Selecting Top Performers
Be Careful What You Wish For
Copyright 2005

When using job match assessments to improve the selection and promotion process, success may depend largely upon how top performers are identified. Since the process is designed to help a business select candidates who share the job-related characteristics of top performers, misidentification of those characteristics by misidentifying members of that group can lead to poor results and selection of candidates who do not perform well.

Ask a manager who his or her top performers are and you will usually get a quick answer. Ask for the basis of that selection, however, and you may be surprised how fuzzy or imprecise the criteria are. It is not unusual to discover that managers have no measurable, repeatable criteria for identifying this most important group of employees!

In some jobs, measurable and objective criteria are relatively easy to identify. A salesperson, for example, may be measured on sales production (units, dollars, profit, etc.). Appropriate measures for sales performance may also include calls made per unit of time, customer service measures or revenue growth. Performance in other jobs may not be as easy to measure.

Often, faced with the task of identifying performance measures in a field with soft outputs or very long-term outputs, managers fall back on personal likes and dislikes, personality conflicts/lack of conflicts or other measures with little relationship to their company’s goals, profitability or long-term success.

In some settings, recognition of these challenges result in attempts to make evaluation more objective. A favorite tactic in these settings is supervisory rating scales, where supervisors rate incumbents on one or more dimensions thought critical to performance on a numerical scale that may run from three to 10 points. The outcome of such ratings may look objective, as we tend to associate decimal numbers with objectivity: “She scored a 2.7 of a possible three!” Unfortunately, analysis of range compression (where everyone scores in a one-point range of a possible three) and interrater reliability raises serious questions about the validity and utility of these procedures.

If the procedures are flawed, the outcomes will be equally flawed, with serious consequences for the business and the employees affected.

What can a manager do to avoid these pitfalls and select top performers on the basis of objective, repeatable and predictive criteria? Fortunately, since the issues in selecting top performers for job fit assessment are essentially the same as those surrounding the entire topic of performance appraisal, the literature is rich with sources offering guidance.

Interested readers might start with these titles: