Ch 1

Only 21% (of presidents and CEOs) felt they got their money's worth when they hired externally.

A survey of top HR executives in 25 global companies found that 80% of their external hires turn out to be disappointments. Promotions produce disappointing results a full 75% of the time.

Ch 3

Once you've Topgraded your top team...

First, conduct a Talent Review of everyone on your team.
Second, create scorecards for each key role.
Third, build your Virtual Bench of A players and A potentials to meet your future hiring needs.
Finally, learn how to conduct three different types of interviews: Screening interviews, Topgrading interviews, and Reference Check interviews.

These best practices should improve your hiring and promoting success rate from 25 percent to 90 percent.

Ch 7

Interviewing typically plays a key role in the candidate evaluation process. Everybody does it. But most organizations' interview practices are crippled by a fundamental weakness: they're not predictive of job performance.

If your interview data is so incomplete or inconclusive that it fails to provide a sound basis for prediction, you're just shooting in the dark. Vague information leads to shallow analysis.

Ch 8

In the Topgrading methodology, "screening" does not imply a superficial, casual, or perfunctory look at a person's qualifications.

The four screening questions:

The candidate's career goals
What he is really good at professionally
What he is not so good at, or not interested in
Who his last five bosses were, and what each boss would list as the candidate's strengths and weak points

According to consulting firm TalentKeepers, the annual cost of employee turnover in the United States top $5 trillion.

CH 9

The Topgrading interview gives you a fine-grained look at a person's background. Question by question, job by job, you peel away the layers. The interview protocol guides you through the person's background in four important areas: school, work history, career goals, and competencies.

Past performance is the best predictor of future performance.

Ch 10

Don't buy it when candidates say they can't provide you with references or don't know how to locate them. A players tend to stay in touch with their previous bosses. Even if they've lost touch, they'll be resourceful enough to find them again.

Ch 14

Is your hiring success rate at least 90 percent, and if not, why are you not using the most advanced selection methods available to screen people?

Other

The Topgrading methodology refers to building your Virtual Bench, a reserve pool of good people that you may tap in the future.

95 percent of trained Topgrading interviewers strongly prefer interviewing with a tandem partner. In this case, two heads are absolutely better than one.

The Topgrading methodology, for example, insists on spending an hour on the initial phone screen and diving into revealing questions from the very beginning.

The Topgrading methodology introduced by Smart and Smart suggests using a scorecard and filling out a very detailed career history form during the first phone screen. They suggest an hour for a more in-depth phone screen than is commonly used, and several hours for an in-person main interview. This of course implies active, engaged note-taking for every screen session, and subsequent discussion. Like us, they are champions of the idea that doing a better interview results in better hires.

The Topgrading writers suggest this set of questions for each job in the candidate’s past:

What were you hired to do?
What were your accomplishments?
What failures or mistakes were made in this job, and what did you learn from them?
What talent did you inherit, what changes did you make to this talent mix, and what talent did you end up with?
What were the people like that you worked for, and how would they rate you?
Why did you leave?

Reference checks are the best way to confirm the patterns of performance you’ve identified in a candidate.

The Topgrading advocates make the interesting suggestion to decide yourself which references to contact, and perhaps even ask the candidate to set up the conversation.