Firing sucks. How to avoid doing so by hiring A players.

Didier Rodrigues Lopes
15 min readJan 2, 2023
Generated by Midjourney

In 2022, OpenBB grew to 20 people. But amongst all of our hiring, we also had to let some people go.

Before 2022, I had never fired anyone in my life but in my new role, I had to learn how to do it. If you’re a manager, you know that this is the hardest part of the job.

Having that said, I wanted to use my Christmas holidays to understand how we can avoid letting people go. For this, I needed to start from the beginning and improve our overall hiring process.

This blogpost will be highly based on the book “Who: The A Method for Hiring” by Geoff Smart and Randy Street, which I highly recommend.

Introduction

What is an A player? A candidate who has at least a 90 percent chance of achieving a set of outcomes that only the top 10 percent of possible candidates could achieve.

In this post, I will go over the steps to get an A team.

A method for hiring

1. Scorecard

This is a document that describes the mission for the position, outcomes that must be accomplished, and competencies that fit with both the company culture and the role.

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