it kind of goes together, for people who want part-time work, they still want it to be long term and it’s remote. The other thing that’s that people care about.

Ugis: And this communicates 80 percent of what you need to communicate. Everyone who is not interested, they’re going to move on, which is very fine. People who are interested, is going to read more So, but you know, all these principles are in place when you’re doing any sort of sales communication, and recruitment really is sales. You’re trying to convince someone that coming to work for you is a good idea, so effectively it sales. So you use the same principles.

Sean: Very good stuff. I really didn’t think a lot about our job ads, though, so I’m surely going to revisit that after this podcast.