Topgrading 101

5th Edition

You Can Hire Almost All A Players

Dr. Brad Smart, Founder and CEO

Topgrading, Inc.
 Table of Contents
Preface by Price Pritchett ...............................................................2

Introduction ....................................................................................4
About Topgrading, Inc. ................................................................6

Chapter 1: Why Hiring is Your Most Frustrating Challenge ... 11

Chapter 2: Proof Topgrading is the Best Hiring Method ........ 16

Chapter 3: 6 Key Hiring Steps: Topgrading Lite ..................... 20

Step 1: The Job Scorecard ................................................... 20
Step 2: The 2-Job Career History Form ............................... 21
Step 3: Phone Screen Interviews ......................................... 25
Step 4: The Complete Career History Form ......................... 25
Step 5: Tandem Topgrading Interview ................................. 28
Step 6: Reference Calls ........................................................ 31

Conclusion .................................................................................. 32
Topgrading ROI ........................................................................ 34

Resources ................................................................................... 35

What Top Executives Say About Topgrading .......................... 36

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TOPGRADING 101 – 5TH ED. – YOU CAN HIRE ALMOST ALL A PLAYERS

Preface
by Price Pritchett, Ph.D.

What is the single most important leadership skill?

That question has been answered. There is no doubt it’s the ability
to create teams of high performers. An annual Conference Board
survey shows the #1 headache of CEOs and all C-suite executives
is hiring mediocre performers. If you’re a leader, talent counts more
than anything else for your success, and you want to hire high
performers, right?

You know about the research leading to the truism that “80% of the
results come from 20% of the people.” You’d love to clone those
20% but, try as you might, most of the people you hire are
disappointments. And for the vast majority of companies, no one
seems to have the answer…except my dear friend Brad Smart. We
worked for the same firm at the beginning of our careers. I’ve
marveled at how Brad has tackled the toughest problems in hiring,
applying his drive, brilliance, and determination (marks of an A
Player, by the way), to create and implement what I’m positive is the
best hiring method, by far. Not second or third best – Topgrading is
in my opinion the very best.

I recall when Brad created the term “Topgrading.” We were

discussing how feeble it is to “upgrade talent,” because a leader with
twelve C Players could replace one with a B Player and declare he
had “upgraded talent” with eleven C Players and one B Player. The
light went on and Brad suggested, “How about calling it ‘Topgrading’
when the goal is to have all, or at least almost all A Players?” Brad
nailed it!

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The Topgrading concepts in this book are simple enough to

understand but take hard work to implement. It takes know-how,
practice, and discipline. With more than 10,000 talent assessments
under their belts, Topgrading professionals are authorities on
selecting and coaching high performers. Their work with a broad
range of companies—global leaders, high-tech start-ups, and
everything in between—has enabled them to solve the biggest
problems in hiring.

Just keep this in mind: If you’re a CEO, Topgrading will get you
better results, a stronger bottom line. Hundreds of CEOs say
Topgrading improved their profits. If you’re an HR manager,
Topgrading will make your career far more successful. And if you
are a manager at any level, systematically create your A team with
Topgrading and your steadily improving results will lift your career
trajectory, for sure.

Pritchett, LP was founded by Dr. Price Pritchett and is the leading

consultancy in merger integration strategy.

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TOPGRADING 101 – 5TH ED. – YOU CAN HIRE ALMOST ALL A PLAYERS

Introduction
Whether you are the owner of a 10-person company, CEO of a
Global 1000 company, a Human Resources manager or manager
of a department, here’s a scenario to which you probably can relate:

You have a mixture of talent, and your marginal performers cause

you the most frustration. You’d like to spend more time helping your
high performers achieve even more, but chronic low performers take
up too much of your time and your high performers’ time, dragging
down your entire organization. You value talent, you really do, but
bad hires are your biggest recurring business headache.

You try to replace low performers, but it’s frustrating because:

 Recruiters present too few quality candidates

 Resumes are too often full of hype
 Your competency and behavioral interviews give you too
few valid insights
 Reference checks are frequently worthless
 Most of the people you hire turn out to disappoint you

You are not alone. If it’s any consolation, the most sophisticated
Human Resources executives are disappointed in most of the
people their companies hire. We met for a full day with the #1
Human Resources executives from just Global 100 companies, the
largest 100 companies in the world. They said only 20% of the
people they hire turn out to be A Players, the high performers they
hoped for and expected; in other words, the most sophisticated
heads of HR in the world are disappointed by 80% of the people
their hiring methods produce.

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However, the 16 Topgraders in the room said 80% of the people

they hire turn out to be high performers; A Players. Wow – 20%
success for most of the largest 100 companies, but 80% success for
Topgraders.

A 2019 Harvard Business Review article entitled “Your Approach to

Hiring is All Wrong” points the finger at the whole business world.
Their research laid out the terrible state of hiring everywhere:

 Companies measure what’s important, with one huge

exception. Almost all companies fail to measure what is
most important: talent, specifically what percent of the
people they hire and promote turn out to be the high
performers they desperately want.
 Thousands of new hiring methods – apps, machine
learning, etc. claim they improve hiring, but improvement in
the quality of hire they produce is, so far, tiny.
 Candidates lie to get jobs, and the new hiring methods are
gamed by vendors who teach candidates how to cheat.

If you are frustrated with bad hires, this eGuide is for you. But I’m
not impartial. I’ve devoted all my career to solving hiring problems
and you’ll be the judge of whether I’ve succeeded. With so much
hype from hiring vendors, perhaps you would prefer not to read
about Topgrading methods until you’ve been convinced that
Topgrading is indeed the best hiring method. If so, please jump to
Chapter 2.

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TOPGRADING 101 – 5TH ED. – YOU CAN HIRE ALMOST ALL A PLAYERS

About Topgrading, Inc.

Before reading about the cure for bad hire headaches, you might
be interested in who is writing the prescription. I’m Dr. Brad Smart,
founder of Topgrading, Inc. We’re a group of professionals
dedicated to helping clients build and maintain teams of high
performers who fit their culture. Our tools and processes have
been honed over 40 years, working with clients of all sizes, in all
industries, everywhere on the globe. We have helped Global 100
companies Topgrade, but also hundreds of small, midsize, and
growth companies. We:

 Conduct workshops and webinars to train all managers to

implement Topgrading methods, with special emphasis on
the Topgrading Interview.
 Conduct the Topgrading Interview for C-suite jobs, where
the cost of a mis-hire is sky high.
 Assess and coach executives as part of succession
planning.
 Offer Topgrading Online Solutions (TOLS), our platform
that enables trained managers and HR to use the
Topgrading methodology and integrates with Applicant
Tracking Systems (ATSs).
 Offer TopgradingHIRE, our ATS for Small and Medium
businesses.

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TOPGRADING 101 – 5TH ED. – YOU CAN HIRE ALMOST ALL A PLAYERS

What Exactly is a Topgrader?

Topgraders are leaders, supported by their CEOs, who use

Topgrading methods in their quest to hire and promote all high
performers, A Players. “All” actually has been achieved by a few
Topgraders, but “almost all” has been achieved by tens of
thousands of leaders. We as Topgrading Professionals think of
success as:

 Excellent Topgraders achieve 85%+ high performers hired,

which is the average success rate for our case studies.
 Very Good Topgraders achieve 75-84% high performers.
 Good Topgraders achieve 50-74% high performers.

Because most non-Topgrading companies hire only 25% A Players,

Topgrading companies achieving less than 50% high performers
hired and promoted think they are using Topgrading methods but
when they call us we always find their execution is not as thorough
as it should be. Our vision is to see Topgrading become accepted
everywhere as the best hiring method, so we welcome calls in which
the CEO or head of HR explains how they deploy Topgrading. We
commonly make a couple of suggestions that improve the success
rate.

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TOPGRADING 101 – 5TH ED. – YOU CAN HIRE ALMOST ALL A PLAYERS

What is an A Player?

 A high performer
 Someone in the top 10% of talent available at your target
compensation level
 Someone you would enthusiastically rehire

We’ve already cited the 80-20 rule, in which 80% of the sales,
profits, or other results are created by the top 20% of the talent.
Typical stats cited by M & A experts Pritchett & Associates are:

 Paper plants managed by A Players have 94% higher

profits than other plants
 A Player investment banker associates are twice as
productive as average performers
 The difference in productivity between a top performing
knowledge worker and an average knowledge worker is
over 100%
 The top 10% of programmers produce 800% more lines of
code than average programmers
 The top 20% of sales reps produce 120% more than
average reps

Topgraders embrace the 90-10 rule rather than the 80-20 rule: hire
someone in the top 10% of talent for the salary range you choose.
So, if there are 10 qualified candidates knocking on your door and
eager to take the job for the pay you offer, you pick the #1 best
candidate; if there are 100 candidates, you at least hire one of the
top 10. Do this, and you are Topgrading.

Let’s look at a competency model.

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TOPGRADING 101 – 5TH ED. – YOU CAN HIRE ALMOST ALL A PLAYERS

A Player Managers tend to be:

 Smart; exhibit solid intellect and business savvy

 Driven to succeed; passionate
 Trustworthy
 Consistent high performers
 Adaptable; adjust to many different personalities and
business challenges
 Surround themselves with high performers
 Very hard workers
 Resourceful; overcome obstacles
 Effective leaders
 Humble, down-to-earth, grounded, self-aware
 Eager to fit your core values

Which of these is the single most important competency?

It’s resourcefulness, a composite of energy, passion, analytic skills,

and persistence wrapped into one. Resourcefulness is figuring out
how to get over, around, or through barriers to success. A Players
live by the motto: figure it out!

A Players exude resourcefulness; a LOT of resourcefulness. They

proactively look for or create opportunities to succeed. When facing
a challenge, they just don’t give up. Facing seemingly hopeless
setbacks they snatch success out of the jaws of defeat. MarineMax
CEO Bill McGill, a Topgrader, said, “The 2008 recession wiped out
a lot of our competitors – few people in a recession buy a $500,000
yacht. But my A team showed their resourcefulness. They did not

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whine, complain, or play the victim. They dug in, found solutions,
and we survived stronger as a company.”

For Topgraders, GOOD is not GOOD ENOUGH.

B Players reliably do the basic job; they are adequate but

disappointing, maybe even rated Good but for sure they are not Very
Good or Excellent. They lack resourcefulness, so they are mediocre
at making the most of opportunities and anticipating problems. Too
much of your time is spent carrying B Players or, worse, C Players
who run to you, too often expecting you to “figure it out.”

But Don’t I Have to Pay More for A Players?

Not necessarily. You have set the compensation range for the job.
If, for example, you think the marketing director’s job is worth
$100,000, you should find the A Player who is available in that salary
range. Just one warning though: If you won’t pay more than $100k
for a marketing director, but the competitors all pay closer to $150k,
you have to ask yourself, will the best candidate at $100k be good
enough? Do you have the right target salary? Should you maybe
outsource the function?

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TOPGRADING 101 – 5TH ED. – YOU CAN HIRE ALMOST ALL A PLAYERS

Chapter 1
Why Hiring is Your Most Frustrating Challenge

Our research from 100,000+ case studies shows that the most
common management team – everywhere – consists of about 25%
A Players, 50% B Players, and 25% C Players.

A
Players

C
Players

B
Players

Does this describe your company? If so, only 1 person in 4 you hire
turns out to be an A Player. You have a mis-hire 3 out of every 4
times. Not a very good business result…

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…unless you become a Topgrader and 80% or 90% of the people

you hire turn out to be A Players. The best Topgraders, over time,
have teams of 90% A Players:

Players

Players

Why is Hiring So Difficult?

Hiring can be difficult for many reasons, but three of the biggest
reasons are:

 Candidate Hype. About 40% of resumes contain – sorry to

use such harsh language – lies. I know, it’s not a very good
commentary on humans in general but that’s what we’ve
heard from clients for decades. And I’ve hired people who
worked in background check companies and they all
confirm over 40% of resumes contain serious untruths, like
falsely claiming to have a degree or license.
It’s easy for candidates to hype their resumes. Books on

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how to get a job show them how to do it. Outplacement

consultants encourage not just putting our best foot forward
but lying. How can people hype strengths and hide failures
and mistakes? It’s simple…
 Poor Verification. It’s hell trying to confirm (or disprove)
what candidates claim they did because reference checks
are usually worthless – too often with the candidate’s
buddies or with HR representatives who are bound to a
‘neutral reference’ policy. You’d love to talk with managers
to whom your candidates reported, but how often does that
happen?
 Unrevealing interviews. Typical hiring interviews simply
do not inform you of the candidate’s failures and mistakes
or reveal the risks in hiring them. So-called competency or
behavioral interviews are super easy to fake. Most
managers like to think they are good interviewers – until
they also think of how few of their hires turn out to be A
Players.

Almost all of the 6,500 executives I’ve interviewed lamented the fact
that they have been conned by candidates. The actual performance
of too many people they hired was not nearly at the level they
claimed in various jobs, and those bad hires were costly.

Is this commentary a reminder of your chronic “Bad Hire

Headache?” If so, Topgrading has the cure. If tens of thousands of
managers in diverse companies have hired almost all A Players with
Topgrading, you can too.

Most CEOs don’t know that a better hiring mousetrap exists, so they
look the other way. SHRM reports that only 5% of companies

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seriously and honestly measure what HR calls Quality of Hire. Most

CEOs and HR managers don’t require performance at the A Player
level because they don’t believe they can hire more than about 25%
high performers. Topgrading CEOs set higher targets for
performance because they expect, no, they require high performers
to be hired, and they get that higher level of performance.

CEOs are always viewed as the primary drivers of Topgrading. HR

does the heavy lifting and gets the most credit, and CEOs set the
talent standards, the performance bars. But the CEO has to have
HR’s back, so that if a peer runs to the CEO, asking to cut corners
on Topgrading methods and standards, the CEO says no.

The CEO must have HR’s back

and not allow corners to be cut.

Human Resources Leaders in Topgrading

Companies Are the Most Respected in the World

And why not? – every CEO wants Quality of Hire to be much, much
better, and Topgrading HR managers deliver it.

When General Electric became the most valuable company in the

world (in market cap) its head of HR, Bill Conaty, was at the top of
lists of The Most Respected Human Resources Leaders. Ditto for
Don Redlinger of Honeywell. Shell began Topgrading and the head
of HR, John Hoffmeister, was just starting to get accolades as a top
HR professional when he changed jobs – he was promoted to CEO.

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Only 1% of companies in general double or triple their percent high

performers hired. Over the years, hundreds of HR managers in
Topgrading companies have stood out as highly respected because
they are in that top 1%. They are best of class in their profession.
And it’s fun – they thoroughly enjoy delivering almost all A Player
candidates to their internal clients, the managers who have to
deliver results.

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TOPGRADING 101 – 5TH ED. – YOU CAN HIRE ALMOST ALL A PLAYERS

Chapter 2
Proof Topgrading is the Best Hiring Method

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself,

“ but talent instantly recognizes talent.

- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

In the 3rd Edition of Topgrading there are more than 40 half-page

and eight full-length case studies (some are holding companies with
many portfolio companies) that demonstrate the success
organizations are experiencing with Topgrading. You can see a
summary of these results in the chart below.

If you go to www.TopgradingCaseStudies.com you can click on any

company name to view the full case study. You can see how our
varied selection of services has solved talent and hiring problems at
companies of all sizes in all industries. You’ll also read quotes from
CEOs saying in their own words that they believe Topgrading made
the company more successful and profitable.

The chart below shows each company’s improvement in hiring A

Players, with the average improvement being from 26% to 85%.
That’s HIGH performers, not just Good performers. There is no
shortage of hiring tools and methods touted in the market, but we’re
unaware of any other hiring method that produces a fraction of the
documented improvement in talent that Topgrading produces.

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Master Chart of Topgrading Case Studies

Before
Company Topgrading After Topgrading

Access Development 33% 94%

American Heart Association 25% 95% (upper management)

Anonymous
Pharmaceutical Company 33% 75% (sales reps)

Argo 51% 96% (Assist. VP and above)

Azura Memory Care Not measured 75%

Batesville Casket 60% 80%

Carestream Health Est. 30% 74% (IT department)

Columbus McKinnon Not measured 85% (exempt jobs, globally)

ConnXus Not measured 90%

Corwin Beverages 33% 92% (non-entry jobs)

Culligan Not measured 85% (corporate jobs)

10% 92% (staff)

DenTek 0% 100% (management)

17% 75% (hired, total company)

DPT 20% 80% (promoted, total company)

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Before
Company Topgrading After Topgrading

Education, Inc. 12% 78% (teachers)

(now LearnWell) Not measured 89% (corporate staff)

EMC 27% 95% (sales reps)

E*TRADE 25% 75% (upper management)

More than 80%

General Electric Not measured (high potential managers)

ghSMART Not measured 99%

GSI Est. 22% 90% (executives)

Hayes Lemmerz 85% (managers promoted globally)

(now Maxion) Not measured 74% (managers hired, globally)

Hillenbrand Low 81% (management)

Home Instead (franchise) 25% 88% (caregivers)

HTG Molecular Not measured Est. 85%

JT Foxx Organization 2% 80%

K&N Management 21% 89%

Labsphere 30% 70%

Los Niños 50% 85%

25% 95% (dealership general managers)

MarineMax 30% 100% (region managers)

Mint.com Start-up 90%

Netsurit 9% 75% (promotions, management)

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Before
Company Topgrading After Topgrading

North American Nursing

Education (name changed) 19% 87% (school deans)

Nurse Next Door Not measured 85% (corporate and caregiver)

OnyxMD 10% 90%

ProService Hawaii 45% 91%

Red Door Interactive 20% 90%

Ron Santa Teresa 25% 74%

Roundy’s 20% 80% (store directors)

(now owned by Kroger) Not measured 100% (senior management)

Sigma Marketing 45% 90%

Synergia One 57% 83%

Tekmore (name changed) Not measured 95% (managers)

Triton 2% 80%

Virtual Technology Not measured 98%

Dr. Michael Lorence did his Ph.D. dissertation* vetting Topgrading

and noted that among thousands of academic studies on hiring, no
study shows a hiring approach with a fraction of Topgrading’s
demonstrated results. He speculates that if every leader used
Topgrading, the impact on the US GDP would be huge, with a lot
more companies surviving, flourishing and creating more jobs.

*Lorence, M.S. (2014). The Impact of Systematically Hiring Top Talent: A Study of
Topgrading as a Rigorous Employee Selection Bundle (Doctoral dissertation).
Retrieved from https://scholarworks.gsu.edu

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Chapter 3
6 Key Hiring Steps: Topgrading Lite

Those who build great companies understand

“ that the ultimate throttle on growth … is one

thing above all others: the ability to get and
keep enough of the right people.

Jim Collins, Good to Great

In this chapter, you’ll find six of the most important steps in

implementing Topgrading; call them Topgrading Lite. These steps
will help solve three big hiring problems. If you do just these steps,
you’ll probably deliver 10% fewer bad hires, maybe taking you from
25% to 35% high performers hired. Not bad – but far from the 85%
that serious Topgraders achieve.

There is an art to this science; just doing the following steps will not
get you the level of success you can achieve with a full immersion
in Topgrading.

Step 1: Create a Job Scorecard

Over the years, clients have reported that in exit interviews, people
complain that they really did not know what the job was that they
were hired for. This confusion is too common, and it leads to bad
hires. Decades ago, we sought – and found – a solution.

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What departing employees were complaining about, in so many

words, was that as candidates the job descriptions they were shown
were vague. Only after they were hired was what we call a Job
Scorecard created – a list of all the metrics or objectives they would
be required to achieve. Those metrics, not the job description,
became the basis for their performance appraisals. What
Topgrading has done is move up creating that Job Scorecard so
candidates clearly understand what will be expected of them if they
are hired.

A key benefit of the Job Scorecard is that leaders can interview for
the metrics that will be expected if the candidate is hired, better
ensuring that you’re hiring someone who can achieve the goals.

Step 2: Candidates Complete a 2-Job Career History

Form; You Scan the Candidates’ Prescreen Snapshots

Suppose you used job boards to generate candidates for a Sales

Representative position and you received 50 resumes or candidate
LinkedIn profiles. Knowing that a lot of resumes contain fabrications,
you try hard to guess which resumes are both impressive and
honest. You don’t have time to conduct 50 phone screen interviews,
so you probably use a screening tool. Trouble is, the common
screening tools – personality tests, culture fit tests, bots, and robotic
interviews by script readers – don’t add much value (as the
previously mentioned Harvard Business Review article states).
Better screening tools are ability tests, knowledge tests, and video
interviews. But keep in mind that in almost all companies the hiring
methods, including those initial screening tools, produce lousy hiring
results – only about 25% high performers hired.

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Topgraders use a simple, effective screening tool, the 2-job Career

History Form, that produces the Prescreen Snapshot. As Scott
Clawson, CEO of Culligan, stated: “Even before any interviews the
Prescreen Snapshot identifies the best performers and shows how
their recent managers would rate their performance.” Here’s how the
Prescreen Snapshot works:

 All candidates are sent a form letter saying, thanks for

applying, we’d like to continue the hiring process, and
please provide information about your two most recent jobs.
 Candidates click on the link and read the instructions, which
contain the Topgrading Truth Serum: The candidate is
informed that a final step in hiring is for the candidate to
arrange calls with their managers; the reference call with the
current manager will be performed when the candidate
agrees to arrange it, usually when a job offer is at hand. The
Topgrading Truth Serum has delivered exceptional results
for 40+ years. It scares away candidates who know they
won’t get good reviews from their past managers, and it
encourages great candidates to be completely honest about
their strengths and weaknesses. So, instead of fearing that
you’re being conned, you know that you will get the whole
truth because candidates are aware that they will have to
arrange reference calls with their bosses.
 Candidates take 5-7 minutes to complete the Career History
Form for their most recent 2 jobs. The Topgrading Career
History Form has special features, copyrighted and built into
Topgrading Online Solutions, TOLS (our software platform).
In addition to the usual job information, our form also asks
for salary information (where legal), reasons for leaving

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jobs, and – most important – how their managers would rate

their overall performance.
 You (or HR) then receive the completed 2-Job Career
History Form, the Prescreen Snapshot (below) and the
Phone Screen Interview Guide.

The Topgrading Truth Serum solves

the Candidate Hype problem.

Following are two Prescreen Snapshots. The first is a pretty good

one (depending on the Job Scorecard), because Karen Smith isn’t
a job hopper, has enjoyed steady salary growth, has NOT left jobs
for bad reasons, and she says both her managers would rate her
overall performance Excellent.

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Next is a 2-Job Snapshot of someone who probably is not a good

candidate. He’s had two short term jobs, was out of work recently,
has remained flat in compensation, left for a serious reason (Fired
for Cause), and admits that his bosses would give him mediocre
performance ratings (Fair in one job and Good in current job).

The hiring managers or someone in HR can glance at dozens of 2-

Job Snapshots in just minutes and easily focus on the best
candidates. The alternative is to review resumes: if you had 50
resumes it would take several hours to cut them down to candidates
to phone screen. And because you don’t trust resumes, you conduct
lots and lots of phone screen interviews. The Prescreen Snapshot
is a great time saver – almost instant resume screening and much
fewer phone screen interviews. One client reported cutting 20 phone

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screen interviews to 5 or 6, saving more than 25% of total hiring time

and cost.

Go to PrescreenSnapshot.com
for a FREE TRIAL of 10 Snapshots

Step 3: Conduct Phone Screen Interviews

The Phone Screen Guide is prepopulated with the information the

candidate entered when filling out the 2-job Career History Form.
That means that when phone screening you don’t have to look at
the Career History Form, resume, or Prescreen Snapshot to see key
information: employer, dates, job title, salary (if legal), reasons for
leaving, and boss ratings. It’s all there and the time-tested questions
to ask in a phone screen interview are clear, with space to write
responses.

The phone screen interview might last as long as 45 minutes for a

mid-manager, half an hour for a sales rep, 15 minutes for a call
center employee, or 5 minutes for a stock clerk candidate. At the
end of the phone screen interview, if you and the candidate want to
move ahead, move on to:

Step 4: Candidate Completes the Full Career History

Form

The information from the 2-Job Career History Form is saved, so

here’s how you introduce Step 4: “Pat, you completed the Career
History Form for just your most recent two jobs, which we have been

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TOPGRADING 101 – 5TH ED. – YOU CAN HIRE ALMOST ALL A PLAYERS

discussing. Before inviting candidates in for face-to-face interviews,

we ask them to go back to the Career History Form and fill out the
rest of it – your education history, the rest of your jobs, and some
questions about your future. With this additional information, the
face-to-face interview will be much more productive, since the
interviewers will already have a lot of questions answered.”

You’ll get:

 The full Career History Form (education, all jobs, etc.)

 Full Career Topgrading Snapshots
 Topgrading Interview Guide prepopulated with candidate
data
 Reference Check Interview Guide

You’ve seen the Smith and Doe 2-Job Snapshots. Here are their full
career Snapshots:

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TOPGRADING 101 – 5TH ED. – YOU CAN HIRE ALMOST ALL A PLAYERS

These Snapshots show you a lot of highly valuable information.

Typically, if 6 phone screen interviews were conducted, reviewing
the full Snapshots will make it easy to pick the best 2 or 3 to invite
in for face-to-face interviews.

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TOPGRADING 101 – 5TH ED. – YOU CAN HIRE ALMOST ALL A PLAYERS

Step 5: Conduct the Famous Tandem Topgrading

Interview

The Tandem Topgrading Interview, using the Topgrading

“ Interview Guide, has become critical to our staffing

process. It is set up in a logical and systematic way and
permits the interviewers to hear a thorough review of all
the previous jobs that got the person to where they are
today - the events, motivations, accomplishments, and
failures. It’s really opened our eyes to important things
that we otherwise would have missed.

- Rick Steinberg, Vice President of Human Resources,

Columbus McKinnon

The Topgrading Interview is the silver bullet of hiring. Every

manager and every company we know of achieving 90%+ hiring or
promoting success conducts Topgrading Interviews. It is the most
revealing interview – interviewers miss nothing important in
assessing candidates.

Use the Topgrading Interview Guide

The Topgrading Interview is chronological, starting with the

educational years, coming forward to the present, covering every
job, and concluding with the usual sections on Self-Appraisal and
Plans and Goals for the Future. The Topgrading Interview Guide is
prepopulated with 100% of the Career History Form information and
makes absolutely certain that you are conducting the most thorough
interview possible using the time-tested and proven Topgrading
questions.

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I’ve written entire books on how to conduct this interview and the
majority of the time in our 2-day Topgrading Workshops is devoted
to this crucial skill.

Conduct a Tandem Topgrading Interview

Why two interviewers? Because of what happened in the late 1980s.

In the first significant case study of Topgrading at GE when Jack
Welch was CEO, leaders improved hiring from 25% to 50% A
Players using solo Topgrading Interviews. Then I added a second
interviewer, the Tandem Topgrading Interview, and GE’s success
hiring A Players shot up to over 80%. Since then every Topgrading
case study showing 85%+ hiring success uses the Tandem
Topgrading Interview.

Conducting a Topgrading Interview is not easy; it’s hard work to

concentrate on candidate responses, spot important patterns in
competencies, observe candidate body language, and think of
follow-up questions without leading the witness. But interviewing is
much easier and actually exciting with 2 interviewers.

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Getting the deepest insights into candidates is so fascinating that

the time flies by. And A Players love the walk down memory lane;
they enjoy telling you about their successes and they reveal
mistakes too, because A Players can tell you how they learned from
mistakes.

Your very first Tandem Topgrading Interview will convince you what
at this moment you find hard to believe – you really CAN learn
everything you need to about a candidate.

Solo Topgrading Interviews can achieve

50% success, but a Tandem Topgrading Interview
can achieve 85%+ success.

How Much Time Does a Topgrading Interview Take?

 Stock Clerk: 30 minutes (solo)

 Call Center Employee: 45 minutes (solo)
 Sales Rep: 2 hours (tandem)
 Vice President: 3 hours (tandem)
 President, GM, CEO: 4-5 hours (solo by Topgrading
Professional or tandem with Professional conducting but
another top executive asking some questions)

You are probably thinking, “Isn’t it too time consuming for two
interviewers to take all that time for one interview?” Not when almost
all your hires are high performers. The benefits dwarf the additional
time spent finding and hiring the A Players, and you save hundreds
of hours alone not having to fix mistakes low performers caused.

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Step 6: Conduct Candidate-Arranged Reference Calls

This step is easy and puts the cork in the bottle.

After the Tandem Topgrading Interview, if you and your tandem

interviewer want to move toward a job offer, just go through your
notes and pick out the people you want to talk with – certainly all
bosses in the past 7-10 years, and for managers, some peers and
direct reports. Ask the candidate to arrange the calls and within a
day or so they will typically get back and say yes, all are willing to
talk and here is their cell number and availability.

And what about the current manager? In the phone screen you
would have said:

 No reference calls will be made until the candidate agrees

 The candidate will arrange all the calls, and
 They will not be asked to arrange a call with their current
manager until they agree to – probably when a job offer is
at hand and perhaps after the offer is accepted.

This is your chance to verify everything the candidate said and every
(tentative) conclusion you and your tandem interviewer have made.
The in-depth Topgrading Reference Check Guide walks you through
building rapport, asking for an appraisal, explaining the job, and
asking the reference to assess the candidate in relation to that job.

You’re done with Topgrading Lite (except for the job offer) and
the odds of hiring an A Player are better than before, but not as high
as if you had used all 12 Topgrading steps. All 12 steps are too in-
depth to cover in a brief guide but are covered in our public and
company-specific workshops.

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TOPGRADING 101 – 5TH ED. – YOU CAN HIRE ALMOST ALL A PLAYERS

Conclusion
This guide began with a typical hiring scenario. Let’s revisit it, but
show how key parts of Topgrading transform “typical” to a much
more effective process, with much better results:

Pre-Topgrading Hiring Post-Topgrading Hiring

40-50% of resumes contain The Career History Forms and

falsehoods and C Players Topgrading Snapshots
easily create A Player motivate honesty and quickly
resumes tell you the most important
facts about candidates

Your interviews are not very The Tandem Topgrading

revealing Interview, using the Topgrading
Interview Guide, is extremely
revealing

Reference checks are too Candidate-arranged reference

often worthless calls with their managers and
others are revealing and
motivate the candidate to be
honest in the interviews

Too often the person hired The Job Scorecard ensures you
disappoints you; only 25% High hire someone who can do the job
Performers hired well; 80%+ High Performers Hired

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Topgraders report many related benefits:

• Unwanted turnover declines

• Hiring costs drop substantially

• Coaching becomes much more successful (since almost all A

Players and A Potentials are hired)

• Succession planning is much stronger with so many A’s and A

Potentials

• The entire company soars in revenues and profits

• Individual managers with much stronger teams achieve more

success, earn faster promotions and, as an added huge bonus,
enjoy a significantly better balance in their lives.

How do companies roll out Topgrading?

Typical steps are listed at www.Topgrading.com. The shorthand
answer is:

1. Immersion in the company strategy and culture

2. Create Job Scorecards
3. Train all the managers in 2-day Topgrading Workshops;
For large companies we train-the-trainers
4. Use Topgrading methods to improve coaching
5. Use Topgrading Professionals to interview C-suite
candidates
6. Consult periodically to be sure Topgrading is working
7. Measure hiring results regularly

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TOPGRADING 101 – 5TH ED. – YOU CAN HIRE ALMOST ALL A PLAYERS

What is the ROI of Topgrading?

To determine the Return on Investment, we get the following data
from our clients:
 Percent high performers hired at executive, management,
and individual contributor levels
 Financial and time/productivity costs of mis-hires for each
level
 Administrative costs before and since Topgrading (with
typically substantial reductions in costs with Topgrading)
 Annual turnover cost, at different levels
 Estimates of the savings in money and time if the company
achieves various levels of improvement
A detailed ROI analysis example would take many pages. A simple
way to get a feel for ROI is to take very conservative estimates and
project annual savings for one slice of Topgrading – just mid-
managers. Suppose Acme, Inc. will hire 30 mid-managers in the
next year. Acme estimates that only 26% of the mid-managers they
hire turn out to be high performers. And they estimate the cost of a
mid-manager mis-hire is $250k and 200 hours wasted.

What would Acme save in money and time by Topgrading just the
mid-manager level if hiring success only doubled, to 60%?

Acme would cut the likely mis-hires from 22 to 11 and savings would
be:
 11 x $250k = $2,750,000
 11 x 200 hours = 2,200 hours

Topgrading will cost a fraction of the financial savings. And savings

are substantially more because Topgrading is never just at the mid-
manager level. It’s at all levels.

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Resources
Tools to Get You and Your Organization
Topgrading

 Call us. In a few minutes we can answer your questions and

give you an idea of the best way to implement Topgrading in
your organization. 847-244-5544
 Use the Free Trial of the 2-Job Snapshot. You can get set up
in 30 minutes and it’s all automated. Go to
www.PrescreenSnapshot.com and ask candidates for your
current job openings to complete the 2-job Career History Form
even before you talk with them. Spot the high performing, honest
candidates in seconds.
 Sign up for a public Topgrading Workshop. Ideally the CEO
and head of HR attend. Then if you’re convinced Topgrading is
worth pursuing, call us to analyze hiring methods and results,
project your ROI, and lay out a plan to roll out Topgrading.

Thank you for your interest in Topgrading and for reading

this short guide. Good luck on your journey toward hiring
almost all high performers!

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
“At Mint.com I had 40 people.
I Topgraded and 36 out of 40 (90%) were
A Players. I sold the company for
$170 million. Any less than 90% and we
would have gone out of business.”

- Aaron Patzer
Founder, Mint.com


“In the fight against cardiovascular disease
and stroke, Topgrading helped us raise an
additional $50 million over the previous year.
Topgrading has saved lives.”

- Cass Wheeler
CEO, American Heart Association (retired)

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
“Nothing matters more in winning than
getting the right people on the field. All the
clever strategies and advanced technologies
in the world are nowhere near as effective
without great people to put them to work.
Brad’s Topgrading methods helped us
maximize talent at GE.”

- Jack Welch
Author of Winning & CEO, General Electric (retired)

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
“Brad and [his President, Chris Mursau]
have conducted Topgrading workshops for
our managers and received top ratings.”

- Kevin Silva
Former SVP Human Resources, Argo


“Topgrading has been an invaluable tool for
DenTek in hiring and retaining high-level
performers. Over the past six years we
have blossomed into a world-class
consumer goods company with explosive
growth and great opportunities, due largely
to the hard work of A Players recruited
through the Topgrading process.”

- David Fox
President, DenTek Oral Care

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Topgrading:,
5250 Grand Avenue
Suite 14-325
Gurnee, IL 60031
(847) 244-5544