When I think about hiring, it is easy to picture the traditional process: a position opens, a job gets posted, resumes come in, and the person with the most obvious qualifications gets an interview. But what if the best person for the job is not looking for that exact job? What if they are coming from a completely different industry or career path?
That is one of the ideas that stood out to me in Eric Herrenkohl’s How to Hire A-Players. In Chapter 6, “Finding New Pools of A-Player Talent,” Herrenkohl encourages business owners to look beyond the most obvious places when searching for great employees. Instead of simply waiting for qualified applicants to find a job posting, entrepreneurs can identify different groups of people who already have the fundamental skills they need and intentionally look for talent within those groups.
One principle from the chapter especially stood out to me: there are skills you can teach and skills you can’t. That distinction can completely change how an entrepreneur thinks about hiring. If a person already has the fundamental qualities and abilities needed for a role, they may be able to learn the company-specific parts of the job. This means a candidate should not necessarily be eliminated just because their previous job title or industry does not perfectly match the position being filled.
Herrenkohl gives several examples of talent pools that businesses might overlook. These include people reentering the workforce, restaurant employees, teachers, interns, former entrepreneurs, and people with experience in other industries. The common idea is that the skills someone developed somewhere else may still translate into what a business needs.
I think this is especially interesting when I think about my own future business. A farm-to-table distillery and restaurant would require people with a wide range of skills. Some positions would obviously require specialized technical knowledge, but many of the most important skills would be transferable.
For example, someone who has worked in a high-end restaurant may already understand hospitality, customer service, multitasking, and working under pressure. Someone from the hotel industry could bring strong guest experience skills. Someone who has managed a retail store might already understand inventory, employees, scheduling, and customer relationships. A person with agricultural experience could bring knowledge of working with crops and seasonal operations even if they have never worked specifically for a distillery.
Those people might not look like the obvious candidates when searching for a distillery or restaurant employee. But that does not mean they lack what the business needs.
This also makes me think differently about what it means to be an “A-Player.” An A-Player is not necessarily someone who has already done the exact job I am hiring for. It could be someone who has demonstrated the ability to perform at a high level in another environment and has the fundamental skills needed to succeed in a new one.
That distinction would be important to me as a future entrepreneur because I would not want my hiring process to become so narrow that I only consider people who look perfect on paper. At the same time, I would not want to hire someone simply because they seem like a good person and assume everything else can be taught. The challenge is identifying which skills are fundamental to the role and which skills can realistically be developed after someone joins the company.
For example, I could teach someone how my company operates, how we want our customer experience handled, or the specific systems we use. It would be much harder to teach someone how to take ownership, work well with a team, communicate with customers, or consistently perform at a high level. Those fundamental qualities would matter when I am deciding which talent pools to explore in the first place.
This idea also changes how I think about recruiting. Instead of asking, “Where do people with this exact job title work?” I could ask, “Where are people already using the skills I need?” That question opens up a much larger pool of potential employees.
For a small business, I think this approach could be especially valuable. A growing company may not have a large recruiting department or the resources to compete with major corporations for people who already have the perfect background. Looking in less obvious places can give entrepreneurs another way to find talented people while also bringing different experiences and perspectives into the organization. Herrenkohl’s larger point is that recruiting should be an ongoing effort rather than something a business only thinks about when a position becomes vacant.
The biggest takeaway for me is that hiring A-Players requires looking beyond the resume. The goal is not to find someone who already knows everything. It is to recognize the fundamental skills that matter, identify where people with those skills can be found, and then determine who has the potential to become an A-Player within the organization.
For my future business, that means I would want to keep an open mind about where great employees come from. Sometimes the strongest candidate may not come from the industry I expect. They may come from a completely different environment where they have already developed the skills, work ethic, and experience that my business needs. As an entrepreneur, recognizing that talent may be just as important as knowing how to hire it.
Reference
Herrenkohl, E. (2010). How to hire A-players: Finding the top people for your team, even if you don’t have a recruiting department. John Wiley & Sons.