Top Grading

“Topgrading”
How Leading Companies Win by Hiring, Coaching, and Keeping the Best People
Bradford D. Smart, Ph.D.

What if the company outgrew the talent? It happens all the time, so A players drop to B players, who drop to C players (pg 17).

Forward-looking, growing companies will hire for the talent and compensation level needed three years from now. We have a client (a biotech company) that grew from $2 million to $500 million in five years. Luckily they were prepared: they had sensibly hired senior managers for the $500 million level when the company was founded (pg. 17).

Underpay and you might get too little talent, but overpay and you might give away the store.
-Overtalented people become bored and quit (pg. 18)

You pay less for talent when economic downturns, mergers and acquisitions, or outsourcing enable you to get the talent you need…cheaper (pg. 20)

True topgraders regard a chronic B player (unable, despite training and coaching, to rise to A player status and not judged to be capable of being an A in a different job) to be as undesirable as a chronic C player. Both C players without A potential and B players without A potential must be replaced (pg. 22).

An “A potential” is someone who is predicted to achieve A player status within six to twelve months (pg. 22).

Topgrading Calculator (pg. 28)
Total number of replacements to achieve 90% A Players
Your current success in hiring/promoting
Number of underperformers to be replaced
25%
50%
75%
90%
10 31 17 11 10
20 67 35 24 20
40 141 72 48 40
100 357 179 120 100


Companies with a competitive advantage risk losing it to companies that Topgrade (pg. 32).

Chapter 1 Checklist: Are you a Topgrader? (Pg. 33)

Yes No My team consists of all A Players or those with A potentials at the appropriate salary level.

Yes No Instead of paying top dollar for talent, I get top talent for whatever dollars (salary) I pay.

Yes No I know it’s incorrect to say, “A $50,000 salary will only get me a B player, so we should pay $75,000 to attract an A player.” The correct statement is “A players exist at all salary levels, but at $50,000 even the top 10 percent of talent is not good enough. We need an A player in a biggger league, someone in the top 10 percent of talent available in the $75,000 league.”

Yes No 90 percent or more of my external hires are A Players.

Yes No In relation to my competitors, I look harder to find talent, screen harder to select the right people, and act more quickly to confront nonperformance.

Yes No I realize I can create a C player out of an A player by overpaying, stifling a person’s talents, putting a square peg in a round hole, or failing to train someone.

Yes No At least 90 percent of the people I promote turn out to be A players.

Yes No My A, B, and C players all have Individual Development Plans to remain As or (for Bs and Cs) develop into A players, move into other jobs where they can be A players, or leave the company.

Yes No I do not waste time “fixing” problems that B/C players should have prevented.

Yes No I don’t use short-term results as an excuse not to topgrade.

Yes No I don’t use “but the competition hasn’t topgraded” as an excuse for me not to topgrade.

Yes No I retain B players only in unusual circumstances, such as when replacing them with A players would be too disruptive or when the benefits would be too short-term (e.g., if a plant closing is coming soon), in which case they are truly “temporary A players.”

Yes No I run the numbers, using the Topgrading Calculator, to determine if and when my hiring and promoting success rate can lead to my having an A team.

Yes No My minimum standard for subordinates (i.e. “Meets Performance Expectation”) is one requiring A player performance.

Yes No Even if my business enjoys government protection, I realize that protection could be withdrawn, so it is prudent to topgrade now.

-If you answered “no” to more than two or three of the preceding questions, you are not a topgrader, and you are not alone (pg. 34).

Typical companies hire only 25 percent As, but Topgrading companies hire at least 90 percent As (pg. 36).

The financial and career costs in not Topgrading are astronomical (pg 36).

Ninety percent success in promoting is achievable (pg. 41).

For midmanagers whose base salary is in the $100,000 range, the average cost of mis-hiring is fifteen times base salary, or $1.5 million (pg. 44).

Fight pressures to try to get by with a B who can be hired now (pg. 66).

Devote one-quarter of work time to Topgrading (Jack Welch estimated one-half of his time) (pg. 66).

Set a goal of having everyone reporting to you be an A player within one year, and everyone reporting to them be an A player within the next year, and so on.

(Pg 88) Figure 3.4 Sample Competency Interview Guide

Applicant__________
Interviewer_________
Date________
Interview Focus: Intellectual Characteristics
Scale: 6=Excellent, ; 5=Very good; 4=Good; 3=Only Fair; 2=Poor; 1=Very Poor

Rating
_____ 1. Intelligence
a) Please describe your learning ability. _________________________
b) Describe a complex situation in which you had to learn a lot, quickly. How did you go about learning, and how successful were the outcomes? _______

_____2. Analysis Skills
a) Please describe your problem analysis skills.___________________________
b) Do people generally regard you as one who diligently pursues every detail or do you tend to be more broad brush? Why? _________________________
c) What will references indicate are your style and overall effectiveness in “sorting” the wheat from the chaff?_________________
d) What analytic approaches and tools do you use?_______________
e) Please give me an example of digging more deeply for facts than what was asked of you.____________________________
_____3. Judgment/ Decision Making
a) Please describe your decision-making approach when you are faced with difficult situations in comparison with others at about your level in the organization. Are you decisive and quick, but sometimes too quick, or are you more thorough but sometimes too slow? Are you intuitive or do you go purely with the facts? Do you involve many or few people in decisions?________________________________
b) What are a couple of the most difficult or challenging decisions you have made recently?_____________________________
c) What are a couple of the best and worst decisions you have made in the past year?____________________________________
d) What maxims do you live by?__________________
_____4. Conceptual Ability
a) Are you comfortable dealing with concrete, tangible, short-term issues or more abstract, conceptual, long-term issues? Please explain.
_____5. Creativity
a) How creative are you? What are the best examples of your creativity in processes, systems, methods, products, structure, and services?
b) Do you consider yourself a better visionary or implementer? Why?______
_____6. Strategic Skills
a) In the past year, what specifically have you done in order to remain knowledgeable about the competitive environment, market and trade dynamics, products (services) and technology trends, innovations, and patterns of consumer behavior?______
b) Please describe your experience in strategic thinking, including successful and unsuccessful approaches. (Determine the individual’s contribution to team strategic efforts). _________________________________
c) Where do you predict that your (industry/competitors/function) is going in the next three years? Where is the conventional wisdom, and what are your own thoughts?_____________________________________
_____7. Pragmatism
a) Do you consider yourself a more visionary or more pragmatic thinker? Why?
_____8. Risk Taking
What are the biggest risks you have taken in recent years? Include ones that have worked out well and not so well.__________________
_____9. Leading Edge
a) How have you copied, created, and applied best practices?_____________
b) Describe projects in which your best-practice solutions did and did not fully address customer/client needs. _________________________
c) How will your references rate your technical expertise…are you truly leading edge, or do you fall a bit short in some areas?_______________
d) How computer literate are you?_____________
e) Please describe your professional network.________
_____10. Education
a) What seminars or formal education have you participated in (and when)?
b) Describe your reading habits (books and articles-global factors, general business, functional specialty, industry). ___________


_____11. Experience
a) (Compose a series of open-ended questions: “How would you rate yourself in ______, and what specifics can you cite?” For Finance, “How did you gain expertise in, for example, treasury, controller, and risk management areas?” For Human Resources, “How did you gain expertise in selection, training, compensation, and so on?”
-Question:___________
-Question:___________
-Question:___________
b) What are the most important lessons you have learned in your career? (Gives specifics with respect to when, where, what, etc.)_____________________
_____12. Track Record
Looking back in your career, what were your most and least successful jobs?___

Other Competencies Observed
Rating_____ Competency______________
Comments_______________

How and when to “sell” candidates
-there are no hard and fast rules, however, except one: you can best sell candidates by having keen insight into their needs, and that comes from Topgrading Interviews (pg. 95).
-A players want you to assess them
-A players welcome a tandem Topgrading with the hiring manager
-Your professionalism and thoroughness help sell candidates

Topgraded companies lose only 5 percent of their managers in most years (pg. 98).

The same incentives used to attract top talent to begin with also provide “golden handcuffs” (pg. 98).
-a winning, high-performance organization culture
-the fun and excitement of working with dream teams of A players
-the opportunity to grow, to meet challenges, and to rise in stature and title
-competitive pay and stock options

Topgraded companies anticipate external offers and proactively increase pay to compensate A players with what they are worth (pg. 99).

A player managers also tend to be experts in creating the psychic gratification people want, through any means conceivable, such as (pg 99):
-job movement/enrichment. (A players would sooner find a job elsewhere than stagnate in a job that is no longer enriching and challenging).
-personal coaching; lots and lots of honest feedback
-social activities and team building events
-business travel with spouses (who otherwise feel left out)
-status (for example, being featured in a company magazine)
-permission to commute (if, for example, a relocation by a spouse would otherwise mean your manager would quit)

Topgrading Ongoing Practices (pg. 131)
1) Topgrading is driven by the CEO
2) Topgrading Interviews are used for all hiring and promoting decisions
3) Talent meetings are held every six months initially and, eventually, annually.
4) Scorecards are kept to track topgrading success, year by year


Obstacles to Topgrading/ How A Players Overcome Them (pg. 170)

1) I can’t get my B/C Players to hire A Players
-the single biggest deterrent to topgrading is the understandable reality that B/C Players rarely hire As
2) We think we are hiring A Players, but they turn out to be B/C players in disguise
3) Our HR people are overworked and understaffed, so we don’t exactly have a pipeline of A Players going through the office (solution: constantly recruit)
4) Search firms just don’t produce enough A player candidates
5) I want to raise the performance bar, but almost every talented person I bring in from the outside is rejected by the current organization culture and ends up quitting (solution: provide A players protection from undermining by existing personnel
6) We can’t afford to hire A players
-they are people above the nineteenth percentile of overall talent of all potential candidates at every compensation level. You already are paying for A players, whether or not you get them. That means that a company that is paying its C player marketing director a $90,000 base salary could hire an A player for the same salary (pg. 173).
9) We could never attract A Players because of our location, industry, current financial problems, and so on (solution: pay more in compensation to attract the level of talent necessary to beat the competition) (pg. 176).

To “sell” a candidate, use the Topgrading Interview to find out what the person really wants in a job (pg. 177).

10) My subordinates tend to give “thumbs-down” on A Players (solution: don’t let them have a vote. Make the hiring decision yourself) (pg. 178).

13) Even my A Players aren’t calibrated. They don’t accurately judge who are the As, Bs, and Cs (solution: build corporate expertise and/or rely on topgrading professionals while improving your A Players’ calibration skills) (pg. 179).

The “new paradigms” for career success are based on compelling statistics (pg.191):
-Only sixteen of the one hundred U.S. companies with the most revenue in the year 1900 survived until the end of that century.
-Manufacturing jobs have dropped from 73% in 1970 to 9% today.
-A Christmas card that sings “Jingle Bells” today contains a chip with more computer power than existed in the entire world in 1960.

Nine keys to becoming a happy A Player at the highest level
1) Perform a periodic life balance review, and focus on becoming “good enough” in all eight critical life dimensions

(Pg. 195) Figure 7.1 Life Balance Scorecard

Good Enough Not Good Enough Critical Life Dimensions
Career Success
Wellness
Family (& other relationships)
Pleasure (recreation, hobbies)
Spiritual Grounding
Financial Independence
Giving Something Back
Being Creative


My best career advice is to set overall happiness as the goal and use your resourcefulness to achieve it. Measure all your life dimensions and work to make all good enough every year. It’s okay to list career success first, as long as you achieve balance that maximizes your happiness (pg. 198).
2) Perform a periodic personal career review (pg. 198).
3) Live below your means (pg. 200).
4) Only accept jobs where you will be an A Player
5) Work on overcoming your weak points more than on maximizing your strengths (pg. 205).
-High-potential managers can better advance their careers by devoting personal development time to fixing their weak points than making strengths even stronger (pg. 206).
-Fix your very poor and poor competencies or get out of management (pg. 207).
6) Develop A Player competencies before you need them
-Stay in the personal development business forever
7) In job interviews, reveal negatives (pg 208).
8) Question whether big-company life is for you
9) Topgrade in business and personal life
-Instead of working seventy hours per week with your group of three A players, two B players, and two C players, topgrade and work fifty hours per week (pg. 212).

Candidates with the fewest serious flaws get the job. Candidates with the most impressive strengths get the job only if they do not have any major flaws. Companies outgrow people. Fast-growing companies can outgrow people fast (pg. 218).

A Players need not be excellent in all competencies, but they must meet the minimum standard for a particular job on all of them (pg. 221).

The Bottom Line on Fifty Competencies (pg. 222)

Intellectual Competencies:
1) Intelligence
2) Analysis Skills
3) Judgment/decision making
4) Conceptual Ability
-Senior management jobs all have a strong conceptual component. Read a lot, and pick the brains of good conceptual thinkers.
-Beg or hire smart conceptual types to back you up and do some of your thinking for you.
5) Creativity
6) Strategic Skills
7) Pragmatism
8) Risk Taking
9) Leading Edge
10) Education
-Executives read The Wall Street Journal (including “Fact and Opinion,” the editorial section), BusinessWeek, Forbes, and Fortune.
-Finance is the language of business. If you aren’t showing keen awareness of all the financials, then you’re probably a B Player.
11) Experience
12) Track Record

Personal Competencies (pg. 228)

13) Integrity
Self-Assessment: Everyone breaks a confidence now and then.
Advice: Wrong!
14) Resourcefulness
15) Organization/Planning
Self-Assessment: I have no administrative assistant, and I’m dying.
Advice: Get one now
16) Excellence
17) Independence
18) Stress Management
-I studied two hundred on-again, off-again exercisers who became regular exercisers. Their secret has worked for many others, including me. Their secret? No pain, I gain. Make a lifetime commitment to exercising and never experiencing pain. Exercise five times per week for half an hour, but start slowly. Have a cold? Then ease up. But work out. Chart your workouts.
19) Self-Awareness
20) Adaptability
-Warning! Warning! Lack of Adaptability is a career derailer. A players are excellent in adaptability. They tolerate ambiguity, and make decisions on the fly.

Interpersonal Competencies

21) First Impressions
22) Likability
23) Listening
24) Customer Focus
25) Team Player
26) Assertiveness
27) Communications-Oral
-Good speaking coaches will study your style and leverage your strengths
28) Communications-Written
29) Political Savvy
-you need to become politically aware
30) Negotiation
Self-Assessment: I’m just not quick on my feet in negotiations
Advice: You don’t have to be. A Players are thoroughly prepared. Know
everything about the other guy: his positions, needs, leverage, and vulnerabilities.
31) Persuasion
-the most effective salespeople are not superextroverts and many aren’t really people-oriented. Instead of “bonding,” they listen carefully to what customers want.

Management Competencies (pg. 237)

32) Selecting A Players
33) Coaching
Self-Assessment: I’m a compulsive doer, too impatient for coaching.
Advice: You can still coach after hiring people using a Topgrading Interview. Chapters 9 and 10 will help.
34) Goal Setting
35) Empowerment
36) Accountability
37) Redeploying B/C Players
38) Team Building
39) Diversity
40) Running Meetings
-current books on meeting effectiveness
-all say to empower the participants to take full responsibility
-hold a “meeting on meetings”

Additional Leadership Competencies (pg. 240)

41) Vision
42) Change Leadership
-A Players are more apt to be true change masters, authoring changes and making them happen.
43) Inspiring “Followership”
-So-called natural leaders count for 1 percent of leaders, and all the other successful leaders are made.
44) Conflict Management
Self-Assessment: Two of my subordinates can’t resolve a major difference.
Advice: Bring them together NOW. Ask each individually to explain (a) her point of view, (b) the other’s point of view, (c) what she will “give” for a solution, and (d) what she asks the other to give. Go through all four lists with a major goal of mutual understanding, and that’s all-not necessarily a resolution. There is one ground rule: on any points of disagreement, X must state Y’s point of view to Y’s satisfaction, before stating her (X’s) point of view. You are the referee. This is powerful: it ensures mutual understanding. Then resolution can finally be achieved.

Motivational Competencies (pg. 242)

45) Energy
Self-Assessment: My energy level is declining. I eat right and take vitamin and mineral supplements, but I just can’t find the time to exercise. My doc says to make time.
Advice: Listen to your doc. See #18 (Stress Management).
46) Passion
Self-Assessment: I feel enthusiastic, but don’t show real passion.
Advice: if you are low key, express your enthusiasm other ways: videos, celebrations of success in which others play effusive roles, well-written pieces.
47) Ambition
48) Compatibility of Needs
49) Balance in Life
50) Tenacity
-Tenacity, the passion to succeed, is not last, but right up at the top, a component of Resourcefulness. Tenacious, resourceful people figure out how to serve customers and get quality time with the family.

Definition of Coaching (pg. 248)

Coaching is a one-to-one dialogue in which the coach helps a person understand his strengths and weak points and build commitment to improve performance. Coaching helps unlock someone’s potentials.
-Counseling: to help someone improve self-awareness and change points of view
-Mentoring: sharing sage advice
-Teaching
-Confronting: addressing nonperformance to help someone either achieve performance goals or accept the necessity of redeployment

The Coaching Challenge (pg. 248)

Most managers are mediocre coaches. Surveys of more than five hundred thousand people show that 75 percent of employees rate their managers Only Fair or Poor as coaches.
When people describe coaching deficiencies, they commonly describe their managers as:
-Inaccessible to me
-More results-oriented than people-oriented
-Too impatient to coach
-Hypercritical
-Stingy with praise
-Unconcerned with my career development
-Poor at listening
-Late and/or shallow in performance reviews

Characteristics of a Supercoach (pg. 251)

Coaching is the essence of good leadership. What exactly are the characteristics of a good coach or supercoach?
1) A partner. “Hey, you’ve got a problem, let’s work on it together.”
2) Promotes autonomy. Helps the coachee to independently diagnose problems
3) Positive. Is supportive, builds confidence, never ridicules. Has a sense of humor.
4) Trustworthy.
5) Caring.
6) Patient.
7) Results-oriented. Focuses only on important issues.
8) Perceptive. Understands coachee’s strengths, shortcomings, goals, and needs.
9) Active listener. Plays back content and underlying feelings. Summarizes, clarifies.

Hiring an A Player using Topgrading interviewing and thorough reference checking automatically endows you with supercoach characteristics (pg. 253).




Figure 9.1
The Ease of Changing Competencies (pg. 255)

Relatively Easy to Change Harder but Doable Very Difficult to Change
Risk Taking Judgment Intelligence
Leading Edge Strategic Skills Analysis Skills
Education Pragmatism Creativity
Experience Track Record Conceptual Ability
Organization/ Planning Resourcefulness Integrity
Self-Awareness Excellence Standards Assertiveness
Communications-Oral Independence Inspiring Followership
Communications-Written Stress Management Energy
First Impression Adaptability Passion
Customer Focus Likability Ambition
Political Savvy Listening Tenacity
Selecting A Players Team Player
Redeploying B/C Players Negotiation Skills
Coaching/ Training Persuasiveness
Goal Setting Team Builder
Empowerment Change Leadership
Performance Management Diversity
Running Meetings Conflict Management
Compatibility of Needs Credible Vision
Balance in Life


Why People Change (pg. 257)

-People change when the avoidance of pain seems worth the risk.
-Rational belief is frequently insufficient to effect real change.
-Do not promote managers with a serious weakness until after they have fixed it.
-People change the most when they sense pain in not changing and benefits in changing, and fully embrace developmental activities to achieve their goals.


Psychological Stages in Change (pg. 260)

1) Awareness
2) Rational acceptance
3) Emotional commitment
4) Individual Development Plan for development
5) Reinforcement
6) Monitoring progress
7) Conclusion
-Implied in all seven steps is who’s in charge- not the coach, but the person receiving the coaching.
-The most constructive outcome (even if it’s a friendly termination) comes not from a trash compactor, beating a person with failure, but from a dialogue in which the person arrives at self-awareness and the conclusions necessary to change. A Players always say, “Give me the unvarnished truth, don’t beat around the bush.”
-With C Players it’s slower, much slower.
-If you buy the assumption that you as a coach are a change facilitator, not a change intimidator, a lot of supercoach qualities emerge.
-A wonderful technique for communicating those supercoach qualities is active listening-playing back what you hear and the feelings underlying. It involves paraphrasing the essence of the person’s point of view, reflects people’s intent, reading between the lines. Body language is observed, and unstated feelings are accurately interpreted. Forget trying to use active listening when you are angry at the person, when trust is an issue in your relationship, or when you are too hassled or frustrated to calmly tune in to both the other person’s feelings and your own.
-Saying “You missed quota three months in a row. One more month and you’re fired,” is clear, but a more motivational coaching approach might be “Joe, you’ve indicated three reasons for not making quota, you’ve shared how difficult and frustrating this is, and you just can’t see how you will make quota in the future.” This opens the door for the salesperson to take responsibility for either changing the results or considering job options.
-The higher the management position, the more true is the statement “Perception is reality” (pg. 262).
If interpersonal changes are needed, a 5 percent change in behavior can improve ratings from fair to good (pg. 265).

Individual Development Plans (IDPs) (pg. 266)
-Encourage the person to write it. It’s not your program. Three quarters of the people who compose their own follow through on it quite conscientiously.
-I sometimes give people laminated credit-card-size reminder cards. Million-dollar-a-year executives have said, “I pull the card out with my credit cards, and it reminds me to stay on the program.” Here’s an example:

Management Development Reminders
Pat Jones
-Hold weekly staff meetings
-Email boss monthly results
-Give praise ten times each day
-Read The Wall Street Journal daily
-Take one peer to lunch each week

-Celebrate wins!

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one that is most adaptable to change. –Charles Darwin (pg. 272).

Assimilation Coaching Model (pg. 277)
1) Hire A Player with
-Tandem Topgrading Interview
-Reference checks with all bosses in past ten years
-Coworker competency interview (one hour each)
-Conclusions stated in Candidate Assessment Scorecard
2) Oral Interviews or Email 360 survey
-Two to four weeks after hire
-Purpose: measure first impressions
3) Coaching Interview
-Two to six weeks after hire
-State conclusions, strengths, weak points
-Create IDP together
4) Midyear Career Review
-Discuss follow-up email 360 survey results
-Include feedback to you too

-You don’t have to be a natural, warm, and fuzzy counselor to make Topgrading-based assimilation coaching potent.
-Leadership involves coaching.

-After reading chapters 1 through 10, I hope you believe a 90 percent or better success rate in hiring is possible, and the assessment tool to help you achieve it is the Topgrading Interview Guide (Appendix A) (pg. 309).
-The crucial patterns of how the interviewee developed throughout his career (pg. 310).
-Jack Welch would mandate tandem Topgrading Interviews (pg. 313).

Preparing for the Topgrading Interview (pg. 316)

-With your tandem interviewer, complete a Candidate Assessment Scorecard (Appendix E). Decide which are the most important competencies and agree on a minimum accepted rating. After the Topgrading Interview, write comments, and then discuss your ratings/comments to gain a consensus. Retain your CAS to review it six months after a person is hired to see where your assessments were accurate or inaccurate.

-The Self-Administered Topgrading (SATI) Guide is a twelve-page form in which the candidate responds to most Topgrading interview questions. The SATI Guide is potentially high in value, but its use is high risk too.
1) Use the SATI Guide as a substitute for the Career History Form
2) Use the SATI Guide as you would the Career History Form: read it, set it aside to conduct a spontaneous Topgrading Interview, but keep it at hand, for a brief reminder of what the candidate wrote.
3) Incorporate the SATI Guide only when tandem Topgrading interviewers are very experienced and very good.
4) Use it with care. Consider the SATI Guide experimental.

How to Allocate Time (pg. 321)

-First time Topgrading interviewers sometimes find so much revealing in discovering early positions or education that they run out of interview time. Experience fifteen years ago is not sensible to spend twenty minutes talking about it, leaving only five minutes for your discussion of the present job. Here are some rough guidelines:
4-Hour Interview
(Career History Form at Hand) 2-Hour Interview
(SATI Guide at Hand) 45-Minute College Interview (Career History Form at Hand)
Opening chitchat 10 minutes 5 minutes 4 minutes
Education 20 minutes 7 minutes 4 minutes
Work history 155 minutes 70 minutes 20 minutes
Plans and goals 10 minutes 8 minutes 4 minutes
Self-appraisal 15 minutes 10 minutes 4 minutes
Competency questions 30 minutes 20 minutes 9 minutes


Opening Chitchat (pg. 322)

-After a couple minutes of chitchat about the weather or yesterday’s football game, don’t forget to extend the common courtesy of offering the candidate something to drink.
-You never stop selling the candidate! A Players are in demand, so every step of the selection process should be designed to sell the candidate.
-All interviews in visits #1 and #2 contain some selling, not so much a sales pitch but indirect selling through your being professional, alert, open, friendly, and very interested in understanding the interviewee’s needs.
-You are not apt to know what an individuals real “hot buttons” are until completion of the Topgrading Interview.
-Ask interviewees, and they say they very much appreciate your taking notes.
“He listens well…who takes notes.” –Dante (pg. 324)
-TORC is an acronym for threat of reference check.
-Question 15 in the guide’s Work History section is the guts of the TORC Technique-“What is your best guess as to what (supervisor’s name) honestly felt were/are your strengths, weak points, and overall performance?” Deviate from that wording at your peril. Believe me, the wording of that question has been massaged over decades (pg. 327).
-Maintain control, and if the interviewee grabs it away more than once, say “Pat, there are a lot of questions to be answered in this Topgrading interview, so I’ll ask you to please stick with me.” Any A Player will get the message (pg. 328).
-Some interviewers actually like to begin with a discussion of high school days. I do. High school days are important developmental years. (If you prefer, begin with college, where the Topgrading Interview Guide starts).
-Ask every question in the “Work History” section for every job. Even if you allocate only three minutes for a very early job, nonetheless ask every question and jot a short response. With the later jobs you will be probing more.
-This is the guts of the Topgrading Interview (pg. 331).

-Get specifics, get specifics. Figure 11.1 explains what I mean.
Figure 11.1
Interviewer Specificity (pg. 335)

“I sometimes procrastinate”








“I sometimes procrastinate”

“I missed three deadlines last year”






“I sometimes procrastinate”

“I missed three deadlines last year”
“I missed only three deadlines out of 20, and not
by much. Most people missed more than 10, so I
was given a bonus of $10,000, and a promotion
to VIP MIS.”

-Why did you miss 3 out of 30?
-Was missing the deadlines your fault, or not?
-How late were you? What were the dollar consequences of missing the deadlines?
-What were the career consequences?

-If a person’s guess is that his boss ten years ago would say that he is “creative,” you should not be satisfied with that. You’d pin him down to get specific examples of Creativity. And, when a candidate mentions a great idea, be sure to get specifics-whose idea was it (the candidate’s or someone else’s), how good an idea was it? (pg. 337).


Interpreting all of the Data (pg. 337)

1) Observe Patterns.
2) Assume That Strengths Can Become Shortcomings.
3) Assume Recent Past Behavior is the Best Predictor of Near-Future Behavior.
4) Spot Red Flags and Look for Explanations.
-Red flags are warning signals to the interviewer that something has gone wrong. Say, rapport suddenly declines or something changes in the interview to suggest that you have touched on a raw nerve. Either that, or it’s time for a break. The signals are:
-Blushing
-Suddenly complex responses though previously they were more straightforward
-Loss of eye contact that had been quite good
-A significant change in pace (speeding up or slowing down)
-A significantly higher or lower voice
-Inappropriate use of humor
-Sudden changes in voice volume, pace (faster, slower), pitch (higher or lower), or pauses (more/longer or less/shorter)
-Twitching, stammering, drumming fingers through there had been none of that behavior
-Formality in style or vocabulary, when the individual had been informal
-Inconsistency between nonverbal behavior and words (e.g., saying, “I was very happy in that job,” while frowning)
-Heavy perspiring though the person had been calm
5) Weigh negatives more heavily than positives
-Good-fit factors do not ensure success, but poor-fit factors can ensure failure.
-Clients frequently ask if I favor overall talent over experience. Should they hire a super sales manager from a different industry or hire an average sales manager in the industry? My short answer is hire the manager who’s stronger on talent/potential than on specific industry experience. Sharp people can learn a new industry (pg. 341).
6) Watch out for strong feelings and beliefs
-Strong beliefs can be an asset for any candidate. It’s when the beliefs are accompanied by rigidity, intolerance, and extreme emotionality that you begin to wonder if there might be accompanying shortcomings.

-With your data accumulated, take a few minutes to complete the Candidate Assessment Scorecard, and then write a report.
1) Each tandem interviewer independently reviews her notes three times, rates the interviewee on all competencies (from the list of fifty in the back of the Topgading Interview Guide) and makes brief summary comments in the space next to each competency.
2) The interviewers compare ratings and comments, spending less time on where there is agreement and a lot of time- enough to achieve agreement-where ratings differed.
3) Tandems next talk and gain agreement on overall conclusions: Is this person an A, A potential, or Non-A? What are the person’s career goals and potentials? A joint report is written.
4) As in a solo Topgrading, call the candidate if you know you should have asked some more questions, conduct oral 360s (internal), or conduct reference calls (external), amassing all the data to feel 100 percent certain you have the individual pegged. All the data should fit, so in your gut you are sure all the complexities, foibles, and inconsistencies (everyone has them) form a clear mosaic, with granularity that ensures you can predict the person’s success.

“Asking for reference information is perfectly legal, giving out false or malicious information is illegal, and withholding certain negative reference information can be illegal” (pg. 346).
-If the candidate does not want the current boss contacted yet, make a written job offer contingent upon “no negative surprises” in the reference call that will take place after the offer is accepted (pg. 347).

“There’s something rare, something finer far, something much more scarce than ability. It’s the ability to recognize ability” –Elbert Hubbard (pg. 431).

-Companies can achieve a record of 90 percent A Players hired when a tandem interview (two interviewers) is conducted and the interviewers have been trained in the Topgrading Interview techniques (pg. 431).
-If the person had three jobs, consider each one of those a separate position and complete a Work History Form on it (pg. 438).