You already know who your best people are. Ask any operations lead to name their strongest 3 employees and the answer comes back in seconds.
Yet almost nobody hires against that answer. Instead the job posting gets rewritten from an old template. Then screening starts from years of experience and a list of qualifications.
So the information sits there unused. Your top performing employees are the clearest description of a good hire you will ever have. Most hiring processes ignore them completely.
Most companies mislabel their top performers
Before you can hire against a benchmark, the benchmark has to be right. And this is where it usually goes wrong.
Most companies pick their top performing employees by instinct. That instinct is unreliable.
Winnie Jiang covered this in research for Harvard Business Review. Employees who treat work as a calling tend to look like top performers. But they often are not.
As Jiang describes it, these workers can be idealistic rather than effective. They may also criticise how the company works in ways that lead nowhere useful.
Managers fall for it anyway. Long hours read as commitment. So those employees get labelled as stars, while the person who quietly does excellent work at 5pm gets overlooked.
What to measure instead
Four areas hold up across most front line roles.
- The quality of the work itself, not only dashboard numbers
- Willingness to keep learning on the job
- Quality of customer service and work alongside others
- Ability to solve problems, alone and with a team
Rate your top performing employees against those four before you build any hiring profile. Otherwise you will benchmark against the loudest employee rather than the best one.
Turning your best people into a hiring benchmark
Start with the role, not the person
A benchmark describes a role, not an individual. So pick one role and identify the 2 or 3 people who do it best.
Then ask what they have in common. Usually it is not their background. More often it is how they handle pressure, and how fast they recover from a bad shift.
Profile behaviour, not history
Resumes describe where someone has been. Behaviour describes how they work.
This is the shift that makes replication possible. Two people with very different histories can do the same role equally well. A resume will never show you that.
Apply it to every applicant, the same way
A benchmark only works if it gets used consistently. So it has to be applied to everyone, in the same way, on every role.
Applied unevenly, it is just another opinion. Applied consistently, it is the closest thing to a repeatable hiring decision you will get.
Why this falls apart at volume
Building one benchmark is easy. Holding it across 40 hires a month is not.
So the profile drifts, and the link back to your top performing employees quietly breaks.
The pattern repeats everywhere. A location runs short staffed, so the profile gets loosened. A manager likes someone in conversation and skips the check. Another reuses a profile from a different role because it was faster.
Nobody abandons the benchmark on purpose. Even so, within a quarter it describes nothing.
Usually this is a capacity problem, not a discipline problem. When interview capacity becomes the constraint, the agreed standard is the first thing to go.
How Workwolf® replicates your top performing employees
Workwolf® does not hand you a benchmarking tool and leave you to run it. We run the hiring process for you.
In practice, we start with the people already doing the job well. They complete Packfinder, our behavioural assessment, and their profile becomes the standard for the role.
Then we source and screen every applicant against that profile. Finally, you get a shortlist of people who match how your best employees actually work.
Because our team applies the profile rather than yours, it holds in month 3 as firmly as in week 1. Nobody is deciding under deadline pressure whether to bend it.
Fit measured this way also holds up after the start date, which is much of why early turnover starts before day one.
What about developing the people you already have?
Hiring is not the only route, and it should not be the first one. Coaching a willing employee is almost always cheaper than replacing them.
Two approaches work well. The first is paying for training when someone has the right instincts but lacks a technical skill. The second is review coaching. Here an employee watches a recording of their own work with a supervisor, then breaks down what to change.
Both work best when strong and developing employees work side by side. Skills transfer faster in practice than in a classroom.
Still, neither approach helps when you need 30 new people next month. That is a hiring problem, and it needs a hiring answer.
Where to start
You do not need a project to start. Pick one role you hire for repeatedly. Name the 2 people who do it best, and write down what they have in common that has nothing to do with their resume.
That list is your first benchmark. If you cannot write it, that gap is the real problem. It also explains why hiring for that role feels like guesswork.
And if the benchmark exists but never survives a busy month, the issue is capacity. We covered the warning signs in our piece on when hiring volume outgrows your team.
Book a call with our team. We will look at one role you hire for often and show you what benchmarking it would change.
