How to hire B players: Implement serious recruiting processes and plan to spend a lot of time on it. Get creative with hacks like OP's.
How to hire A players: Identify them through never ending networking, research, and keeping your finger on the pulse of the industry. You'll never find them the same way you find B and C players.
If you're doing that then it's possible they'll find you, if you're not then nothing you can do is going to help.
And the thing is Google, Microsoft, and GM also have some amazing teams simply though blind luck. The kind of thing where a few friends all end up working for a manager they like on some interesting little problem.
Some people have only worked on such teams and don't understand why so many projects fail, and others have never even seen them and wonder how complex software ever get's written. But, so few people have a truly understand the range from inspiring though dysfunctional people and teams out there that talk of A, B, and C coders / rock stars becomes almost meaningless.
PS: One of my favorite Real Programmers was a systems programmer for Texas Instruments. One day, he got a long distance call from a user whose system had crashed in the middle of saving some important work. Jim was able to repair the damage over the phone, getting the user to toggle in disk I/O instructions at the front panel, repairing system tables in hex, reading register contents back over the phone. http://www-personal.edfac.usyd.edu.au/staff/souters/Humour/R... or the modern equivalent http://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html
If you're a decent company, you shouldn't hesitate to invest in B,C players so that they become A players.
[1] - Of course I'm talking about humans who are mentally healthy.
Caveats:
[1] Implicit assumption that the person is actually interested in becoming better.
[2] I understand that this takes a "toll" in productivity because you could be out there building stuff instead of helping these people improve. However, once a company reaches a certain size, I should think there is enough "boring" work for the company to staff "B" players to handle those, while simultaneously making them spend another chunk of their time working on becoming better.
One thing missing in your list: Have 'A' leaders.
He went one step farther: If you have B and C leaders in your org, it's basically all over because few organizations are capable of taking the measures to correct that problem.
Sounds like your answer is: When there are items that smart people want to outsource, they often go work for people stupider than them rather than hire people to take care of it.
Do I have that right?
No, I am looking at the logical consequence of "hire people smarter than yourself". If A is smarter than B, then B is less smart than A.
Therefore: "hire people smarter than yourself" implies hiring people who are willing to work for someone dumber.
Your boss can be smarter than you at his job, and successfully hire you, smarter than he is at your job. That's an odd way to word it, but the fact remains -- there are generally different skillsets and competencies involved, and you are looking to build or be a part of a team with complementary talents.
A leader is spending a fraction of the time hands on that a programmer is. Given the developments in technology and the additional time the developers are getting with it, if they're not better than their leader in a few years, you've got the wrong programmers.
Conversely, you've probably encountered highly intelligent people that have the people skills of a bug.
But software development specially in small teams doesn't work that way. Many a times, junior programmers require direction and even help in completing their tasks. So it comes down to two problems (three, third one later)
1. Either you give someone sub-standard work to maintain that you be able to help them. This will lead to demotivation eventually
2. You accept you are not in position to help them. This generally leads to friction and a bad boss will try to hide incompetence by architecture discussions, meetings etc
Smartness is subjective. Which leads to the third problem. How can you assess skills of someone better than you? You can only go as far as grilling a candidate to your own competence. So a B, C player will only be hiring other B, C players and that will soon degenerate the organization.
No one (ok... almost no one) has no management nor coding skill, rather each of us has a mix of the two. The great organizations I've worked in had extremely smart people in management and in development, but the type of brilliance was different.
So yes, hire someone smarter than yourself.
How to hire B players: Offer market value.
How to hire C players: Offer below market value.
You do two things when you offer more money.
1) You are more careful about who you hire. 2) You actually attract good people who would make a move for that kind of money.
I would love to hear an inverse argument against this.
So; offer an environment where people want to work. Give them interesting work. Add a dollop of patriotism.
Ultimately, if you had an interesting product, a great environment and offered extremely competitive salaries then you would most likely end up with interest from more people in the "A" range.
To use real world examples, no amount of money you offer Salman Khan now would pull him away from his non-profit Khan academy to go back to the hedge fund industry.
If you're going to point to your step 2, then that sounds like a tautology. "Attract good people who would make a move for more money. Offer them more money"
Isn't that what acquihiring is about though? Purchase the talent that wont make the move for money.
* It motivates B and C players more. So you get a lot more chaff to filter out in your application process. You also get many more D players (the ones who are knowingly incompetent and are actively trying to deceive you into recruiting them).
* The major motivation of A players usually isn't money (once you reach the "fair wage" stage). So you don't attract that many extra A players.
* Some of the A players who do get tempted by the extra cash discover that it's not quite as wonderful as they expect and leave for more interesting work. Wasting large chunks of your time and money.
* It may turn some A players off. There's a unwritten rule that you get more cash to make up for dull work. So offering silly money implies to some that the work is going to be exceptionally uninteresting.
The absolute best way I know to recruit A players is:
0) Understand the role that needs filling and the kind of person that needs to fill it
1) Have a really interesting job
2) Know how to access the A players
(I'm amazed at the number of organisations I come across that skip step 0...)
3) Be prepared to be truly market competitive in salary - your target A player may have a 20 year consistent track record of getting sh*t done, respect their sense of self worth.
Being immodest I consider myself an A player, when a startup offering "competitive salary and benefits" low-balls my current income by 50% they've wasted my time and theirs
This can't be emphasized enough. What you consider "silly money" probably isn't silly money to an A player. In fact they may even find it low.
Indeed I'd argue that it's an implicit part of performing step zero - understanding the role and the person. If you don't understand what your potential employee is looking for in a role - be it money, responsibilities, working environment, or whatever - then you're never going to find 'em.
For example I'm continually amazed at the number of companies who decide that they need an uber-geek with a ten year track record of delivering e-commerce platforms (or whatever) - and then go about recruiting them as if they were unemployed. Sigh.