We’ve seen an increase in “Topgrading” or “Who” interviewing lately and wanted to share our research on this emerging approach!

Whether you’re an interviewer or finding yourself preparing for a Topgrading style of interview - we hope this overview helps you show up as your best self and gain what you need from the hiring process!

What is Who Hiring?

A methodology of interview process designed for hiring “A” players by collecting facts and data about candidate’s performance track record over time.

Goals:

• Identify if the candidate has a track record that matches the needs of the role

• Identify if they have the competencies that align with culture and the role

• Identify if they have enough passion to do the job

Who created it?

• Book by Geoff Smart and Randy Street

• Based on learnings from ghSMART

What is the core philosophy?

Hiring “A” players is critical for any business that’s looking to achieve big goals, and failing to do so will be detrimental. By digging deeply into decisions and behaviors this candidate has made over the past 15 years, the goal is to understand their performance track record. 

“In truth, we believe, people don’t change that much. People aren’t mutual funds. Past performance really is an indicator of future performance.” (pg. 108)

Identifying patterns is a core part of this methodology. “Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, if you want to enhance your predictive capabilities, you have to really understand their story and their patterns.” (pg. 82)

Basic Interview framework:

• Screening Interview

• What are your career goals?

• What are you really good at professionally?

• Looking for 8-12 things

• What are you not good at? Not interested in doing professionally?

• 5 - 8 things

• “What would a manager say” can be a helpful prompt

• How would your last 5 bosses each rank you (1-10)?

• Goal to narrow field to 2-5 candidates to advance through next rounds

• Who Interview

• 1.5 - 3 hours long

• Digs into each job in past 15 years with 5 questions

• Reference Interview

• Think about asking them to use people from the stories told in the Who interview where you’d like to dig deeper into a specific time in their career

• Ideally 7 reference calls (4 hiring manager, 3 by others)

• Ideally 3 past bosses, 2 peers or customers, 2 subordinates

• Standardized reference questions, follow up with  “what,” “how,” and “tell me more” questions

• In what context did you work with the person?

• What were the person’s biggest strengths?

• What were the person’s biggest areas of improvement back then?

• How would you rate his/her overall performance in that job on a 1 - 10 scale? What about his or her performance causes you to give that rating?

• The person mentioned that he/she struggled with ______ in that job. Can you tell me more about that?

Core components:

• Scorecard

• What’s needed in the role (beyond JD, ie- what deliverable and metrics will this role be responsible for)

• How does each candidate match against these core competencies

• Who Interview

• Uncover patterns to compare with scorecard

• Core Who questions to ask about each role they’ve held in the past 15 years (chronologically from earliest to most recent)

• What were you hired to do?

• What accomplishments are you most proud of?

• What were some low points during that job?

• Who were the people you worked with? Specifically?

• Boss’s name; what was it like to work with them; what will they say are your biggest strengths? Biggest areas for improvement?

• How would you rate the team you inherited on a/B/C scale? What changes did you make? Hire anyone? Fire anyone? Rate the team when you left (A/B/C)

• Why did you leave that job?

• Will

• What does the candidate want to do? Does this line up with what the role needs? Any overlap between the role needs and what they do not want to be doing?

Interviewing tactics 

• Get Curious

• Start questions with “what,” “how,” and “tell me more”

• Listen for outcomes vs. list of events (A players often tie experiences to outcomes vs. just listing tasks/events/people involved)

• The 3 “P’s” (to gain signaling on how “great” an outcome actually was)

• Compare to

• Previous

• Plan

• peers

• Bring a “biographer” mindset to a Who interview (not of an investigator)

Things that give us pause a DEI-informed hiring person and candidate advocate:

• The philosophy seems to have a decent amount of entitlement in terms of it’s assumptions that interviewees will jump through hoops, doesn’t really focus on candidate experience or include the myriad of injustices encountered in the workplace by many “A” candidates. “If they are interested enough in the job to talk with you, they’ll go with whatever you propose.” (pg. 71)

• Doesn't really support different types of personalities that skew more introverted or less confident for a variety of reasons -  makes a lot of assumptions (“people love talking about themselves”, “talented people know what they do and are not afraid to tell you about it”, etc. (pg. 71)

• Puts a lot of credence on past bosses and how they treated this employee. Ie - if an employee was “pushed out” it’s viewed as a major indicator of less than A ability. This disregards many factors that play into these relationships (esp. racism, sexism, discrimination, etc.)

• References - the main philosophy here is to reach out separately to each of the bosses discussed in the interview, without permission from the candidate. This goes behind candidate’s backs (and against Canadian labor laws) and violates trust. Asking someone to be a reference involves spending a bit of social capital, and we believe that it should be up to a candidate to determine when they’d like to make this ask of previous connections.

• The “culture fit” section is really vague- would like to have learned more about how they recommend doing this part of the interview process. At Hustle hunters, we anchor our efforts around values, motivation and impact alignment, and know how important this section of learning more about soft skills is in making sure everyone is set up to thrive.

Wrap-Up

We’ve learned a lot of tactics that we’ll be incorporating into our work from this process. Combining our deeply human-first candidate experiences with a more strategic sense of curiosity should help us to maintain a strong DEIB-focus while also gaining more important signaling into the potential matches between candidates and clients.