If you are reading this article, you value talent, you really do! But if you’re like most managers, hiring people is a major challenge and source of frustration. Recruiters don’t do a good job screening people, resumes are deceptive, so-called competency interviews are easy for candidates to fake, and candidates only want reference checks with their buddies.

Surveys of thousands of managers show that only 25% of people they hire turn out to be the high performers they feel they’re paying for. About half their hires are “disappointing but adequate.”

For three decades I’ve refined methods that have helped small business managers and famous leaders of large companies more than triple their success picking, not just “adequate” people, but true high performers. Many CEOs say that these methods called Topgrading definitely helped their company perform better; click here for quotes by Jack Welch, Larry Bossidy, and others.

The good news is that you can dramatically improve your hiring success by using commonsense methods you’ll learn in this article. I’ve conducted 65,000 verbal case studies, asking managers their hiring methods, borrowing some of their successful methods, adding some ideas of my own, and for three decades have fine-tuned the most practical advice. The following five best practices are briefer than Cliff Notes, but even so, you can immediately begin hiring better.

1. Instead of a vague job description, use a job scorecard. A lot of mis-hires result when the major stakeholders don’t agree on what the person will truly be held accountable for. For VP Sales, for example, maybe the President wants revenue growth, the VP Finance wants only profitable sales, the VP Marketing wants new customers, and the VP Operations just wants to keep current customers. Good luck – the VP Sales is frustrated and quits or is fired, because most of the team members say the VP Sales is failing.

Suggestion: Get four or five of the managers who have the most at stake in the hire to agree on measurable accountabilities, and be sure finalist candidates know them.

2. Early in the hiring process, let candidates know that in order to get a job offer, they will (at an appropriate time) be asked to arrange for personal reference calls with former bosses. High performers, the people you want to hire, will be happy to do this, and C player candidates will withdraw. Perfect! This is what we call the TORC (Threat of Reference Check) technique. Not only do the best people want to apply, but all candidates will quite honest in interviews, knowing they will be arranging reference calls.

Suggestion: If you use recruiters, require them to tell candidates this requirement.

3. Recruit from your network of high performers you know or have personally worked with. The thousands of high performers I’ve worked with say this is quick (high performers are in your PDA), effective (candidates are already prescreened), and inexpensive (no recruiter fees).

My son Geoff Smart is CEO of the largest topgrading company, and the book Who: The A Method for Hiring, co-authored with Randy Street, shares how dozens of billionaires and Fortune 500 CEOs packed their teams with high performers and the answer is – you guessed it – hiring from their list of high performers they’ve worked with and met.

Suggestion: Require all your managers to stay in touch with high performers and sources of high performers.

4. Use the chronological Topgrading Interview as the most powerful hiring tool. If you use round-robin competency interviews, keep them because good candidates want to talk to several people and ask them questions. However, just realize competency interviews that ask questions such as, “When was a time you were a good team player” are so easily manipulated by candidates that they produce only 25% high performers hired.

The Topgrading Interview is the “silver bullet. One-hundred percent of managers we know of hiring 90% high performers use the Topgrading Interview Guide. It’s 30 pages long, a “road map” for interviewers. A super short version that will enable you to immediately hire better is this: ask, for every full time job (spending more time with follow up questions on the recent jobs):

a) What were your major successes (and how did you achieve them)?

b) What were mistakes or things you wish you’d done differently?

c) Who was your boss, and what were his/her strengths and weaker points?

d) What would that boss tell me were your strengths, weaker points, and overall performance, in a personal reference call I might ask you to arrange?

The chronological interview reveals patterns of how the person evolved over time, and THAT is what enables you to clearly understand what the person is apt to be like in the near future.

Greg Alexander, my co-author of a new book Topgrading for Sales, used these questions and in one year took the #12 (out of 14) region at EMC to #1 in sales.

Suggestion: Use a tandem partner – two heads are a lot better than one and the two of you ask more follow up questions for the most recent jobs.

5. Ask finalist candidates to arrange personal reference calls with former bosses. This is the TORC Technique in action, and it works!

Suggestion: You and your tandem interviewer simply make half the calls each, after the candidate gives you the times references are available and the numbers to call.

SUMMARY

Use these five of the ten most important Topgrading best practices, and you will join the ranks of thousands of managers who have found the solution to the chronic problem of hiring the best people available for the pay. You will improve your hiring success.

Would you like to learn all Topgrading methods, and improve your hiring success even more? You can download the free 50-page eBook, Avoid Costly Mis-Hires: Hire 90% High Performers with Topgrading Best Practices.