Topgrading
Great companies don’t just depend on strategies—they depend on people. The more great people on your team, the more successful your organization will be. But that’s easier said than done. Statistically, half of all employment decisions result in a mishire: The wrong person winds up in the wrong job. But companies that have followed Bradford Smart’s advice in Topgrading have boosted their successful hiring rate to 90 percent or better, giving them an unbeatable competitive advantage. Now Smart has fully revised his 1999 management classic to reintroduce the topgrading concept, which works for companies large and small in any industry. The author spells out his practical approach to finding and managing A-level talent—as well as coaching B players to turn them into A players. He provides intriguing case studies drawn from more than four thousand in-depth interviews. As Smart writes in his introduction, “All organizations, all businesses live or die mostly on their talent, and any manager who fails to topgrade is nuts, or a C player.... Those who, way deep down, would sooner see an organization die than nudge an incompetent person out of a job should not read this book... Topgrading is for A players and all those aspiring to be A players.” On the web
Stats for nerds
7recommend
15mentions
14people
2009–2025years
47% recommend40% neutral13% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I don't understand question #1. Maybe you can rephrase?
#2 requires a mix of (i) reference interviews, and (ii) digging into details during candidate interviews. Read these books to learn how:
* Who: https://www.amazon.com/Who-Geoff-Smart/dp/0345504194
* Topgrading: https://www.amazon.com/Topgrading-3rd-Promoting-Turbocharges...
- We used their website/web app for a while but didn’t get enough value out of it. We had a hiring consultant / coach teach us about top grading after going through many other books.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/915182.Topgrading Is the best book on it. I would just say to use common sense when reading it and think about how you would feel in the interviewees shoes. There is also top grading for sales which has some good stuff in it too. We don’t collect detailed salary info (legal minefield anyway these days). We usually just do one interview and not multiple. There are decent videos in YouTube. They try to sell you on their website and branded materials, but it’s pretty simple for a small company to keep it light and in text documents or whatever you prefer.
- > How could I go about proving it to myself...
Much the same way Devs store projects on GitHub-- start building up your portfolio of talent profiles and notes on individuals that you interview & assess. It's a practiced art-- you become exponentially better the more people you evaluate. Also, understand that people do change and grow as they progress throughout their careers. Take the long view and be sure to follow up periodically.
The best executive leaders create a talent pipeline, typically meet & informally interview 2-3 people a month. Incidentally, this builds-up an amazing network of true contacts, which is to say NOT Linkedin contacts. The best primer on this process is Bradford Smart's Topgrading > http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/915182.Topgrading
> then selling this service if I am capable?
Connecting with buyers, in this case Hiring Executives falls into the specialty function of Sales & Business Development. Professional Services firms are always chomping at the bit for rainmakers. If you're serious about this path, take a development course like Miller Heiman > https://www.mhiglobal.com/
- There are ways to do biographical interviews which DO produce worthwhile results. Topgrading has examples of how to do this, and Aaron Patzer (the Mint guy) spoke about it -- basically you go through someone's resume and job/life history and ask why they made decisions at each step, which exposes most lies (due to inconsistency) and does reveal novel predictive information (even if a resume is relatively polished-for-application-purposes.). It's similar to the Israeli airport interview technique. http://fi.co/posts/599?target=Guadalajara is an apatzer video about the topic.
I'd argue you want both work sample (for technical competence) and the biographical interview (to determine provenance, likely future behavior, etc.), and then combine with some "see how the person works in real time" situational/performance/behavioral interview.
The interviews which are worthless are: technical interviews conducted by non-technical people, meandering style unplanned interviews, and "language trivia" interviews conducted by the marginally competent.
Essentially, interviews should be formal, measurable, and then tracked against performance.
I'd put some basic pre-screening at the top of the funnel if you have too many candidates. My personal first stage filter right now is "referred by someone I know and trust", which is a very selective filter, but at a larger company you can use a less selective filter.
- Look for a book called Topgrading, it's a methodology and defines A,B and C players.
Roughly from memory: A's are smart, get things done. The important thing is: An A player in one role may not be an A player in another role. If you put your best programmer at your retail store, you're probably going to have a bad time.
How do you overcome it? Find your passion, make sure you work with others that are A players (one trademark of A players is that they gravitate together), work on your skills and study peripheral ideas that could be implemented. If you're doing the above then youre probably an A player, if youre on Facebook half the day or complaining that someone didnt refill the coffee pot then you're probably not an A player in the role that you are in and you need to decide to train up or move somewhere where you can be an A player.
- For what it's worth, this was common practice in tech in 1999. It's called Topgrading; it was started by Welch at GE. You can read all about it at http://www.amazon.com/Topgrading-Leading-Companies-Coaching-...
