At a recent event in Tokyo where I was speaking, I was asked how to hire excellent people in a tight labor market. I advise CEOs on three tactics—and none of them involve recruiting companies or HR departments.
Tactic One: Fire the mediocre
Excellent people want to work with other excellent people.
A Japanese executive vice president took over a division with declining performance. Her first move was to fire 70% of the staff. The HR director warned her that top-tier people are impossible to hire and that she needed to compromise her standards. She refused—and had no difficulty rebuilding the team.
Once high performers in other divisions saw that she upheld her standards, many requested transfers to her organization. Despite HR’s insistence that hiring “the best” was unrealistic, she hired them with ease.
If excellent candidates, however, suspect your company tolerates mediocrity—or worse, promotes mediocre bosses—they will run for the hills.
High performers prioritize personal growth over everything else. If you want excellent people, your priorities must align with theirs—and your actions must prove it.
Tactic Two: Ask your best people to introduce you to their friends
Excellent people tend to surround themselves with other excellent people. Some of the most successful executives I know were hired through referrals from trusted friends already inside the company.
If you want the best, you have to poach. Ask your best people for introductions—even from friends who aren’t job hunting. Top performers are rarely on the job market. If you have a genuinely valuable opportunity, you have a moral obligation to make sure excellent people know it exists. Whether they decide to pursue it is up to them.
If your top performers trust you—and they trust their friends—they’ll have no hesitation connecting you.
Tactic Three: Hire non-Japanese graduates of Japanese universities
Non-Japanese graduates of Japanese universities are, almost without exception, among the highest-performing employees at the companies I know. Graduating from a Japanese university as a foreigner requires overcoming far greater barriers than studying abroad in the U.S., UK, or Australia, including linguistic and cultural ones. These graduates have demonstrated:
- exceptional intellectual ability
- cross-cultural fluency
- advanced Japanese and often English
- curiosity and adaptability
- a relentless drive to learn and improve
They have a bias for excellence.
As a corollary to Tactic Two: ask your non-Japanese employees who graduated from Japanese universities to introduce you to their friends. International students in Japan maintain strong professional networks and often circulate opportunities among themselves.
So what’s HR’s role in any of this? There isn’t one.
These tactics are for business leaders—not HR. They’re about setting and upholding your own standard of excellence, and about leveraging personal networks built on trust.
Contemporary HR operates on a different model—scanning résumés with AI, filtering candidates by keywords, ignoring human rapport—all while failing to notice that many résumés are increasingly AI-generated (and soon, perhaps, even AI-submitted).
HR caters to the mediocre. An executive recently told me his HR department restricts salary offers to narrow bands based on market averages. Never pay above market as long as mediocrity is your goal.
And what about recruiting firms? Use them only if you must—and never delegate the call
A CEO once hired an executive through a recruiting firm, paying an exorbitant fee—only to discover the new hire was already well known and liked by many people inside the company. He still laughs about it today, but swore will never again forget Tactic Two.
Use a recruiting firm if you must, never leave it to HR to make the call. Call the CEO of the recruiting firm yourself. Yes, that’s right. Ask to speak with the CEO.
Even if you’ve never met, CEOs of professional service firms return calls from other CEOs—or at least they should.
When a CEO calls, the recruiting firm’s CEO assigns their best account manager—because their own reputation is now on the line. When an HR manager calls, the firm assigns whoever is next in line.
What if the recruiting firm’s CEO doesn’t take your call or call you back? Don’t use the firm. They’ve already told you everything you need to know.
So—what are your tactics for hiring the best?
I’d love to hear them. Drop me a line anytime.
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