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For my book review I read the third edition of Topgrading by Bradford D. Smart. This book was all about what it means to be an A, B or C player as an employee and how to identify one while interviewing potential employees. A lot of times companies and organizations settle for B and C employees that do not have the potential to become “A” players, that all could have been identified and avoided if the company practiced the Topgrading steps to hiring an employee. Topgrading solves the three biggest hiring problems and allow managers to get superior talent and their organizations perform better. The three biggest problems with hiring consist of rampant dishonesty, insufficient information, and lack of verifiability. It solves these problems by having a “truth serum” replacing commonplace falsehoods in resumes and interviews with refreshing honesty. With the Topgrading system there are twelve very clear and effective steps to help hire an A player that will help and add to an organization. Some of these steps include measuring your baseline success hiring and promoting people, creating a very clear job description, recruiting from your networks, screen candidates with the Topgrading career history form and snapshot, conduct telephone screening interviews, providing competency interviews, use tandem interviews that way they can give each other feedback, drafting an executive summary, conduct reference calls, coach your newly hired A players, and annually measure your Topgrading success. Instead of just replacing the low performers in an organization, the Topgrading system needs to be adopted to solve the reason companies have 75% of mis-hires, and instead produce a success rate of up to 75-90% A players hired and promoted. A big problem with potential employees that interview for jobs is dishonesty on their resume that make them look highly qualified for the position. The TORC technique (threat of reference check), is a great tool used in the Topgrading system to scare candidates into telling the truth about the credentials and past experiences they have on their resumes. Threatening to call references and telling them throughout the whole interview process that they need to arrange personal reference calls with their past employers will then weed out C players and bring out the truth about all of the candidates. This system is not about removing C players but instead about hiring only A players or players that have the potential to become A players. A common misconception about Topgrading is that it is more expensive to hire A players, however you are paying the same amount regardless with A players existing at all salary levels, and end up with the possibility of loosing money by hiring an underperforming employee. Another great point about finding A players is to network through A players that already work for the organization. The bottom line of this book is all about how to improve your system of hiring A player employees through the Topgrading system to your organization and no longer settling for “good enough” employees.

This book relates to the course as the Topgrading system is all about strategic staffing and recruiting the right type of employees that will better your organization. This relates to selecting talent through the selection process of strategic staffing by putting applicants through activities such as skills tests and employment interviews to evaluate if they are qualified for the organization. The method the organization chooses to use for this process will then ultimately decide how well the company’s new hires, and therefore the company as a whole, will perform. With this being said, it is so important for the organization to choose and effective system such as the Topgrading system, to hire new employees that will act as A players and ensure the success of the company. Another important aspect that we talked about in class is which skills and what level of them should a company seek when hiring new employees. This relates to the Topgrading system by determining what an A player is or someone that has the potential to become one in their organization. One of the most critical staffing decisions concerns the types of skills a new hire should posses and the appropriate level of those skills for a candidate to obtain to be hired into the organization. This can all be determined about the candidate through the twelve steps of the Topgrading interview process to see if the candidate is qualified for the position. This also parallels the idea of competency modeling that we talked about in chapter 4 and deciding the necessary worker competencies required for high performance that can be identified through a job analysis. Another key point in relation to our class is the overall importance of recruitment and what makes a recruiter effective. Recruiters are the first and sometimes only representations of the company to the candidate, and therefore are the most important. Also they are the people who are putting into place the Topgrading steps and deciding who would be the best fit for their organization and ultimately become an A player in their company. All in all, the Topgrading system carries out the overall staffing strategy of the organization and can help the company be successful by reaching their goals with the help of their A team employees.