Topgrading

Note:  A (free) download comes with this article!

Here is the simplest, clearest outline of all 12 Topgrading hiring steps, including what problem they solve, what skill must be learned, and the results that are typically achieved with using each Topgrading tool.

Thirty (plus) years of experience have clearly demonstrated that each and every one of these 12 Topgrading hiring steps is not just desirable, but necessary, in order to achieve 90% hiring success.  Cut corners by ignoring any one of the steps and it’s been well documented that costly mis-hires go up, and up, and up!

The download, the Topgrading Vision document, came from, of all places, a request from Tony Robbins.  He’s asked me two years in a row to be the “hiring guru” at his Summit for entrepreneurs, and while preparing for it Tony asked for a template, dashboard, something to clearly show how, where, and why all the Topgrading hiring parts fit together.  Good idea, Tony, thanks for the suggestion.  Hundreds of beginning Topgraders have bookmarked the Topgrading Vision, so all the steps are clear.

Enough introduction.  Just click here and immediately download the Topgrading Vision!

RECOMMENDED RESOURCE: The new Topgrading Workbook, the one used in all our workshops, is organized around the Topgrading Vision.  Each of the 12 steps is explained, the problem it solves is clarified, and then fun exercises teach the Topgrading skill.  You have to actually use it to get the favorable results!  For more information and to invest in the Topgrading Workbook, click here.

INTRODUCTION: This article helps you answer the very common question, “What is different about Topgrading?”

For years we’ve said, “Topgrading hiring is just common sense on steroids.”  That is supposed to be a cute way of saying that adopting Topgrading practices proven to hire 90% high performers is a lot easier than someone might think, and there is no magic – just applied common sense.  But lately some executives have advised, “Don’t oversimplify Topgrading hiring methods – Topgrading is revolutionary, and before embracing it, people want to know how Topgrading values, principles, and tools differ from what they are accustomed to.”

Okay, here’s what is different about Topgrading:

1.  Hire only high performers.

Companies dedicated to hiring exceptional performers tend to pay exceptional salaries, but that seems to miss the core value of Topgrading hiring: at every salary level there are high and low performers, and Topgrading strives to help you hire only the best performers – not just average candidates but the very best available.

This notion – packing teams with the “best of class” at every salary level – is highly offensive to two groups of people:  1. those devoted to equality of outcomes (“C players need jobs, too.”), and 2. C players (who realize their job will be in jeopardy with Topgrading).  Hand out an article on Topgrading and just watch these two groups coalesce to undercut Topgrading!

2.  “Topgrading” is a made-up word and concept.

In the mid-1990s, my son Geoff Smart (of ghSMART & Co.) and I collaborated on developing a more comprehensive approach to talent management than what existed at the time.  We felt it was important to come up with a word that captured the essence of the spirit and principles that make up this concept.  “Topgrading” was the name we picked.

After all, if you “upgrade” talent you might have a team of 10 C players and replace one with a B player.  Whoopee – you’ve upgraded talent and you have a poor team.  The word Topgrading struck me as capturing the essence – packing the team with all high performers, A players, stars.

“Upgrading” talent can be embraced by C players; Topgrading means no C players.

3.  (Chronological) Topgrading Interview

The idea of a thorough chronological interview, asking a few questions about every job, is not new; every executive search report is the product of such an interview.  But search reports tend to be light on disclosing mistakes, failures, and what bosses would say are weaker points.

What we call the Topgrading Interview has been fine tuned for decades and today there are 16 basic questions about every job, including every success, every failure, every mistake, every key decision, every key relationship, assessments of every boss, estimates of what bosses would say about a candidate’s strengths, weaker points, and overall performance … plus questions about leadership, talent, goals, self appraisal, etc. … plus follow up questions.  Phew!

The innovation in the Topgrading Interview is to not overlook anything.  To achieve 90%+ high performers hired, you need 1,000+ data points.

4.  Focus on 50 Competencies.

In order to achieve 90%+ hiring success, focusing on 4 or 6 “key” competencies, which is what most companies still do, is inadequate.  This partly explains why companies hire only 25% - 30% true high performers.

In hundreds of workshops we’ve trotted out our standard 50 management competencies and challenged the participants to cut the list by even one, with this criterion:  you have to keep it if you would reject a candidate who is Poor or Very Poor on that competency.  No one has been able to cut the list by even one.  Conclusion:  50+ competencies must be accurately appraised.

But isn’t it impossible for an interviewer to accurately judge 50 competencies?

Nope!  At the beginning of workshops almost all managers say they can’t possibly do it, but at the end of the workshop – they’ve done it!   They amaze themselves!

So the good news is that managers trained in Topgrading can objectively and validly rate managerial candidates on all 50 competencies.

5.  Threat of Reference Check (TORC) Technique, the “truth serum of hiring”

This technique is simple but it works, motivating candidates to be honest.  It’s this:  let candidates know at each step in the hiring process that in order to get a job offer THEY will eventually have to arrange for personal reference calls with bosses (and others).

C players drop out and A players are happy to tell the truth and to arrange those calls.

6.  Topgrading Career History Form

Problem:  Pre-screening from resumes produces a mixture of good and bad candidates, since resumes are too often incomplete and hyped.

At a glance the Topgrading Career History form looks like an application form, but it’s much more. It requests all the information NOT included in resumes or application forms but you wish you had – complete salary history, boss ratings, likes and dislikes in jobs, true reasons for leaving an employer, and the “truth serum” – the TORC Technique (#5 above).

The Topgrading Career History Form gets only the best candidates in for face-to-face interviews.

7.  Research Base for Topgrading

There are now about 40 Topgrading professionals who have conducted tens of thousands of in-depth Topgrading Interviews on pre-screened candidates for executive positions.  Literally hundreds of thousands of times we’ve asked interviewees the talent question – what did you inherit, what did you end up with, and what did you do in terms of hiring, coaching, firing?

The point:  we’ve heard about every hiring method under the sun and never stop improving Topgrading methods.

8.  The Most Credible Case Studies

My son’s company and mine publish unusual case studies in our books and articles:  CEOs of NAMED leading companies state that their companies as a whole are doing better because of Topgrading.

9.  Managers (like you if you are an A player) can achieve 90% high performers hired.

Thanks to Jack Welch (GE Chairman at the time) approving Topgrading methods including two interviewers, the Tandem Topgrading Interview, many companies wanted to copy GE.  It’s now proven – trained A player managers can achieve 80% - 90% HIGH performers hired.

10.  Important Measures of Hiring Success

The HR world has been measuring hiring success in questionable ways – “cost to hire” people and “time to fill” jobs.  Trouble is, hiring goals are achieved if there are poor performers who are hired quickly and cheaply. Topgraders systematically measure percent HIGH performers hired.

The Topgrading Cost of Mis-Hires document is an original tool to quickly measure those costs; in only 15 minutes hiring managers become aghast at the high costs of their mis-hire, and that motivates them to learn the best hiring practices.

11. Ongoing Refinement of Interviewer Skills

Topgrading interviewers go through the Topgrading Interviewer Feedback Form, a checklist of a couple dozen good interviewer techniques, and simply give each other brief feedback and a couple of suggestions for how to do better next time.

12.  Candidates Arrange Personal Reference Calls with Former Bosses.

This is the follow through part of the TORC Technique (#5 above), and it’s simple:  after the Tandem Topgrading Interview, if the candidate and the interviewers want to proceed, the interviewers ask the candidate to do the work of arranging calls with the people the interviewers choose to talk with – usually 4 bosses, 2 peers, and 2 subordinates.  Conducting these phone interviews assures that the “truth serum” worked.

13.  Coaching New Hires Right Away

Candidates are promised coaching soon after they join, “to smooth your onboarding, assure you are productive quickly, and to begin a long-term development process right away.”  Bingo – A players love it!

CONCLUSION: Topgrading is an organic set of hiring best practices, most of which destroy what had been common hiring myths.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCE: We’ve released a brand new Topgrading Workbook, the same workbook we use in our workshops.  It has a clear explanation of each of the 12 Topgrading hiring steps, the same exercises to teach each step, and lots of new tools and methods.  Click here for more information or to order.

FREE DOWNLOADS: 1) 50-page eBook, an overview of Topgrading – click here, 2) Cost of Mis-Hires Form – click here,  3) Topgrading Vision, listing the 12 problems Topgrading solves, the skills necessary to learn, and results – click here.

Topgrading Tips will continue to offer leadership tips, but more and more case studies are popping up – successful Topgraders willing to share their insights, failures, and best advice.  So, from time to time Topgrading Tips will be a mini case study.

This short case study is amazing, the title is not hyped, and the case study has some great lessons for all managers.

Meet Aaron Patzer, founder of Mint.com, and a 28-year old who just sold his company to Intuit for a cool $170 million.  I read that he attributed some of his success to using Topgrading methods.  So I called Aaron, and here’s a brief version of his story …

Aaron grew up in Indiana, got into computers at age six, paid for school by designing websites starting at age 16, graduated Duke in computer sciences and electrical engineering, dropped out of a Ph.D. program at Princeton, and received a MSEE instead.

He joined IBM, got three patents on Play Station and quit because IBM seemed to promote people on the basis of seniority and Aaron guessed he would not have a fun job for more than a decade.  He joined a start up, wrote code and soon he was interviewing candidates on the phone.

With about a 600 IQ, Aaron wasn’t satisfied with his interviewing skills, and he picked up my big, fat book, Topgrading:  How Companies Win by Hiring, Coaching, and Keeping the Best People.  I suspect he memorized the book and particularly the Topgrading Interview Guide.  He asked the questions about education years and then investigated a person’s career by asking about – for EVERY job – successes, failures, bosses (“I figured if a candidate’s last 3 bosses were jerks, I’d be one to hire him.”), boss appraisals, and reasons for leaving.  Aaron “got it,” the power of gleaning patterns and the importance of asking “why?” 1,000 times.  He used the TORC (Threat of Reference Check) Technique and asked finalists to arrange reference calls with past bosses.

Aaron says Topgrading is the best business book he’s read, although he says the first part included name dropping with famous Topgraders, and too much “selling” of Topgrading.  He instructs his managers to go to Chapter 11 for the practical advice (which today is available in a much more exciting tool, the Topgrading Workbook – click here for information).  And I suggested that his managers read Chapter 12, the legalities of hiring, written by the largest employment law firm in the US and written to keep managers out of a minimum security prison.

Back to his success story – at age 25, Aaron was working 75 hours per week and frustrated with the additional hours necessary to manage his personal finances using Money or Quicken.  The bolt of lightning struck – he’d create the best personal finance software.

So he did it, he launched Mint.com, with occasional self doubts.  After all, he was attacking Microsoft and Intuit with no business experience, no leadership experience, no knowledge of Java web services, and by the way – no money.   Ahh, but he already knew how to hire A players.

Google Mint.com to see details of his business, videos of how someone can enter a few super secure credit card and bank accounts in 6 minutes and immediately begin saving money and time.  And it’s free.

So, at 26 years of age Aaron started hiring people for Mint.com and now he has 40 employees.  When he sold Mint.com to Intuit, the company made him head of their personal finance division, so there will be a lot more opportunities to Topgrade.

How did he Topgrade Mint.com?  He used the Topgrading hiring methods, with a few tweaks to really, really zero in to be sure he wouldn’t make a mistake.  For example, he asks engineers general questions about their methods to determine if they are so customer service oriented that they sit with users and note any frustration.

And what is his track record?  Four mis-hires out of 40.  Not bad!  A couple of others quit for good reasons – a dad died and another one of Aaron’s employees returned to Asia to take over the family business.  Looks like a 90% success record, with successful hires not just “okay,” but true high performers.

Aaron Patzer makes assembling a team of outstanding performers look easy.  He didn’t happen to mention one small factor that actually does make Topgrading “easy” – he’s clearly an A player!

Recommended Resource: The “Cliff Notes” for Topgrading is the 176-page Topgrading Workbook, a bit shorter than my 650-page tome!  The Topgrading Workbook explains each of the crucial Topgrading steps, and then presents the fun, illuminating exercises that teach how to do it.  Those are the same exercises we use in our Topgrading workshops.  For more information or to purchase, click here.

The New Topgrading Workbook!

Hi Topgraders,

You have asked for a simple, straightforward Topgrading Workbook, with all the latest Topgrading tools, and here it is!

The Topgrading Workbook is THE manual we use in our Topgrading Workshops.  It clearly explains all 12 Topgrading hiring steps and then there are the same fun, practical exercises we use in workshops.

Click here for a free chapter and the Introduction, for more information, and to purchase the Topgrading Workbook.  Click now to get a tool that will be your personal tutor or the only handout you’ll need for your internal Topgrading workshops.

A players are remarkably … um … inexperienced at job hunting, and they are remarkably inept at it.  And in this article I suggest easy ways to better their chances.

Who am I to make such pronouncements?  I can point to 65,000 oral case studies in which pre-screened candidates for executive jobs told me why they left a job and how they got the next job.  (I’ve interviewed 6,500 executives, with an average of 10 jobs each, so 6,500 X 10 discussions of getting jobs = 65,000.)

Actually, most of the executives I’ve interviewed were high performers who rarely sought jobs.  They were so good that former associates sought to hire them and those former associates recommended them to other hiring managers.  “I’ve never really looked for a job,” is a sentence I’ve heard hundreds of times … from A players.

C players, however, are nudged out of jobs and companies and they become masters at getting the next job.  C players also become masters at imitating A players. They’ve read many books that teach them how to make their resumes look better and how to answer interview questions.  We Topgrading professionals flush out the fakes and teach our clients how to do the same, but that’s a different topic.

In this economic downturn thousands of companies have folded and hundreds of thousands of not just underperformers but high performers, A players, are out looking for jobs. The unemployed are from every industry and I know, from emails and phone calls, that there a zillions of super sharp people out looking for work - sometimes for the first time in their career.  And I’ve coached many on how to do a better job of getting a job.

Here’s the problem: C players become masters at imitating A players; their resumes are full of hype and conceal negatives, and their interviewing behavior is well-rehearsed.  So on the surface C players look like A players.  And the poor A player who is looking for a job doesn’t know how to convey - “Hey, my resume is truthful and so is everything I say in interviews.”

Throughout their careers, A players needing a job have simply gone to their network and asked for connections to hiring managers.  That historically has been a very productive method.  “Birds of a feather …” and when A players contact their networks and say a super sharp A player they know is available … hey, job offers pop up.

Until now.  So if you have exhausted your contacts, your network, and are still unemployed, here’s what you can do:

1.   Rewrite your resume, tooting your horn. Keep it to 2 pages and list ACCOMPLISHMENTS AND SUCCESSES.  I’ve looked at hundreds of resumes since the economic slide and I see A players being TOO HUMBLE.  Don’t include much about responsibilities and don’t state your career objective (save that for the cover letter).  Don’t puff yourself up - stick to the facts.  But make it clear when YOU accomplished something and not just the team, of which you were a member.

2.   Rewrite your cover letter. Cover letters are usually boring and canned.  Speak from the heart, say what you’re looking for, but here is the key…

3.   Make it clear that your bosses in the past decade would give you rave reviews. If you have received overall performance ratings that are tops, say so.  Humble A players rarely do this - too bad because C players don’t do it for a different reason (it ain’t true that bosses gave them top ratings!).

4.   Offer to arrange personal reference calls with your former bosses (and subordinates and peers, too). Only A players CAN make such an offer and actually follow through, but again they are too humble.  In the past their network got them a job and they knew that others were singing their praises, so they were simply their usual understated self.  In this economy if you won Olympic gold medals, you’d better display them if you want to get on the team.  It frankly impresses the heck out of recruiters and hiring managers to read and hear that your former bosses would praise you and that YOU do the work of arranging the phone calls.

5.   Don’t accept low pay. In the past few months I’ve seen some companies take advantage of people they are recruiting and hiring, knowing that even A players are desperate.  Trouble is, when the economy improves, A players who KNEW they were worth more than what they were paid, leave.  Companies you would want to work for won’t try to cheat you in the short term.

SUMMARY:  If you’re an A player looking for a job, the way you can differentiate yourself from C player candidates who portray themselves as much better than they are is to toot your horn - let prospective employers know you have received consistently top performance reviews and that you are willing to arrange the phone calls to prove it.  This is the job hunting equivalent of displaying your Olympic gold medals to prove you are good … no, great!