There’s a 400x productivity gap between top and bottom performers. Harvard Business Review didn’t mince words when it reported that high performers can outperform their low-performing peers by a staggering factor of 400. That stat alone should cause every hiring manager to sit up straighter.
But here’s the kicker: if you think traditional interviews will help you spot those high performers, think again.
Let’s break the illusion. Generic interview questions like “Tell me about a time when…” or “What are your strengths and weaknesses?” aren’t drafted to uncover transformational talent. They’re built for safety, consistency, and surface-level confidence.
What sets them apart? They don’t script their answers. They come prepared to elevate the conversation.
You’ll know a high performer the moment the interview stops feeling like a Q&A and starts feeling like a strategy session.
They bring:
They challenge assumptions. They spot blind spots. And occasionally, they come with a pre-built slide deck. Not because you asked, but because they see the role as already theirs to elevate. Assertiveness is a trademark of high performers.
The problem with traditional interviews? They reward performance in the interview, not necessarily an indication of performance on the job.
Low performers often say the right things. But listen closely:
In an interview with hiring strategist Ron Mason, several consistent patterns emerge among low-performing candidates. They speak in generalities, lean heavily on team references, and often lack clear ownership of outcomes.
Forbes contributor Mark Murphy reinforces this point. Candidates who default to using “you” or “they” in response to situational questions are often distancing themselves from responsibility. That’s not just a language quirk. It’s a tell. If you start to see these patterns when you’re interviewing your candidate, we recommend you go deeper by asking probing questions. Think “how, why, tell me more” prompts to uncover whether they are truly a high performer.
Don’t just ask questions. Build a structured process. One proven approach? The A Method from the bestselling book Who by Geoff Smart and Randy Street.
The A Method focuses on four repeatable steps:
It replaces guesswork with clarity, and fluffy answers with deep, job-relevant evidence. The result? A dramatically higher hit rate on exceptional hires.
Want more smart prompts to build into your process? See more high-performance interview questions here.
In short, we’re not in the business of just filling roles. We’re in the business of finding people who change the trajectory of your company and helping you keep them with employee engagement and human capital audits, onboarding processes, and performance management.
Our hiring approach doesn’t hinge on canned questions. Instead, we define your employee value proposition and then apply a portion of The A Method that surfaces high-caliber talent, often hidden in passive candidate pools. We ask candidates to talk to us through their resume starting from the beginning and answering three questions to give us insights with how they think.
1. What did you do in the role?
2. What was your biggest success?
3. Why did you leave the position?
The result of using this approach? We recently partnered with a client who saw immediate revenue growth after we helped them hire two high-performing sales professionals using our process. The impact was so pronounced, they asked us to build out five more roles to support the momentum.
That’s the 400x difference in action.
Check out the full story here:
“High Performers vs. Low Performers” on LinkedIn
Final Thought
Hiring high performers starts by rethinking the process. It’s not about asking better questions. It’s about asking better for whom?
Because if your process is built to surface average contributors, that’s exactly who you’ll find.
Want more high performers on your team? Then make your interview feel less like a quiz or interrogation and more like a strategic dialogue that reveals intellect, skills, decision-making, humility, confidence, and assertion.