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"Topgrading" Review

“Topgrading” by Bradford D. Smart, Ph.D. (Prentice Hall Press)

This book, written by an industrial psychologist, is the best book that we have read on selecting, mentoring and retaining “A” performers. His clients include General Electric and Allied Signal.

In today’s economy, would you prefer to have “A” level performers lift your firm out of the stock market doldrums or do you prefer to work with the “B” or “C” Players? In Brad's experience, "A" Players are more innovative, resourceful, and smarter contributors than a "B" or "C" Player. Therefore, with whom would you rather work? As a hiring manager, it is your choice.

Brad Smart uses his Chronological In-Depth Structured (CIDS) interview process to weed out the “B” and “C” players in order to find the “A” Players. His book also tells how to legally counsel out underperformers in a fashion that lets those people decide that it is the best career move for them. It also helps them retain their dignity.

The appendix alone is worth the cost of the book. The appendix includes the following:

1) Chronological In-Depth Structured (CIDS) interview guide. This guide should be used for both internal and external candidates. It provides a structured interviewing track for the interviewers of candidates. His forms provide hiring managers the ability to learn the maximum amount of information about a candidate.

2) Career History Form. In most companies, candidates complete an application. However, sometimes an “A” Player does not want to spend the time to complete one. The hiring manager encourages the completion of the Career History Form by suggesting that it will potentially save a couple of hours during the interviewing process.

3) In-Depth Reference Check Guide. Without a doubt, this is the best guide that we have ever used for reference checking. Brad actually gives the hiring manager a written track to use during the reference check.

4) Interviewer Feedback Form. This is the form that all of the interviewers complete shortly after an interview. It helps the hiring manager get a total view of the candidate.

5) Sample Competencies – Management. How often have you struggled with a job description? These fifty competencies may give you the ability to write a job description that may be stronger than your current descriptions. With this tool, you decide on a scale of one to six how important this skill is for a specific job and then measure how the candidate is rated on the same scale.

Brad Smart covers coaching all employees. He goes into detail on the reason to coach and how to go about it.

Obviously, as in any book, there are some areas where we disagree.

The first area is how Brad structures the interview process. He prefers to interview the candidate intensively over a two day period. Then, bring the final candidate in a month later. In my experience as a contract recruiter consultant, there are two reasons that you do not want to do it this way.

1) In a month, someone else with a quicker interviewing process may have hired the “A” Player.

2) In all of the articles that we have read about memory, within seventy-two hours, we typically forget ninety-five percent of what occurred. The first things to go are many of the soft reasons why someone is excited about a company. Typically a job change is more of an emotional change than a rational change. Therefore, by waiting a month, a company loses that advantage.

The second area where we disagree with Brad’s book is small but significant. Since he is an industrial psychologist and not a recruiter, he does not totally understand our role in the process. His points regarding recruiters who specialize in one discipline are true. There are probably twenty-five to fifty percent of the companies where they may not recruit candidates because they are clients. Where we believe he misses is the number of “A” Players who professional recruiters refer to companies. His numbers come from hiring managers, some who probably did not have a strong method of selection prior to Brad’s CIDS interview. Many times on contract recruitment consulting contracts we have strongly recommended that a manager interview someone that we felt was an “A” Player only to have the manager pass in order to get to the “B” or “C” player. Once they have selected that candidate, a recruiter’s job is to deliver them.

Over the years many executives and hiring managers have purchased "Topgrading" on RecruiterGuy's recommendation. To this day, they talk about how this book positively impacted their interviewing effectiveness. With those two cautions and those endorsements, RecruiterGuy strongly recommends “Topgrading” by Bradford D. Smart, Ph.D. For your convenience, you may purchase this book from Amazon.com by clicking on the link at right.