Throughout the recruitment industry, it’s well established that if you want to build a great company, you need to attract top talent. In fact, the whole point of working with a professional recruiter is that they’re able to filter through the noise and increase your chances of bringing in high-performers.
Research shows that only a quarter of all new hires end up being high-performers, which is why it’s so important to go out of your way to try to increase that percentage at your company. That’s where Topgrading for sales professionals comes in.
The companies that use Topgrading see much higher success rates, with the very best of them hitting as much as 90%. But what exactly is Topgrading and how can you put it to work at your company?
In today’s article, that’s exactly what we’re going to investigate.
An Introduction to Topgrading
The concept of Topgrading was popularized by Brad Smart, a psychologist and consultant who’s worked with a number of companies to help them to improve their hiring and talent management. He’s also an accomplished author and co-author, mostly on the subject of Topgrading. He published his seminal book on the subject back in 1999.
Smart first talked about Topgrading in an article for Directors and Boards magazine, where he talked about how he started using Topgrading techniques to help establish General Electric’s hiring process during the 1980s and 1990s.
Smart says, "If you have 100 applicants for a job paying $75,000, why not hire someone in the top ten?" He also points out that Topgrading solves four major challenges:
Low performers can exaggerate successes and hide failures.
Interview methods don’t reveal nearly enough about candidates.
It’s difficult to verify what candidates tell you.
Most applicant screening tools don’t work well.
Since its popularization, Topgrading has been used at all sorts of companies, from huge multinationals like Honeywell, Barclays and the American Heart Association to SMEs and startups. Done well, it can improve organizational talent, reduce staff turnover and create a more dynamic culture within your company.
How Topgrading Works
Recruiters who use Topgrading aim to avoid making hiring decisions based on first impressions and gut reactions, providing a repeatable process that can be followed.
For Topgrading to be of any use, we need to take the point of view that the regular hiring process is often derailed by dishonesty. Candidates can fake their resumes or shine in an interview setting without being any good at their job.
The main idea is to spot the best candidates for any given position by following a 12-step process that includes everything from coaching to job scorecards and a series of interviews. At the end of this process, the candidates are categorized as A Players, B Players or C Players, with A Players being those who are the most likely to be high-performers.
The 12-Steps of Topgrading
The Topgrading process relies on a 12-step program that’s easily repeatable and which can be adapted for companies of different sizes and in different industries. Here’s what those 12 steps look like:
Measure and improve
Create a job scoreboard
Advertise the position
Filter the candidates
Carry out phone interviews
Carry out competency interviews
Carry out Topgrading interviews
Provide feedback to the interviewees
Summarize the interviews
Carry out a Threat of Reference Check (TORC)
Coach the new hire
Measure their success
The tenth step (the TORC) is where you ask your interviewees to arrange reference checks from their former bosses and colleagues. The idea is to get rid of any candidates who’ve been dishonest. If the candidate arranges the reference checks, the recruitment team can follow up and check the accuracy of the candidate’s claims. If the candidate doesn’t arrange those checks, we can assume that they’re a B or C Player.
It’s also worth noting steps eleven and twelve, which go way beyond the recruitment process and which are all about continuing to develop people after they join your company. The idea is to reward A Players with promotions and pay rises, to train B Players to become A Players and to identify the C Players who aren’t going to improve no matter how much training you provide them with.
Now that you know a little more about Topgrading, I’d love to hear from you. Have you used Topgrading? And if so, what kind of results have you seen? If not, will you be integrating it into your hiring process going forward?
Let me know in the comments so that we can keep the discussion going, and be sure to follow me on your favorite social networking sites for more. I’ll see you soon for another article!
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