21 May’15
5 steps to follow for hiring top performers

5 steps to follow for hiring top performers

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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.

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