Hiring a Top Performing Team with Topgrading

It’s no secret that the past two years have upended the labor market. The fallout from a global pandemic pushed millions out of the workforce and caused millions of others to rethink their career plans. At the same time, America’s largest generation in history, the Baby Boomers, began aging into mass retirement.

Today’s labor market is tighter than it has been for years. Companies of every size and industry want to hire, but with a potential recession on the horizon, they know a poor hire can mean disaster.

Traditional headhunters cannot ensure that companies get the talent they need. Instead, businesses need a different approach- one we call Topgrading. Topgrading is a proven, practical approach. Research suggests that the mis-hiring rate without Topgrading can be as high as 70%, while Topgrading can reduce that to as little as 10%. So let’s explore some facts and solutions.

Hiring the Wrong Person Can Spell Disaster

We highlight the fact that vacancy and quit rates currently experienced in the United States correspond to a degree of labor market tightness previously associated with sub-2 percent unemployment rates. – NBER Report by Alex Domash and Lawrence Summers.

A lot of reporting confirms the tight labor market. The supply of suitable candidates has shrunk to the point where even if you find someone for an employment opening, it is equally challenging to find someone to replace them if they fail to meet expectations. Naturally, this weighs on the minds of hiring managers and SMB owners, often resulting in companies rushing hiring decisions and getting stuck with whoever they hire.

And to compound hiring challenges, much information gets left out with a traditional interviewing and recruiting process. For example, an applicant may be great in a one-on-one setting but fail at group interactions. They may lack core skills not covered by an interview. And their preference of behavior (aka personality) may turn out to clash with company culture.

Hiring a new employee is expensive. Administrative costs abound, and new employees don’t become fully productive until after a period of training and orientation. The company funds that learning curve from every aspect.

One bad employee can spoil a bunch, which may be worse than no employee. Organizations often sink to their lowest common denominator as workers look around and see what their coworkers can get away with behaviorally. But a good employee can raise the productivity of a whole team through their example.

Traditional Recruiting Often Hires the Wrong Person

Traditional recruiting finds candidates and assesses them through resumes, CVs, and interviews. Unfortunately, this process lets candidates present themselves the way they want you to see them, enabling distortions and deceptive appearances.

Recruiters tend to present far too few candidates- after all, there is a labor shortage right now. As a result, resumes often contain a lot of hype. And interviews and reference checks carry too few valuable insights.

And ultimately, traditional recruiting leaves the final decision up to whims and intuitions. And no one’s gut has ever failed them, right? Without an objective method of determining the right candidate, managers will have little transparency and few past examples to review. And lack a consistent, replicable process for other hires.

How Topgrading Works

Topgrading is a system that helps businesses hire high performers. It was developed over 40 years by professionals partnering with CEOs and HR managers to create the best process possible.

Our work trains your managers in Topgrading methods so that Topgrading becomes a core fixture of your organization. To that end, we teach several proven tools, including:

• Leadership Candidate Assessments
• Job Scorecards
• Topgrading Interviews
• Prescreen Snapshot

Finding the best workers starts with clarifying the needs of your business. Topgrading creates Job Scorecards to delineate your organization’s needs and values. These scorecards allow hiring decision-makers to assess how well a candidate will fit their role objectively.

Candidates are first screened with a simple Topgrading Interview to filter out weak candidates before inviting those who pass to a face-to-face interview. Prequalifying saves time and money on the recruiting process, freeing up resources for hunting for suitable candidates.

A PreScreen Snapshot is a tool to colocate essential information about candidates’ job history, including performance ratings. It uses color-coded graphs to make information easy to read. Managers can use PreScreen Snapshot to identify weaknesses in a candidate’s profile and potential strengths.

How Topgrading Prevents Disaster

Inadequate or unsuitable workers rarely make it past the Topgrading system. The key reason is that Topgrading operates with your business’s core needs and values in mind. As a result, candidates are assessed not simply on how well they can theoretically perform the tasks demanded by their role but also by how well they fit the unique needs of your business.

Topgrading also takes emotional guesswork out of the equation by using objective assessments to determine if a candidate is a good fit. The process fosters transparency and accountability in your organization. Managers can look at past hiring examples and understand precisely why a specific candidate was hired. And why another was not.

Conclusion- Topgrading with KM Consulting

Topgrading is a proven system with four decades of success in hiring strong candidates. KM Consulting has used it to help privately held businesses, from small and medium-sized enterprises. Many Fortune 500 companies rely on Topgrading in their recruiting and hiring processes.

KM Consulting provides Topgrading as part of our solutions. An introduction to Topgrading starts with a workshop for Owners, CEOs, and HR managers, then expand into an analysis of your company’s hiring methods and results, projects your ROI, and develops a hiring plan.

Sounds intriguing? Learn more by contacting KM Consulting.

Building a highly productive team is difficult. Fortunately, KM Consulting can provide tools and expertise to help privately held companies. Here is the first step.