Using AI, Everyone Can Now Be in the Top Third

by Lou Adler, CEO and founder of The Adler Group

According to ChatGPT everyone can now be in the top third despite the mathematical absurdity. These are people who are more motivated, more satisfied, more productive, stronger team players and more flexible. Here’s all you need to do to get started.

When opening any new requisition, be sure to ask this question:

What are the top 4-5 things a person needs to do to be successful in this role?

Once you know what work needs to be done it’s pretty easy to figure out if a person is competent enough. You just need to get examples of work the person has done that’s most comparable to these accomplishments.

Then as long as you don’t make any of the classic hiring blunders due to bias or assessing the person on the quality of their interviewing skills rather than the quality of their accomplishments, the person will be at least average.

But if you can figure out what motivates the person to excel you’ll be able to hire someone in the top third or top 20-25%. This is where AI is a game changer. It’s motivation to excel that represents the difference between an average performer and someone who is an outstanding performer.

For job seekers it’s pretty easy to figure if a job will allow you to become outstanding. Just ask the hiring manager the question above at the beginning of the interview. Then give examples of work you’ve done that are most comparable. As long as they’re reasonably close, you will get an offer! However, don’t accept the offer it unless you have all of the information about the critical non-monetary factors described in this post to assess the likelihood the job represents a worthy career move.

Doing this at scale is a bit more challenging. In this case you need to be sure all of the factors in the Hiring Effectiveness Index shown in the graphic are in the green zone. This mapping tool will help you figure this out for your company.

The most important – and the hardest – part of the entire process is conducting a “Job Analysis and Cultural Assessment” for each job. This starts with the job- question above but also requires a deep understanding of the company culture and the hiring manager’s leadership style. This is where AI in general and ChatGPT in particular can help you with the heavy lifting. We show hiring managers and recruiters how to do this at our Performance-based Hiring workshops, but this post provides a good overview. (Or just send us an email with a link to one of your open job descriptions and we’ll send you back the results.)

Assessing a candidate’s intrinsic motivation to excel is the key to hiring people who wind up in the top half of the top half. Figuring this out one candidate at a time is difficult enough but well worth the effort. However, doing this for hundreds or thousands of candidates per year requires a non-traditional approach. The factors in the Hiring Effectiveness Index describe exactly what needs to be done. AI provides the turbo-boost to jumpstart the entire process. But it all a starts with this one question when opening a new job:

 What does the person in this job need to do to be successful?  

Permission has been granted from The Adler Group and Lou Adler, author of Hire With Your Head and The Essential Guide to Hiring & Getting Hired, to reprint this article.

About the author
Lou Adler is the CEO and founder of The Adler Group – a training and search firm helping companies implement Performance-based Hiring℠. Adler is the author of the Amazon top-10 best-seller, Hire With Your Head (John Wiley & Sons, 3rd Edition, 2007). His most recent book has just been published, The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired (Workbench, 2013). He is also the author of the award-winning Nightingale-Conant audio program, Talent Rules! Using Performance-based Hiring to Build Great Teams (2007). Adler holds an MBA from the University of California in Los Angeles and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Clarkson University in New York.