Topgrading

Improve Onboarding, Coaching, and Retaining Talent

Experienced Topgraders can skip over this article and scroll down to “What’s New in Topgrading” because you know that onboarding, coaching, and retaining people are relatively simple when you’ve screened people with the Topgrading Interview.  For others – read on and you’ll understand why!

Recently I was on a conference call with 10 HR executives with global companies totaling $1 trillion in revenues, all complaining that onboarding was unsuccessful, most managers are lousy coaches, and it’s hard to retain top talent.  Most companies have problems in these 3 areas because their hiring processes are so superficial.  Most use round-robin competency (behavioral) interviews that result in 75% mis-hires.

1. Onboarding is a broken process when square pegs are hired for round holes.
2. Coaching is a heck of a lot more difficult with mis-hires.
3. Retaining top talent is problematic when A players report to C players and when managers don’t really understand hirees’ needs and motivations.  Superficial hiring leaves managers with vague understanding of what will retain people and so they are surprised when talented people quit.

Topgraders onboard, coach, and retain with relative ease, because they put round pegs in round holes 80% - 90% of the time.  Topgraders have MUCH more information about new hires than managers who use superficial round robin competency interviews.  The chronological Topgrading interview reveals strengths, weak points, values, motivations, and ambitions by asking about every success, every failure, every key decision, every important relationship, and reasons for every job move. 

So, for Topgrading interviewers:

1. Onboarding is a breeze because, with a thorough understanding of the new hiree, it is “obvious” what the plan should be to introduce the hiree to the company, key coworkers, and learning materials. (OK – some companies are so complex that new managers participate in three-month onboarding programs, but even these elaborate programs fail when there is a mis-hire.)
2. Coaching is easy, because good hires, high performers, are eager for feedback, take criticism constructively, and trust you.
3. Retaining talent is no mystery.  Topgraders know what challenges, opportunities, and rewards will retain their new high performers.  So, managers tweak jobs and shuffle their high potential people to meet their understandable and desirable needs to grow, expand, and achieve.

Summary

“Everything goes better with Coke” may have been a cheesy slogan, but “All people problems are minimized with topgrading” is quite true.