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Inside the Mind of the Top Performer - Part I

By Lou Adler, January 9, 2008

Top performers are different than average performers both on the job and how they look for a new one. Simply defined, a top performer is a person who consistently exceeds expectations. While you might be able to determine a person's potential to be a top performer in 30 days or so, it takes at least a few months to determine if a person is a top performer. This has to do with motivation, team skills, and the consistent achievement of results. For a variety of reasons, just because a person can do the work, it doesn't mean the person will do the work. Generally speaking, if a top person takes a great job that perfectly fits his or her needs and aspirations, it's unlikely the person would even consider changing jobs in the first year or so. The person is typically on a steep learning curve, making an impact, and highly satisfied with the current work and the potential future opportunities.

Read more articles by this author.

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However, after a period of time even top performers can experience a decline in growth and satisfaction. Under these conditions a top performer might proactively seek out other opportunities, but generally speaking, not too much time will be spent looking. To take advantage of top people looking infrequently you'll want to make sure that your open opportunities are both easy to find and compelling enough to get the person to respond.

I define this type of top performer who is temporarily and infrequently in the hunt for a new job as a semi-active candidate. Since these people are fully-employed and not desperate, they tend to be much more discriminating when deciding to apply for a job, and even more selective when deciding to accept an offer. While the compensation package needs to be competitive, they're more concerned about getting back on a faster career track. Most companies do not take full advantage of this pool of top performers who are temporarily in the job market. They focus more on the fully active candidate, assuming they're one and the same.

A fully active candidate is defined as a person who is an average performer, has made little impact in any job, is rarely satisfied, and is constantly and aggressively looking. These people are not very discriminating and they tend to overvalue compensation rather than opportunity. Unfortunately, most companies design their sourcing and recruiting programs around the needs of these average candidates rather than the top performers. This reveals itself in a number of areas:

1. Job postings are difficult to find. For one thing, they're posted on boards that have not been shown to attract the best, and even on boards that are effective, the ads are still difficult to find. The boards are typically selected based on price and volume criteria, not quality.
2. The titles turn off the best people. Most job titles are boring, generic, or contain unknown terms. Even if a top person with multiple opportunities stumbled upon a posting, the probabilities are low she'll apply since all of the jobs appear similar.
3. A disqualification mentality permeates the ad copy. Most ad copy is filled with qualifications and experience requirements, with little about the growth opportunities. Even if a top person with all of the qualifications somehow read the ad, he's unlikely to apply if the job is just a rehash of what the person is doing now. Since the top performer is already employed in a job that has gone temporarily stale, you must at least offer the promise of something better to gain the person's interest.
4. Top performers are excluded from consideration. Often the best people have different qualifications or are a little light in experience, offset by high potential. This is what makes the opportunity for a new job appealing. However, the possibility of attracting this type of person is not even considered since the copy is exclusionary and filled with "must haves" in industry and experience requirements.
5. Compensation becomes the differentiator. When every job sounds like every other job, the only difference is compensation and location. This is exactly how the average performer decides, but not the top performer.
6. The application process is demeaning. Few top people ever get this far, but if they did, it's unlikely they'd get much further. The application process at most companies is very user unfriendly and filled with disqualifiers, irrelevant knockout questions, and is overly time consuming.

Collectively, this is why companies have such a difficult time finding top performers online and why they then pay too much even for average people. Poorly thought out processes like these inadvertently eliminate top performers from consideration at every step. By default candidates making it through the maze will be average people who have not read the job description, who live nearby, and want to be paid a salary premium to do boring work that's similar to what's being offered by every other company around.

To address this, here are some short- and long-term ideas to consider in order to attract those top performers who are temporarily online:

1. Reverse engineer your jobs so they can be found. Put yourself in the mind of your ideal candidate who has experienced a slowing career growth curve. The person is likely to Google for jobs using the job title, the city, and the term "jobs," or they go to some niche site recommended by a friend. In parallel the person is going to network with associates in societies or groups in an attempt to find a referral. So try this out and make sure your job posting is found this way.
2. Use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques so your career website can be found. When you conduct the reverse engineering exercise described above you'll discover that the postings on your career site are nowhere to be found. This is probably due to the fact that they've been designed to prevent Google from finding them. Reforming your career site and all of the postings is an essential step in finding top performers looking online. Jobs2web.com can help here.
3. Use ads to tell stories, not describe qualifications. Ads should be mini-advertising pieces that appeal to the needs of a top performer who has limited time. A story describing the compelling nature of your job is the simplest way to separate your job from all of the rest. Be sure to emphasize the opportunities and describe the challenges.
4. Use compelling titles that stand out from the crowd and then post them on niche sites. We ran a "most outrageous ad" contest last year. The winner used the title "Government contracts and wine ... together at last" to attract the attention of government contractors for jobs in Napa Valley. It was posted on a niche site and over a dozen highly qualified people responded within 24 hours.
5. Use a multi-step application process. There is no need to gain complete information on your prospects the first time. A good sourcing strategy is to build a large database of names and resumes to network with and nurture. Once you have this database you can keep it warm by sending emails and topical newsletters. You can then reach out to this pool of prospects as specific jobs become available.
6. Redesign your sourcing processes from a top-down mentality. Top people are not req-driven. A top-down sourcing approach incorporates the idea that top people first look at industries, companies within industries, and then classes of jobs, rather than specific titles. This is why an easily found talent-hub which describes the opportunities first is a better sourcing strategy. From the talent hub prospects are then led to specific jobs.

These ideas address the needs of top performers who temporarily go online to look for better opportunities. Passive candidates, on the other hand, are a different breed. These are people you need to contact and persuade to entertain the idea of working for your company. Making matters more difficult, these people will only consider something if it's far superior to what they're doing today. There are a number of other variables that need to be considered to attract and hire top performers who are fully-employed, currently on a steep growth curve, and have not yet considered looking elsewhere. While we'll get into this topic in Part II of this article, many of these passive candidates after being contacted will go online to look at your job descriptions and career site before getting too interested. So it's worthwhile to start improving this aspect of your sourcing process anyway.

Recruiting more top performers starts by understanding that how and why these people decide to look for another job, and why they accept one offer over another, is different than the average performer. Most sourcing and recruiting processes ignore this fundamental concept. From what I can tell this is the root cause of why so many companies are finding it far more difficult and more costly than necessary to attract the best people possible.