Taipan Masterclass 2012 - Business Execution with Topgrading

I just came back from speaking at the Taipan Masterclass 2012, held in Manila Philippines.  We had a blast!  My hosts in Manila were such warm and wonderful people.  There where 49 companies with a total of 149 executives that did a deep dive for over 3 days into the following topics:

1. Strategic selling
2. Topgrading
3. Execution for High Performance Teams.  

• "A" Players would be more productive and happy if they were not cleaning up after other non "A" Players.
• Consider interviewing with a partner.  Tandem interviewing or group interviewing achieves 80%-90% success in getting "A" players.
• Ask candidates to set up reference calls for you with their past employers.  "A" players would be glad to do it while "C" players will run for the hills!

At Rhythm Systems, we have been using Topgrading for the last few years with great results.  We interview in a group of 4, and can testify that the shared observations of every member of our interviewing group helps us to only hire the best.  Our group interviews protect us from one of our team members "falling in love" with the candidate that we are interviewing.  Many times when one or two of us got "sold" by a candidate, the other two in the group would be able to pull us back with good objective data and observations. 

The cost of replacing a poor hire can be as much as 15 times the person's base salary.  That's a lot of waste.  Strong business execution should increase speed while lowering waste.  Better to hire right and slow than hiring fast and wrong.