Talk to Topgrading: The Proven Hiring and Promoting Method That Turbocharges Company Performance like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
Topgrading is Bradford Smart's comprehensive argument that companies succeed or fail primarily based on whether they have high performers — A-players — in every role, and that most organizations are far worse at identifying and retaining them than they believe. Smart spent decades as an executive coach and assessor, and Topgrading is both his methodology and a detailed account of what separates A-player thinking from the rest.
The book's central method is a long structured interview called the Topgrading Interview, which can run three to four hours or more. Like the Who interview in the later book by Smart's son Geoff, it is chronological: the interviewer walks through every job in the candidate's history, exploring successes, failures, key relationships, and the candidate's own self-assessment of performance. The length is deliberate. Smart argues that patterns only emerge over time, and that candidates can maintain a false performance for an hour but rarely for three. Tandem interviewing — two interviewers in the room simultaneously — reduces individual bias.
What it gets right
- 1.
A-players are the top 10 percent of available talent for a given compensation level. Most organizations settle for B- and C-players without realizing it because their interview process can't distinguish them.
- 2.
The Topgrading Interview is a multi-hour structured chronological walkthrough of a candidate's career. Length and structure together surface patterns that short interviews reliably miss.
- 3.
Tandem interviewing — two trained interviewers present simultaneously — reduces individual bias and increases the probability that both interviewers probe the same signals.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Bradford D. Smart is an industrial psychologist and executive coach who has advised hundreds of CEOs and conducted thousands of executive assessments over a four-decade career. He is the founder of Smart & Associates and the creator of the Topgrading methodology, which has been adopted by companies including General Electric, Lincoln Financial, and American Standard. His son Geoff Smart co-founded the consulting firm ghSMART and co-authored Who: The A Method for Hiring, which adapts the Topgrading framework for broader management use. Bradford Smart holds a PhD in psychology from Purdue University.
