Have you ever noticed it’s a whole lot easier to get top performance from somebody who has more capabilities to be a top performer?

So here’s the challenge that I’ve been noticing recently for a lot of the banks that we’ve helped take to the top five percent of performers.

Once they get there, they have a new problem that is mere mortals no longer fit into this organization because everybody else understands it, gets it, is moving fast, communicating properly about the right things, and has a natural energy and compassion for the customer that’s kind of built-in, and so they get it. And when the mere mortals come into that organization, they’re set up to fail which isn’t fair to them.

So might I suggest that you completely reinvent your hiring approach?

Most HR experts learn their craft in HR classes back in college which worked great back in the eighties and the nineties, but it’s not working today, and here’s why.

Imagine a top performer seeing an ad from you saying, “looking for someone who has strong Excel skills and can do a spreadsheet.” Woohoo, says the high performer, but that’s just not going to work and yet, that’s still the job posting that’s out there because we’re missing the point.

We are no longer hiring for skills. We are hiring souls. We are hiring people who have a passion for making a difference for customers and an unbelievable ability to learn new things quickly so that they can become the only banker that customer ever needs. That’s a different kind of human.

And, yes, you can teach them skills, but you can’t make them into that compassionate person who cares, who stands for learning, who wants to be a part of something great, and who has that fire in the belly.

You can’t train fire in the belly. You have to hire for that because the skills can be learned quickly, but the fire in the belly is what you need to hire.

Recently, I did a webinar, and prior to it, I did three weeks of research to determine what were the most important things to hire top performers and pretty much everything that is covered in the webinar are things you have never heard before.

Make sure you sign up to watch the webinar replay and get your entire executive team to listen together. Because here’s the thing, with AI coming with a vengeance, you better believe you’re going to have to hire people who have second-order thinking and a fire in the belly, and the old skill set hiring system is dead and over. So time to bury that one. When I have you back next week, we’re gonna talk about what do you do once you get these top performers in place.

But first, go watch the webinar, and learn how to do that. I had one bank executive who told me at the Best Banks of America Super Conference that their hiring improved a thousand percent as a result of watching that webinar, and the caliber of the people they’re bringing in was far better. So don’t miss the webinar. Click here to watch with your team.

Next week, we are hosting a part 2 hiring webinar you don’t want to miss.  Click here to register.

To your continued success, 

Roxanne Emmerich 

Please watch the video above and share it with your exec team and board.