The A-Player Filter: Tenacity, Curiosity, Enthusiasm
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Having hired around 140 people in three years, Carrie Rose screens for three traits rather than credentials: tenacity, curiosity and enthusiasm. Tenacity is the refusal to accept a pushback as an ending; curiosity shows up as an endless supply of questions about the business, the role and the client; enthusiasm is a default positive posture towards the work. Each is tested with a specific interview prompt, and the curiosity test is a hard gate — a candidate who has no questions doesn't get the job. Her claim is that this prediction holds up on the job, and that the quality of a company can be read off how many of these 'A players' it contains. The system also accounts for the downside: A players tend to leave and start their own businesses, so recruiting is continuous rather than episodic.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Fix the three traits as your screen
Decide in advance that tenacity, curiosity and enthusiasm are what you are hiring for, and that skills gaps are trainable in comparison.
- 2
Test tenacity with a push-through story
Ask when they last pushed through something — where they didn't take no and didn't give up. Listen for whether they found another route rather than stopping.
Pro tip Probe for what they did after the pushback, not how hard the situation was.
- 3
Gate on curiosity: 'have you got any questions?'
Ask directly whether they have questions. Someone who says they don't fails; strong candidates want to know what you do day to day, what the problems in the business are, and what they should tackle first.
Pro tip The same trait predicts pitch performance — curious people interrogate clients and win on understanding.
Watch out Treat 'no questions' as disqualifying rather than shy; Carrie applies it as a rule, not a tiebreaker.
- 4
Test enthusiasm by how they tell it
Ask them to tell you something they've done recently and watch the delivery, not the content. Enthusiastic people are visible in how they narrate ordinary work.
- 5
Coach the predictable weakness — delegation
High performers with these traits tend to be protective of their work and poor at handing it down. Build delegation coaching into their development from the start.
Pro tip Name it early as a known pattern so it doesn't read as criticism of their standards.
- 6
Plan for A players leaving
Accept that the best hires often leave to start their own businesses or move to bigger brands. Keep hiring continuously and treat their departures as evidence the culture worked.
Watch out A players are valuable but hard to keep — building a business that assumes retention will keep breaking.
In the wild
Carrie and her PR director Will spent roughly ten years working out the best way to write a release, target press and build relationships. When they packaged that into onboarding at Rise at Seven, new hires screened on the three traits — some of them 21 years old — were producing what she describes as industry-leading results within two weeks of joining, on work that had taken the founders a decade to figure out.
→ Trait-based hiring plus packaged process compressed a ten-year learning curve into a two-week ramp.
Across roughly 140 hires in three years, a significant number of Carrie's strongest people left to found their own businesses. Rather than treating this as a retention failure, she frames it as her success metric — she wanted people to leave for Netflix, Disney or their own companies. The operational consequence is that she recruits continuously to replace the people the filter is designed to attract.
→ Continuous hiring became a structural requirement of the model rather than a sign of churn problems.
Common mistakes
Hiring on CV and skills alone
The traits Carrie screens for aren't visible on a CV. A candidate can have the right experience and still stop at the first pushback or arrive with no questions, which is what actually predicts underperformance.
Ignoring the delegation blind spot
The same protectiveness that makes A players push through work also makes them hoard it. Left uncoached, it caps how much the person and the team can carry.
Assuming your best people will stay
A players tend to become entrepreneurs. Building a company that only works if they remain guarantees repeated crises when they inevitably leave.
From the transcript
“Tenacity is that the word where you push through.”
“People who ask questions, they're the ones that succeed the most and they're the ones that do well in things like pitches.”
“a good business is based off how many A players they have in a business”
From the episode
How To Build A Million Dollar Marketing Agency In 1 Year - Carrie Rose (Rise at Seven)
Carrie Rose (Rise at Seven)