BoxOnline has not had the benefit of the TG method until recently
but many of the start ups in our portfolio of Clients have used it religiously.

We promote strategies that work.. proven processes that are… well,… proven via some form of track record and thus far, TG has demonstrated its effectiveness far beyond expectations. Thus far we have sanitized several firms and brought them from the brink of bankruptcy to profitability using such processes… one of these that we now know and trust is TG… yes, ONE of them is TG…

Bob, in your post above you mentioned:
“many effective alternatives to Topgrading for smaller organizations, and I’ll continue to present them here.” would you mind sharing? We are curious too.

In March of this year (in your comment above) you mentioned you had only recently discovered TG, yet in September your comments says your startup grew from 2 to 23 employees using “TG methods.” So are you referring to your own firm? Because your website says that it took 11 years, so presumably you did the first 10 years of growing using “TG principles” but not the exact process. If so, I applaud your success, because I agree with many of the TG principles, just not all of the process surrounding it.

Your own blog does not reference TG, and only has a few posts that even mention hiring. So are you seriously suggesting that TG is the only conceivable hiring process that works? That a one-size-fits-all solution was developed over a decade ago and nobody should even attempt to improve upon it?

Your own experience would seem to indicate otherwise.

it costs more to hire B and C players than it costs to
a) buy the course
b) learn the material
c) put it into practice

I fully respect those that say it is a giant investment in time to implement TG because it is true – our latest startup grew from a staff of 2 to 23 using TG methods and there is no turning back!

if you can grow rapidly and then sell your company… then you won’t have to deal with the messy and emotional mess you created… the clean up challenge is not to be under-estimated.

good luck with your project

My other comment is that the price tag is extremely expensive for a small company – hence for now I’ll just be sticking to the free PDFs and guides around!

To explain away the multitudes of job applicants who are disgusted by the TopGrading philosophy and avoid companies that use it, TopGrading advocates argue that those are “C-players” who “self-select out.” What a cop out! I am a top 10% performer, an A-player. I would never work or interview for a TopGrading company, and I don’t know any leading performer who would. I firmly believe that only a C-player would put up with the TopGrading nonsense in their workplace, and it’s the A and B-players who stay away in droves.

I am a huge advocate of creating an effective hiring process – sharing best practices is the point of this blog. One driver for continuous improvement is monitoring your hiring success rates. So naturally we do keep score. In fact I published our results recently here:
http://thestaffingadvisor.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/why-you-need-to-keep-score/

Yes, as you pointed out, we do work very quickly (something our clients appreciate) but I’m happy to compare our hiring success rates to those of any search firm, using any process. We have many client testimonials on our website listing our clients by name and I have yet to lose one of them to a firm with a better process or better hiring track record.

I don’t deny that Topgrading has many enthusiastic advocates around the world.

I don’t deny that Topgrading has worked quite well for many organizations (I would imagine for a business process consultancy like your own it would be a natural fit).

I stand by my concern that Topgrading is simply too hard to implement in smaller organizations, and consequently it is often partially implemented, or talked about and not fully followed. I have seen far too many examples of executives in the C suite talking about Topgrading, and hiring managers in the trenches making up their own variation of it. No Topgrading advocate would recommend that. If you are going to invest in Topgrading, plan to go “all in” or do not attempt it.

I think there are many effective alternatives to Topgrading for smaller organizations, and I’ll continue to present them here.

I wonder if you participated in Brad Smart’s training or if you simply read the promo material such as the 50 page overview and then jumped to your conclusion?

The reason I ask is that the link you decided to use above (to not recommend Brad Smart) points to a category of your own posts on recruiting blunders rather than articles that intelligently discuss the merits and shortfalls of TopGrading based on your experience and as they pertain to SMEs – that was a rather disappointing waste of time FWIS.

I have launched 4 startups in the past 2 decades and after reviewing the topgrading material during the past 3 weeks can honestly say that I wish I had heard about it long ago. Please understand that my definition of startup is a process to go from 4 to 500 employees within a defined period of time.

I also found it interesting to note that finding a number 2 in any small business is one of the prime areas where TopGrading could add real value to even the smallest of businesses. You may not know this coming from the recruiting side of the fence, but investors tend not to put their money down on a small startup without a strong and reliable number two. And landing a best fit number two is not an easy task with or without TopGrading.

Sure TopGrading takes more time… but I can agree with Brad Smart, it is time well spent during the hiring process rather than the cleanup work that ensues after hiring the wrong person. Sure, it means more work for the recruiter as well but as I have seen, few if any recruiters publish their hiring success rates… your business is more about shortening cycle times rather than improving quality of new hires… in fact, I would imagine that you don’t need to be the best in the business to succeed, you simply have to take the burden off your Client’s shoulders so that s/he is not bothered with the hiring process too much or worse, blamed for the mis-hires.

Lastly, on one of your posts you actually stated that you preferred working with managers that actually did the job of the person they were looking to hire.

Seriously, What is YOUR hiring success rate?

That said, I have used the Topgrading interview format with a number of clients and they have universally seen significant improvement in hiring success.

As you have said above, there are some key things that I think we can all agree will make better hires.

1. Decide THROUGHLY in advance what you are looking for.
2. Recruit a LARGE pool of candidates.
3. Methodically screen those candidates based on their PAST PERFORMANCE.
4. Conduct Phone screens and interviews consistently (this means using an interview guide).
5. Ask about every job, and all the behavioral questions that you can think of. [This is key. The longer interview really helps clients to get all the info they need.]
6. Great reference calls, with people who are willing to talk with you frankly about the candidate’s performance.

I really think there is a lot to learn from Brad Smart and his process that will improve the hires at nearly every small business. Do we need to follow Topgrading chapter and verse, well I think that most small business hiring practices are so far from these basic principals that any movement in that direction is worth while. And if business owners were more confident that they would be able to hire good people, they would be less likely to tolerate mediocre performers.

Embrace what is good there, and there is a lot of it. Try out some of his methods; then make a judgment. It might be different from what you think.

Brad Farris
Anchor Advisors, Ltd.
http://www.anchoradvisors.com

Secondly, people are terrified to hire someone potentially smarter, more qualified, or generally better than what they are looking for. They tend to hide behind the mask of “well we just can’t afford them”, yet what it really comes down to is insecurity. The inherent problem with this, is that they are hindering their own growth career-wise. They should be hiring to hire the person who will eventually be so good, they will move up – which means said manager moves up. Instead, they hire mediocre performers who won’t threaten their job safety.

What I disagree with is that Topgrading is a universal tool for all companies. Small and mid-size firms (as Bob points out) are too fast and fluid for this type of rigid implementation. Usually this would cause “culture shock” in such an environment. to the people who work for small companies because of low bureaucracy, this screams “process, process, process”.

However, all that said, I think that Topgrading assumes one thing too blindly. That people can actually interview and assess talent. Many people, too many, hire and judge the outcome of an interview based on “feel” or “gut”, and that is about as scientific as laying down money on Red or Black at a Roulette table. Many smaller or mid size companies cant devote the training time needed, or have people too resistant to it, in order to get the ground level training needed to assess better.

I think that before we can assess top talent, we need to “assess how we assess”.