In this talk, the speaker proposes a hiring system that eliminates traditional resume screening in favor of an automated questionnaire sent to all applicants. The questionnaire responses are used to estimate each candidate’s production potential and expected return on investment (ROI) for the organization. By evaluating candidates on productivity factors such as curiosity, motivation, purpose, and learning ability—rather than formal training or experience—the system aims to identify a small subset of applicants with extremely high projected ROI (e.g., 1,000% return). The speaker explains how the Performia production‑evaluation system and production interview techniques quantify the investment required (salary, training time) versus the anticipated value generated over the employee’s tenure, guiding hiring decisions toward those who can deliver the greatest financial upside.
Chapters
Imagine a hiring system where you don't even need to look at a resume. So someone comes in, they apply for the position, they send in their application, their resume, and then as you know, you know, most resumes are written in a particular way. Quite often they're written in a way so they respond to automated resume matching systems. They have a lot of the same words in them. The same, you know, enthusiastic, quick learner, autonomous, all these sorts of things. So we know when we read a resume, there's like usually only one or two things we're interested in. And even those may not be true. Or may be written in a way to try and trick us. So imagine a system where the resume comes in and the system automatically doesn't even check the resume. It sends out a questionnaire to a person and from that The answers to that questionnaire tells us how— what the potential of production is for this person. Basically, what is my potential return on investment for this person? So 100 people apply, 100 questionnaires go out, the, you know, maybe 80 or 90 responses come back on this, and we go, wow, we can see that the return on investment for this few people is extremely high, and for these people— Very low. It's actually going to cost us a lot more because they're below the 0%. And we have that system because the first step whenever trying to screen or assess someone is, can they add value to your organization? Is there a potential for that? Because if there's no potential for them to add value to your organization, why would you ever consider to pay them money? And so this is the very first step. And this is how Performia totally turns and to some degree revolutionizes the whole screening and candidate selection process. Because traditionally, let's look at knowledge, which is training and experience. But training and experience doesn't make a person productive. You know, if you look in Australia one year at the 100 richest people under 40 years old, more than half of them didn't finish university. In fact, I think more than half of them didn't even finish high school. So they got out and they had an idea and they had motivation and they had some compelling purpose and the skills to be able to inquire and learn things so they could become successful. And these are the core things that make a person productive, not their training or their experience. If the right sort of person with the right curiosity and the motivation and the will to see and the purpose to see things succeed gets trained and gets experience, they become even more so. So we're not interested in this until really much further down the track when we've gone through our 100 applicants and found the 2 or 3 that come up with the highest return potential for return on investment. And when I say return on investment, You're investing in this employee. You pay them money each week, week in, week out. Usually for the first 1 week to 1 year, they don't start producing value. So you could invest as much as $100,000 in an employee before you start to get a return on them. And so you need to know how much do I need to invest in this person for the life that they're here, maybe 5 years, 10 years, 1 year. How much am I going to invest compared to how much are they going to make back to me? And really that return on investment, if you look at it in any successful organization, you know, it should be, you know, it should be more than 1,000%. So I pay the person $100,000 a year and they return to the company $1 million. That's what we're looking for. This is a target. This is a strategy. And the way to achieve it is to reverse your hiring flow. Don't look for First for knowledge and experience. Look for productivity. Use the Performia production evaluation system. Use the product— use the production interview techniques. And then you'll know whether you're interested and you should be talking to this person.
