4 ways to find A+ talent

Everyone wants to hire A players but no one is talking about where to find them.

Here’s the truth: a bunch of fancy pants assessments or behavioral tests won’t help you find your next A Player.

Here’s what will: doing a lot of hard freaking work to find these people.

Most people’s search for A players looks like this

1. Ask employees
2. Ask in a community or two
3. Post some long and boring job posts on LinkedIn
4. Complain they just can’t find good talent these days

Instead of that nonsense that never works, steal the same search process we use at Go Carpathian to consistently find A players from all over the world.

First off, to consistently find A players you can’t just use one talent-sourcing funnel.

Just like you wouldn’t rely on only one lead source to find new clients, you can’t expect all of the best people to hang out in the same spots.

Here are the four main funnels we use to funnel A players into our network.

1. Regional job boards

2. Headhunting of currently employed talent

3. English language content focused on the history and culture of regions we recruit from

4. Referrals from industry leaders and partners.

I could write an entire newsletter on each of these sources.

You need job boards because they’re ubiquitous. And you can’t just rely on LinkedIn. We estimate close to 80% of the talent hired at Go Carpathian does not have an active LinkedIn presence. It’s not nearly as universal in Eastern Europe, South Africa, or Latin America as it is here in the United States.

The downside to job boards is obvious.

You will have to sort through dozens of candidates if not hundreds to find decent people.

You need to be headhunting because a lot of the best talent is employed by one of your competitors already! Most people think they can skip this step because it’s hard work to implement. You have to do very, very targeted outreach to sometimes dozens of people just to fill one role. But the upside is strong.

The best predictor of someone’s success in a given role is if they’re already doing that role successfully somewhere else.

You need content, to nurture and build trust with candidates. I’m not going to go too much into this one. There are 1000 ways to do it. For Go Carpathian, we have a YouTube and Instagram page we use to create content that folks in Eastern Europe like. This attracts an audience of English speakers in a key recruiting region for us and gives them a reason to like and trust us. You could also do this with CEO or Founder-driven content about your company and how you help your clients.

You need a referral network because the best talent talks! My cofounder Tim and I have spent thousands and thousands of dollars on in-person visits to Eastern Europe explicitly to build in-person connections with industry experts who know people that we want to hire. By building and strengthening these connections, we’re able to fill a huge % of roles at Go Carpathian just through referrals.

You may not be able to fly all over the world to build these relationships, but with the internet, you can start getting the next best thing. The key here is that these relationships take time to develop and nurture. It is perhaps the slowest of the four funnels.

Look I get it. This is a lot of work and a lot of money to build out.

I’m sure you’ve found an A player or two just by getting lucky.

But if you want to get a team JUST of A players I don’t think building out multiple recruitment funnels is optional.

If relying on luck is your thing, I wish you much of it.

But it will be very, very hard to scale that way.

That all said, you don’t have to do all this work yourself.

You can just borrow my recruiting funnels with a Go Carpathian membership plan.

You can get account managers, operations managers, media buyers, email marketers, SEOs, PPC managers, and many more roles filled by my recruiting team totally done for you for just $1,000/month.

We do all the sourcing, all the vetting, and all the heavy lifting for you. Just submit an onboarding form and focus on being the type of company A players would want to work for.

Want to give it a risk-free trial run? Tap here to talk with a member of the team.

Until next time,

Nathan