Build a talent pipeline, not a hiring frenzy

Most founders scramble when hiring. Build a talent pipeline instead—so you’re not settling for warm bodies, you’re choosing A-players on your terms.

Most founders don’t have a talent pipeline. They’ve got a vacancy, a mild sense of dread, and a recruiter on speed dial. Then they settle. “Our B players might be average, but at least they know our systems,” they say to themselves. The warm feeling offered by continuity and the known feels a far more appealing option than the idea of having to bring in someone new and show them how everything works – especially during a growth phase where everyone is busy. That fear keeps you small. I see it again and again. So here’s the fix—from the first conversation I have with a client through to the day you stop hiring on hope and start producing A-players on demand.

Face the music: Not everyone in your team is brilliant

When I start with a client, we run a talent assessment. Always. First, the CEO rates each member of their leadership team A, B or C. Then, when I’ve got the execs together, they rate themselves, and then we map the whole company. We plot everyone on a six-box grid: performance by values fit. There’s a special place for the toxic A—high performer, low values. Poison. Typically, when we do this we find only 10–30% As, a majority of Bs, and a handful of Cs. That gives us a starting plan: coach the Cs up or out; grow the Bs with intent; double-down on the As. And we run one standard. To be an A, you’re at the A-standard three quarters out of the last four. If you never hit it, you’re a C. Occasionally hit it? You’re a B. Stop grading on a curve.

This single exercise changes the room. Suddenly, the conversation shifts from opinion to commitment. We stop arguing about personalities and start dealing with performance and behaviour—together.

The bullshit story that keeps you clinging to Bs

Here’s the tape that plays in many founders’ heads: “I get that A-players are 5–10x more productive. I even believe I won’t need to pay them more. But my Bs know our world. If I fire one, won’t I risk hiring a newbie who’s worse?” That fear is rational only if your recruitment process is broken—no common language, no objective measures, interviews done on gut feel. If that’s the source of your fear then fix your recruitment process first. Once you’ve done that, you can trust yourself to upgrade. I want a system where employees know their performance every day, every week, every quarter—so managers coach, not guess, and “difficult conversations” mostly disappear.

If this sounds familiar, my Seven reasons why you’re not recruiting the best people will help you stop hiring on hope. It tackles vague ads, poor interviews, weak scorecards, and missing values screens. Start there, and come back here once you’ve got a recruitment process worthy of your goals.

If you can’t define “A”, you’ll never hire one

Bin the word-salad job description. Replace it with a job scorecard—three to five outcomes with clear success metrics, plus the leading activities that actually drive those outcomes.

Here’s how I build them with teams:

1. Dump the lot. List every task.
2. Filter ruthlessly. Keep only what’s high impact, happens frequently, and takes more than 5% of your week.
3. Attach measures. For each surviving task, agree on a lagging result and at least one leading indicator.
4. Write the A-standard. What does “A” look like—specifically?

Most people discover they’ve been trying to fit 120% of a week into 100%. So the scorecard exercise doubles as a capacity intervention. Good. We’ll fix that too.

Hold yourself to account first (then cascade)

I use a dead-simple Post-it tool with execs. Cut it into four, label the corners D / W / M / Q (day, week, month, quarter). Now, for each period, rate your own performance: A, B or C. Share it with the team. If you’re the CEO and you’re not an A, go first. Why not? What would have needed to be different? What will you change next week—process, people, cadence? And what objective measures will prove it? Then take the same conversation to your direct reports. That’s the start of your real-time performance system—and the raw material for your scorecards.

You’ll be amazed how quickly this strips drama out of performance management. The conversation becomes: “What changed last week and what will you do next week?” Then you write it into the scorecard.

No slack, no strategy — why your OKRs are failing

People don’t fail on OKRs because they’re lazy. They fail because there’s no slack. One exec team I worked with needed three days a week for OKRs and two days for BAU. That was the pace of change they’d chosen. Most teams I meet are already at 120% committed. If you want someone to spend half a day a week on a change programme, you must take work off their plate. Start with the low-impact stuff. Delegate. Kill meetings. Hire a f**king assistant. Coach as a group, not 1:1, where you can. Turn 60-minute meetings into 25. Free the time or stop pretending.

This is exactly how I find founders a day a week back inside 90 days. The gains come from boring, compounding moves—delegation, calendar triage, team coaching. It’s not glamorous; it works.

Show me the numbers — what an A really looks like

Take sales. If you’re paying someone a six-figure package, they’d better be bringing in serious money. For me, that means north of a million in gross profit every year. So don’t just say “hit target” and hope. Spell out the inputs that drive it: how many proper meetings a week, how many value workshops a quarter, what size pipeline they need to keep live. Now you’ve got a clear picture of what good looks like. That’s your advert, your interview framework, and your first 90-day plan all in one. The same scorecard works inside the business too — no surprises, no excuses.

Stop guessing, start measuring — that’s how you hire As

If you only fix one thing, fix interviews. Too many managers wing it. Use the scorecard to build a structured interview: questions that test for the outcomes you need and the inputs that drive them. Score answers against your A-standard. Agree the bar as a team before you meet candidates—then hold it.

For behaviour and team fit, I like Ideal Team Player (humble, hungry, smart). It’s a simple, shared language for interviewing against your values. Use it as the culture screen alongside your scorecard. It’s like an internal version of your Ideal Customer Profile – instead of identifying the perfect customer for your business, you find the ideal person to work with.

Sourcing: Go where the A-players are (and repel the rest)

You won’t fill a pipeline by posting and praying. Write ads that repel the wrong candidates and attract the 10% you really want. Be explicit about outcomes, pace, and values—so non-fits self-select out. Remember the old Royal Marines recruitment advert, ‘99% need not apply’? Guess what – they didn’t, so the recruiters weren’t sifting out applications from the wrong kind of person and could instead focus on selecting the best of the best.

Stop waiting until someone quits to start looking. That’s amateur hour. Build your bench now. Keep a rolling list of people you’d hire tomorrow if you had the chance. Tap your network, work the referrals, talk to grads, ex-employees, even contractors who impressed you. Mix your channels and keep those relationships warm. Then when a gap opens, you’re not panicking — you’re bringing in someone you already know is good.

And don’t forget onboarding. A great hire can still fail without a proper runway. I sat down with Brad Giles to map the 90-day plan that gets new starters to effectiveness faster—worth a listen before your next offer goes out.

Performance without the drama

Here’s the goal: employees always know their performance before any conversation. Nobody should ever be wondering how they are doing – they should KNOW. Managers coach; they don’t surprise. You get there by combining visible metrics (from your scorecards) with a cadence people can keep. This is why weekly or bi-weekly check-ins beat annual appraisals: quicker feedback, fewer shocks, more progress. And when someone isn’t meeting the A-standard, you know early—and you act.

A nice side-effect: when you stop tolerating mediocrity, your A-players stay. Nothing drives great people away like watching you protect passengers. Keep the bar high and consistent, and you retain the folks who raise the average.

Culture is who you hire, fire and promote

Every hire is a culture hire. You’re signalling “this is who we are”. That’s why every new person must raise the team average. If they don’t, by definition you’re lowering it. After a cracking year, this is where firms botch it—rushed offers, fuzzy criteria, “seems nice” hires. Don’t. Slower, clearer, more objective is faster in the long run—and far better for culture. Avoid the temptation to cut corners – remember that bad hires can (and will) undo a lot of progress very quickly indeed.

This is what I mean by talent density. Pack your business with A-players and the whole dynamic shifts. One great person doesn’t cost any more than one average person, but the difference in energy, pace and output is night and day. Get enough of them together and suddenly meetings are faster, projects move, and standards rise without you having to crack the whip. That’s why I keep banging on about raising the bar—it isn’t about vanity, it’s about building a team where excellence is normal and mediocrity just doesn’t survive.

Retention: tours of duty, growth and recognition

Retention is pipeline insurance. If you keep more of the right people, you hire fewer people and in less of a hurry. Think in tours of duty—clear missions with defined time horizons and growth built in. Great for aligning expectations and keeping ambition alive.

Give A-players space to do their best work and make it visible when they win. Recognition matters. So does development. If someone brilliant is plateauing, craft a bigger challenge or a cleaner runway. The message should be: we set a high bar, and we invest in people who clear it.

A pipeline that works in any function

This same approach works in sales, operations, marketing, finance, customer success—any role where outcomes can be defined (hint: that’s all of them).

• Marketing: outcomes could be qualified pipeline, cost per opportunity, lead-to-SQL conversion, brand reach in target ICPs—paired with leading indicators like campaign cadence and creative testing velocity. Build the scorecard; interview against it; set the 90-day plan.
• Operations: customer NPS, on-time delivery, unit cost per transaction, gross margin—tied to leading indicators like SOP compliance, cycle times, and first-time-right %. Same architecture.
• Customer success: net revenue retention, expansion revenue, time-to-value—led by QBR cadence, playbook usage, and product-adoption checkpoints.

If you can name it, you can measure it. If you can measure it, you can hire and coach for it. If you can hire and coach for it, you can build a pipeline—not a panic.

If you only do one thing this quarter

Make scorecards non-negotiable. Start with your exec team. Build your own, share them, and set the tone. Then cascade. Within a few weeks, your recruitment ads are clearer, your interviews tighter, your onboarding saner, your coaching easier. Within a quarter, you’ll feel the pipeline strengthening. And six months later, people will say, “Your team just feels different.” They’re right. You’re no longer hiring on hope. You’re running a system that produces A-players.

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Written by business coach and leadership coaching expert Dominic Monkhouse. You can order your free copy of his book, Mind Your F**king Business here.