There’s a line that’s been floating around Silicon Valley for years, often attributed to Steve Jobs: “A players hire A players. B players hire C players.” Guy Kawasaki popularized it further. It’s one of those statements that sounds clever and gets nodded at in meetings, but I think most people stop too early. The pattern goes deeper than A and B.

Here’s how I think about it, after years of hiring engineers and technology leaders:

A players hire A players. B players hire C players. C players hire randomly.

Each step in that chain tells you something different about insecurity, judgment, and organizational decay.

A Players Hire A Players

The best people I’ve worked with share one trait that has nothing to do with technical skill: they are not threatened by talent. They actively seek out people who are as good as or better than themselves. They want to be challenged. They want to argue about architecture with someone who might be right. They want a peer who catches their mistakes before those mistakes reach production.

This is fundamentally about security. A players know what they bring to the table. They don’t need to be the smartest person in the room. They need the room to be smart.

When you let an A player run hiring for their team, the team gets stronger with every addition. Each new hire raises the average. The A player looks at a candidate and asks, “Will this person make us better?” That’s the only filter that matters.

B Players Hire C Players

Here’s where the trouble starts. B players are competent enough to do their jobs, but they carry a weight that A players don’t: the fear of being shown up. A B player looks at a candidate and unconsciously asks a different question: “Will this person make me look bad?”

So they hire down. Not dramatically down. They don’t hire disasters. They hire people who are capable but clearly subordinate. People who won’t challenge their decisions or question their judgment. People they can manage comfortably.

The B player doesn’t think of it this way, of course. They’ll tell you the C player was “a great culture fit” or “really coachable.” What they mean is: “This person won’t threaten me.”

C Players Hire Randomly

Once you’re at the C level, something else takes over. It’s not insecurity anymore. It’s a lack of judgment. C players genuinely cannot tell the difference between good and mediocre. They don’t have the experience or the instinct to evaluate talent accurately.

A C player interviews someone and thinks, “This person seems fine.” They can’t see the gaps because they have the same gaps. They can’t test for skills they don’t have. They mistake confidence for competence, or worse, mistake compliance for competence.

Their hiring process is essentially a random number generator. And here’s the irony: a random process, given enough iterations, occasionally produces excellent results. A C player will, by sheer accident, sometimes hire an A player. The A player shows up, looks around, and wonders what happened.

This is the cosmic joke of organizational hiring. C players are actually more likely to accidentally hire great people than B players, who are actively filtering them out. The B player’s insecurity is a directional force pointing downward. The C player’s lack of judgment is just noise, and noise occasionally lands on a signal.

The Cascade

What makes this pattern dangerous is that it compounds. One generation of bad hiring creates the next generation of worse hiring.

Say you have a strong team and you promote a B player to a management role. They hire C players. Those C players eventually become managers themselves and hire randomly, pulling in people who range from mediocre to terrible with the occasional accidental gem. Within two cycles of leadership turnover, you’ve gone from a team that could build anything to a team that can barely keep the lights on.

I’ve seen this pattern play out across organizations in the media and technology industries. The decline is never sudden. It’s a slow erosion, one hire at a time, and by the time the damage is visible to senior leadership, the talent base has been hollowed out.

Rebuilding from that position is painful. You’re essentially asking the remaining A players (if any survived) to work alongside people who can’t keep up, while you slowly replace the team around them. Most A players won’t wait around for that process. They leave.

What Leaders Actually Control

I’ve come to believe that the single most important thing a leader does is hire well. Strategy matters. Process matters. Vision matters. But all of those depend on having people who can execute. A mediocre strategy executed by an A team will outperform a brilliant strategy executed by a C team every time.

This means that hiring is not something you delegate and forget. Every leader should be deeply involved in hiring decisions, at least for their direct reports and ideally one level below that. You need to see the candidates. You need to calibrate the judgment of your hiring managers. You need to catch the B player who’s filtering out anyone better than themselves.

Earlier this year, a colleague circulated a memo on leadership that resonated with a lot of us. One of its core themes was finding and keeping great people. That’s not a coincidence. Every experienced leader arrives at the same conclusion eventually: your people are your strategy.

The Practical Test

Here’s a simple diagnostic. Look at the last five people each of your managers hired. Are those new hires stronger or weaker than the manager? If weaker, you have a B player problem. If roughly equivalent, you might have a C player problem (they can’t tell the difference, so they default to people who remind them of themselves). If stronger, you have an A player, and you should do everything in your power to keep them.

The other test is subtler: watch how your managers react when a candidate is clearly brilliant. Does the manager get energized (“we need to close this person”) or threatened (“I’m not sure they’d be a good fit”)? That reaction tells you everything about whether you have an A player or a B player running the team.

Hiring well is not a talent you’re born with. It’s a discipline you build over years of paying attention to what works and what doesn’t. But the first step is understanding the pattern: A hires A, B hires C, and C rolls the dice. Know where you are in that chain, and you can start to fix it.