Recent news stories noted that it was 10 times easier to get a job at Goldman Sachs than at Google. While these are two different industries with different needs for talent, the story highlights the intensifying fight for top talent between Wall Street and Silicon Valley — in part due to the changing nature of banking jobs, which no longer meet the profiles of thrill-seeking applicants.

This revelation raises the question of how banks, or any other organization, can consistently attract top talent and how to make sure there’s a good fit between the applicant and the position.

I sat down with Gary Morais, whose company developed a suite of HR software tools called 10Rule, which helps companies hire and train their employees to match the top 10 percent of performers for every position.

According to Morais, hiring top talent is critical to lowering turnover and creating a high-performance culture for the organization. To achieve these goals, companies need to have a strategic recruiting methodology based on performance metrics that can sustainably replicate the organization’s known successes, leading to higher bottom-line results.

Here are five important tips that every organization should follow to streamline the hiring process and achieve these recruiting goals:

1. Measure top performers for performance-execution capabilities

Most managers can easily identify these individuals because top performers stand out among any group of employees. These individuals need to be assessed for “performance execution” capabilities, which should not be confused with personality, style or competency. Performance execution capabilities are linked to the individual’s internal-performance thinking that drives or delivers the job tasks and the ability to meet specific goals.

2. Rate the performance of selected talent

It’s important to confirm that the top performers have the right performance drivers necessary to get the job completed. This rating is a way of double checking which performance drivers are producing the desired outcomes needed for best productivity for any given job or role.

3. Benchmark the position based on performance indicators

Creating a visual picture of the top performers of any given position for the recruiters and hiring managers, to guarantee hiring success. This job bench template must correlate to the same performance drivers measured for the top performers, based on ranges that are critical to the maximum productivity and sustainable financial results for the organization.

4. Assess incoming job applicants

Use the same performance metric as determined in the first step to identify all performance capabilities needed for the position and job bench. The candidates should provide the proper information not only on how they will normally perform, but also how the applicant would perform under stress or pressure, which may be the norm in today’s fast-moving competitive market.

5. Interview with a custom behavioral interviewing questionnaire

The candidates should also provide a custom behavioral interviewing questionnaire, so the recruiting and hiring managers are on the same page. This questionnaire must be customized to the applicant’s internal performance indicators, which helps weed out the individuals who do not match the job bench template. Both the recruiters and hiring managers must be equipped to view the job bench template, and ask specific interviewing questions to identify exactly the performance qualities needed to hire another top-performing candidate for that position.

Hiring the right candidate isn’t necessarily about just going to the best schools. It’s been consistently proven that the best talent are individuals with the right “performance thinking” that correlates to top performance execution with a specific position. At the end of the day, it’s all about being able to have measurable human capital performance capabilities, and hiring to match the top performers for any given position.

Scores of start-ups worth more than $1 billion, known as “unicorns” in the industry, have gained substantial venture-capital funding in the last two years. Dozens have surpassed a $2 billion valuation. And several have passed the $2 billion in just two years.
Slack, the enterprise communication platform that’s taken on traditional email platforms, has become the fastest start-up company to reach a $2 billion valuation, according to data from financial information firm Pitchbook.

The platform, founded in part by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, got its start in 2009 as an internal platform for an online game called Glitch, but it ultimately failed in that first iteration. It relaunched in 2013 for external use, becoming the product Slack is today.

Slack is a cross-platform communication product for desktop and mobile. Slack creates a messaging and file-sharing tool for companies that feels more conversational than email.

“They hadn’t had too much success. So, they tried [Slack] for about four years. The product was a tool they had developed, among themselves, and they liked it so much that rather than pursue this gaming idea, they would produce what is now Slack,” said Mike Volpi, partner at Index Ventures and a Slack board member.

The possibility of Slack going public is unrealistic “in the short term,” Volpi told CNBC, but it may be a possibility in the future. “It’s still a young company,” he said.

Slack reported $12 million in annual recurring revenue in early February.

The San Francisco-based company has more than 200,000 paid users, and 750,000 people access the service daily, according to company records. Adobe, The New York Times and SoundCloud are among its users, and Slack employs about 130.

Smashes like Slack have risen so sharply in valuation partly because of the immediate, widespread availability of software. The cost of launching a start-up has also dropped.

The emergence of crowdfunding is another integral reason that valuable start-ups have recently grown exponentially, said Christian Catalini, professor of technological innovation, entrepreneurship and strategic management at MIT Sloan School of Management.

“There is a lot of investment by VC, angels and super-angel groups into a lot of new businesses. Many of these will fail, like during the dot-com bubble,” said Catalini.

Slack reached a valuation of $2 billion before the company’s two-year anniversary, at a rate faster than Twitter, Snapchat and Uber, according to recent PitchBook data.

The price of building a company based on software has gone down, said Efrat Kasznik, president and founder of Foresight Valuation Group, a Silicon Valley-based start-up advisory firm. Platforms such as Amazon Web Services have made launching companies, especially those, like Pinterest, that create a community, feasible for entrepreneurs.

“It’s easier to develop software, especially when you have good marketing and good traction,” said Kasznik, who is also a lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business. “You cannot grow so quickly in hardware.”

“There is so much pain in the workplace right now,” said Bill Macaitis, Slack’s chief marketing officer, because of the tedious nature of traditional email platforms. Slack is focusing on redefining the way companies communicate. Macaitis said just as he thinks of Uber as a “disruptor” in its industry, he thinks of Slack as a disruptor in the way of workplace communication.

“For Slack, there are 100 similar companies who didn’t make it,” said Kasznik. “You only see the ones who make it.”

Correction: Crowdfunding is named as one reason certain start-ups have grown exponentially. That was misstated in an earlier version of this article.

Rebecca Ungarino