How many qualified interviews does it take to hire an ‘A’ player?
Before we discuss the interview-to-hire ratio for top performers please factor in the following two points on why hiring A Players is paramount to any organization’s success today:
#1: It is harder (paradoxically) to hire in the downturn. (In a downturn, the amount of resumes from C-Players massively increases while the amount of resumes from A-Players remains the same.)
#2: With a 25% success rate for hiring (that’s a 75% failure rate!), 40 people have to be hired and 30 fired to end up with 10 high performers. With 90% hiring success, only 11 people must be hired and 1 fired to get 10 high performers. (source: TopGrading).
Using a common interview-to-hire ratio (which all staffing companies track) of 4:1 and assuming that only 10% of the workforce qualifies as A Players it takes 40 QUALIFIED interviews to hire one A Player.
| Overview: Interview to Hire Ratio for A Players | Normal Hiring Metrics | A Player Hiring Metrics |
| Resumes | 36 | 360 |
| Candidates | 12 | 120 |
| Interviews | 4 | 40 |
| Hires | 1 | 1 |
| % of the market | 90% | 10% |
The question that then arises is, what is the best way to accurately select an "A" player from the finalists?
Numerous ERE authors have detailed how only interviewing very rarely gets the job done (failure of not using assessments) , however the best interviewing and hiring practice that I know of (and the one most Private Equity and Venture Capitals use) is Hiring Best Practices from TopGrading.
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