The Three-Trait A-Player Hiring Filter
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- —
A hiring and talent-assessment rule built on three observable traits — tenacity, curiosity and enthusiasm — each tested by a specific interview question rather than assessed on vibes. The mechanism is that these personality traits reliably co-occur with tangible performance rather than being decorrelated from it, so screening on them predicts A-players without needing separate performance proxies. Tenacity is probed by asking for a time the candidate pushed through a no; curiosity by whether they have questions at all; enthusiasm by asking them to describe something they did recently and watching how they tell it. The guest reports the prediction holds up in practice, with one known cost: A-players tend not to stay, because they leave to start their own businesses — which the guest treats as a success metric rather than a loss.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Screen for tenacity
Look for people who keep pushing when told no or told it will take time, and who respond with 'we'll figure out another way'. There are not enough people in businesses who just keep pushing.
Pro tip Test it directly: ask when was the last time you pushed through something — where you didn't take no and didn't give up.
- 2
Screen for curiosity
A-players arrive with a million questions — what do you do day to day, how much money do you make, what are the problems in the business, what is the first thing you would like me to do. The same trait shows up client-side in pitches, where they ask questions constantly to learn as much as possible about the client and their company.
Watch out Ask 'have you got any questions?' — if they say no, they don't get the job.
- 3
Screen for enthusiasm
Look for people who are broadly positive about their job day to day. Nobody is positive all the time, but a mostly positive outlook on life changes the perception of most things.
Pro tip Ask them to tell you something they've done recently and simply watch how enthusiastically they tell it.
- 4
Judge in the interview, then verify in the role
The guest reports being able to tell in the interview, using those three questions, and that the prediction does hold true once you see the person working in real life.
- 5
Coach the known weakness — delegation
The one thing noticed repeatedly in these high performers is that they are not good at delegating. They are protective — 'I can do this, I can do that' — and force things through rather than working as a team. Expect it and develop it deliberately.
- 6
Count your A-players as the health measure of the business
A good business is judged by how many A-players it has. If you have 30 people and 15 are A-players, you have a very good company. Most companies have two or three, and they are really hard to get.
- 7
Accept the churn and reframe it as the success metric
A-players don't usually stick around — they leave to become entrepreneurs. Plan for constant replacement, and treat alumni going on to great brands or their own businesses as evidence the business worked.
Watch out A-players are very valuable but very hard to keep; a hiring pipeline that assumes retention will run dry.
In the wild
The guest describes having hired 140 people over three years across a team that now stands at around 70. Many of the strongest performers left to start their own businesses. Rather than treating that as attrition failure, the guest describes being proud of it, recalling wanting people to leave and work for Netflix or Disney or other great brands, or to start their own things — and naming that as the actual success metric for the business. The cost is real: it meant constantly replacing people who come, learn, and then move on to their own ventures.
→ High turnover among top performers accepted as a deliberate trade for having built people worth losing.
The guest describes a specific test used in job interviews: at the end, asking the candidate 'have you got any questions?' If the answer is no, they don't get the job. The reasoning is that anybody who wants to be successful or is going to be good at their job is curious and will have a million questions — about what the founder does day to day, what the business makes, what the problems in the business are, what they should tackle first. The guest wants those million questions, and reads their absence as a decisive negative signal rather than as shyness or preparation failure.
→ A single closing question used as a binary screen on curiosity.
Common mistakes
Reading a quiet candidate as merely reserved
No questions at the end of an interview is treated here as a hard fail, not a nerves artefact — the trait it reveals is the one that predicts who succeeds and who does well in client pitches.
Assuming A-players will delegate well
The repeated weakness in these hires is protectiveness over their own work. Promoting them without developing delegation creates a bottleneck out of your best performer.
Building a team plan that assumes A-players stay
They leave to start their own businesses. A business that does not budget for constant replacement will lose capability every time one graduates out.
From the transcript
“tenacity is at the word where you push through I think there's not enough people in businesses that just keep pushing”
“I test people in job interviews and I go have you got any questions and if they go no I don't think I have they…”
“the only thing is a players don't usually stick around because they become entrepreneurs they usually go and start their own businesses”
From the episode
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