The Essential Guide to

PERFORMANCE
HIRING
THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE
If you’re ever having problems in life or in business, it’s usually because of not understanding what’s
happening around you with people. It’s quite rare to go home at night and have a sleepless night because,
the photocopier is not working. It’s normally because someone has done something and you can’t
understand, and you don’t know how to handle it. Performia is there to remove this mystery for you.

This in fact is why and how Performia was founded in Australia. Gareth Jekel, Director of Performia Australia,
a refrigeration mechanic by trade, built his first commercial refrigeration business at the age of 27, to 150
full time staff and $ 21m sales.

Throughout the years whilst building his business, the areas that increasingly took more time and attention
from Gareth all had to do with people. He knew the technology of supermarket refrigeration and the required
business processes but as the team grew, the business would get more complex and slow. He hired key
executives with long, relevant experience and top salaries, but this only amplified the mystery when things
did not get better, easier, more productive. Eventually the personnel issues compounded and the frustration
outweighed the value of continuing and Gareth decided to sell his business.

Around the same time, Gareth attended a business seminar on the basics of
building productive teams by recruitment strategy consulting organisation
Performia. The presenter, Marten Runow, founder of Performia
international who at the time was raising awareness in Australia and
looking for partners to continue Performia’s international expansion
in Australia.

Gareth was absolutely blown away by the information from the

presentation and wished so much that he had this knowledge
years earlier while he was transitioning his business from small
to medium. He knew that things would have been very different
if armed with this information and he would not have faced the
mysterious challenges that come with building a team.

This is how Gareth found his new passion, Performia, and embarked
on the the strategy to establish and expand Performia in Australia —
and in 2006, Performia was born in Australia!

THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO PERFORMANCE HIRING 2

You could be unbelievably experienced in business but unless there is a working strategy and a set, quality
assured process for selecting your people into your team, you may be working much harder for smaller
rewards than required.

This is why your hiring strategy becomes so essential to take your business
to the next level and the most important area to be applying best practice as
it underlies the quality and profitability of every other process.

The Essential Guide to Performance Hiring reviews traditional hiring

methods, typical mistakes and pitfalls you need to know to avoid, and will
introduce you to a hiring strategy that will open up your business to more
affordable, productive candidates, allowing you to move your current team,
hiring process and business to the next level of growth, productivity and
freedom.

ABOUT PERFORMIA
Performia is a global HR consultancy specialising in recruitment tools and strategy. Performia international head office
is based out of Stockholm Sweden, with offices in 29 countries, and servicing more than 10,000 active clients in over
50 countries ranging from large public companies to SMEs and micro businesses. Performia services include strategic
recruitment advice, training on building hiring processes and teams, screening services, assisted recruitment and HR desking.

THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO PERFORMANCE HIRING 3

THE PROBLEM OF
HIRING
Taking a look at what happens when you hire people — you will have
experienced these scenarios —

You have this person come to you and she looks

great, she looks really productive, she says all the
right things in the interview and she has a great
resume — so you hire her. And as you suspect, she
creates good results for the organisation. You get
excited about your great hiring decision.
PRODUCTIVITY
Another person comes to work at your business, and
he looks really great — and in actual fact you become
so confident with this candidate that you even go home
to your partner and you say “honey, let’s book that trip,
I’ve finally found the person that’s going to make some
time for us”. Then you hire this candidate — and he
produces nothing. PRODUCTIVITY

Continuing on, you’re hiring again, and you’re

really desperate. You can’t find someone who has
what you need so you hire this candidate that
doesn’t look so good. You put her on and exactly
as you had suspected and three weeks later you
let her go.
PRODUCTIVITY
Now this other candidate comes along. Again
you’re desperate and there’s no one else. You hire
him and keep a close eye because you know he is
just going to be a problem — but he ends up being
the most productive staff member in your team!

PRODUCTIVITY
Looking at this representation, it makes it very easy to see that there is
much more to know about hiring, about people, and looks and resumes
are not an effective method, they can actually be very misleading.

THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO PERFORMANCE HIRING 4

 When building teams, you only want to be screening in these types of people.

Of these two, the one who would be more cost effective to hire is
the second one. Why? Because most likely he has been passed
over by other businesses because they are not able to easily spot
how effective he will be. The first candidate could actually be two to
three times more expensive because she presents herself and her
credentials so well.

Looking at these next two, the first candidate is going to be the most expensive
or even dangerous because when you hire the second candidate, you are
already expecting she is not going to work out so you’re watching her, and
you’re looking for results and you will quickly move her out of the business.

The first candidate has already bluffed you in the interview and now
you are ready for him to produce great results and might even put him
in charge of large areas of your business. His area starts to drop off a
little bit. When you meet with him and ask “Hey, what’s happening?” he
says, “Well, you know, what we need is — if I had 2 more staff, I could
really make this branch rock”. As you are so confident with him, you give
him what he needs but 6 months passes and there’s been no change.
So you go back to him and ask “Hey, what’s happening here?” and the
reply is “Hey, you know what, we’re really pumping, we’ve got all these
programs ready to go! It’s going to be an unbelievable office and I’m
going to make you so much money! What I need is for your approval on
the $ 50,000 social media campaign, and you watch we’re just going to rock.”

You can see that this person is really starting to cost you a lot of money. You tell
yourself that doesn’t work and now you’re confused because you’ve hired this highly
competent person and everything he tells you makes sense — but you’re getting no
value out of him and in actual fact now, a year later, you’ve paid his wage, the wage of
two more staff, and an expensive campaign. He has cost you about $ 700,000 with no
improvement, and sometimes, it could be even worse outcomes than before this sort
of person started.

So now you decide you’d better to go up and spend two months with him and help him.
You want to make it work because of this feeling of responsibility you have — you don’t
feel you can terminate him because you’re the one that hired him and told everybody The second candidate might
how great he’s going to be. So now you waste two months and more money as well as just add no value.
lose other opportunity you would have created in your own office, only to find out that
The first candidate will
this person is absolutely useless, has been lying to you — and then one day you don’t
remove value from your busi-
see him again. That’s if you’re lucky enough, some of these candidates can present
ness and might even crash
themselves as your right-hand person for ten years which is why THESE are the people
the whole operation.
you’re going to be really careful to avoid.

THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO PERFORMANCE HIRING 5

THE USUAL HIRING PROCESS
Having full knowledge of the available tools and hiring processes can lead to a 180 degree change on how
a Hiring Strategy can be deployed.

The standard hiring process looks first at the resume which mostly indicates the person’s experience and
knowledge.

This traditional process is not only time

consuming, it tends to really hamper an effective
hiring strategy in two ways —

1. Candidates that may add a lot

of value to the business can get
screened out whilst resumes for
lower value candidates look more
appropriate.

2. The candidates that rise to the

top of the screening are the same
candidates that are rising to the top
of other businesses screening lists,
making it harder and more expensive
to get them into your business.

The Usual Process involves a lot of resume reading, filtering, interviews, confusion, only to hire someone
and now test them in the workplace. You might be quite good at this process and get acceptable or better
results, but how can you know out of everyone that applied, did you get the candidate that would add the
most value to your business?

The goal of the screening process is to locate the person that will add more
than the required value to the company, be easy to manage and safe for the
team and your business.
This requires a new, different method of screening that locates first, THE POTENTIAL VALUE A CANDIDATE
WILL ADD TO THE BUSINESS.

THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO PERFORMANCE HIRING 6

This requires a reversal of the usual hiring process, pretty much ignoring resumes in most cases and having
an assessment of each candidate’s PRODUCTION POTENTIAL.

The job ad is actually the start of the screening process. HOW ARE CANDIDATES ATTRACTED TO YOUR
BUSINESS. How the ad is written will play a critical role in the rest of your hiring flow, and ultimately the
business performance.

THE JOB ad when written properly, will filter out those that feel entitled, meaning they will be expensive,
tough to manage and usually lower the productivity of the team, and attract those that want to be part of,
and contribute to the purpose and the game of adding value.

From split testing, it has been learned that jobs that “sell the position”
can attract 5 times more candidates, none or very few of which can
actually add the required value, compared to challenge based ads
that 80 % or more of the candidates have the potential to add the
value required and be considered for the next hiring step.

For positions where few candidates apply, making the job ad more
challenging can actually increase application numbers. Why?
Those that are not quite in the market, the more productive and
loyal, will be more inclined to apply to an ‘honest’ ad, where the
challenges are laid out and where they feel they will be respected
for the production record, not for how they look, their resume
and / or their political skills!

Performia has powerful technology on how to get your job ads

filtering and is one of the smallest and cheapest changes that can
make the largest difference to the productivity of your team.

Learn how to craft the right Job Ad that fits YOUR

organisation’s culture. Your Hiring Strategy Starts HERE

Download your Guide to Ad-writing

THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO PERFORMANCE HIRING 7

THE PERFORMIA HIRING PROCESS
The first factor to check once an application is received is not the resume, but rather performance potential. This
is the core ingredient needed no matter what relevant experience or qualifications the candidate has. There is
no point hiring someone that had lots of experience for the job you are hiring for if that experience has been to
make things worse.

There are simple, fast tools available to get

this important information and the ability to
rate performance potential is the key factor to
improving team productivity.

As this process mostly ignores resumes and first

impressions, it also allows those that don’t present
so well to flow through the hiring process, and those
that have great resumes, below average results,
present well in interviews, to drop out of the hiring
process.

So, not only are you now able to effectively screen

out, you can now also SCREEN IN!

Only when you know from their potential

performance results that there is a good chance
your business can get a good return on investment
The cofounder of WhatsApp was rejected by
if you employ each candidate would you look at
personality, motivation and knowledge. Facebook when he applied for a job, only to
have Facebook pay US $ 19 billion five years
Performia has many tools that you can deploy in
your business to ensure you know more about later to purchase his creation!
these things and make sure you have who you
need in which seat, the most powerful being
Exec-U-Test, which can present fit, strengths, how
they approach different situations as well as check the potential “dark side” of an individual and can further
screen out the potentially damaging and straight up destructive candidates.

Reference checking, employment contracts, onboarding and performance measurement and management
are all important parts of the strategy, but do not create the same sort of change as placing challenging,
honest job ads and being able to grade productivity potential

Check the Never Make the Wrong Hire Again playlist on YouTube for more detailed
information, case studies and application of this strategy.

THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO PERFORMANCE HIRING 8

CLASSIFICATION OF PRODUCTIVITY
To help improve hiring strategy and understand how important is how people are brought into your team
involves some understanding of how productivity can be segmented and defined across the broader public.

The chart on the right represents the productivity segments. On the side is number of people, and across
the bottom is the level of performance, meaning, how much a person is producing in a certain unit of time.

PERFORMERS make up about 20  % of the

workforce and they’re responsible for 80 % of the
result. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re
doing 80 % of the work but if, for example, if you
have 5 people in a team and you take the one
Performer out, the team will fall over and won’t
exist in a short period of time.

The definition of a “Performer” is ‘someone

who can deliver the expected result in an
area without any external pressure or orders
or influence’. They come into an area, you give
them a job to do, you give them the basic tools or
the basic training necessary to get the job done,
and they just deliver the result.

They don’t only need to sit in the top of the

organisation, however it gets even more
important to have Performers at the top of the
organisation because the effects multiply out.

THE STORY OF AN IMPRESSIVE

PERFORMER — GRAHAME
MAHER
As a quiet achiever, possibly a bit dull and boring he was also one of the most able
executives in the world. An Australian who started his career selling mobile phones,
built his business to the point where Vodafone purchased it when they first started in
Australia, and gave Grahame the job to start Vodafone in New Zealand. Within 3–4 years,
he had more market share than the government owned telecommunications company.
(The only country to have the incumbent telecommunications company #2!) Unfortunately, Grahame passed away
at the age of 51 in 2010. He was a
Meanwhile in Australia, Vodafone were ready to pull out. Vodafone head office in UK driving force behind Vodafone’s
announced they were losing $ 250m a year. success, and a true Aussie business
champion who will be truly missed.
As a last resort, they decided to bring Grahame from NZ to save Vodafone Australia.

In 18 months, he turned the business around from losing $ 250m to not just breaking even but making $ 100m profit. He had
to actually let go of over 2000 staff during this period, something he did personally, not hiding behind HR teams, He did not
have an office, but instead, he worked in each area of the business that needed to have staff numbers reduced and have its
productivity increased.

He created a massive profit change. A true Top Performer. Before him, they had someone who was a good Doer trying to get
Vodafone set up in Australia. Grahame then transferred to Sweden, and turned the business around; within 9 months he had
taken it from a loss, to selling the business for €1,035 million.

THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO PERFORMANCE HIRING 9

DOERS are 60  % of the workforce. A Doer
is someone who is willing, they want to see
you and the organisation do well, they want
to help, they want to learn but they do need
some external pressure, they need to be given
orders, and they need to be helped from time
to time. People in the Doer classification range
from being highly effective doers down to those
who have close to zero productivity.

At this point, they are not really adding value and

they’re not taking any value from the business
either. They could be costing you $ 70,000 a year
with overheads and on costs and support, then
they’re making $ 70,000 back. Unfortunately, if
this was as bad as it gets, business would be a lot
easier that what it actually is!

TROUBLE MAKERS. The next classification of

productivity is 17.5 % of the workforce we refer to as
“Potential Trouble Source”. They fall in the category
of “Undoers”, because they ‘undo’ things.

These are individuals who come into the

organisation and create trouble and problems.
They’re quite obvious to you because you see
them. The problem is, is that they suck about
80 % of attention from management, or your
Performers go to handle these people.

You then wonder —

“How am I going to handle this?”

“How do I get the person to
produce each week?”
“How do I sort out all their sick days?”
“How do I sort out that every time the person goes near a computer it breaks?”

THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO PERFORMANCE HIRING 10

And it gets really tough.

The interesting part is that these last 2.5 % are

what we call suppressive people, because they
try and suppress other people in being able
to improve or even maintain their own level of
productivity.

The 17.5  % “potential trouble source” are

observable, can be seen, but here is where it
gets dangerous — we don’t see THESE ones —
the 2.5 %. They are excellent at hiding behind
the scenes.

This is why you need to set up your organisation

to be able to detect these sort of people and
set up your recruitment systems to be able to
know that you’re not going to let these people
into your organisation.

This is the Product of Performia — Strategies

and tools to differentiate between the different
levels of performance and make sure you do
not hire these people.

With this product, you can move this curve

to over to the right, having more performers
and effective doers working in your team,
undistracted by undoers and suppressive
people.

See the Productivity

Index that identifies each person on a scale of 1 to 10.
Using a similar scale for judging a candidate will help
the hiring process have a much clearer view.

Download the Performia Productivity Index

THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO PERFORMANCE HIRING 11

THE RESULT
OF PERFORMIA SERVICES
The ease and success of your organisation’s
expansion and constant improvement is driven
by you and deployed by your team. How you
choose and grow your team is the main factor
underlying the success of your business and
requires consideration and its own strategy to
be sure that you have every chance of keeping
ahead of the curve.
Industry leading businesses, small and large,
just starting or fully established, just like
successful sports teams, have clearly worked
out and defined recruitment strategies that are
developed and driven from the top.
Performia is partnered with more than 10,000
businesses to help them develop their strategies,
and provide some of the tools required to have
industry leading teams.
The result of Performia’s recruitment strategies
and screening systems is —

Increased productivity.
Improved retention.
Safer workplaces.
Fun and fulfilling working environments.

Start your journey towards

a High Performance team —
Schedule your Strategy Consultation
THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO PERFORMANCE HIRING 12