In this 10‑minute presentation, Negar Riazati (on behalf of Performia) outlines a rapid, four‑step hiring framework designed to identify high‑value candidates within minutes. The method begins with assessing a candidate’s past production using five concrete screening questions that reveal concrete value added in previous roles. Candidates who cannot demonstrate past production are filtered out, eliminating 80‑90% of applicants. The second step evaluates personality traits relevant to team fit, problem‑solving orientation, pressure handling, and customer service. The third step probes motivation, distinguishing candidates driven by challenge and intrinsic reward from those motivated solely by pay, with implications for retention and risk. The final step examines knowledge and education, emphasizing that formal credentials do not guarantee workplace performance. Throughout, Riazati promotes Performia’s automated online system that can screen large applicant pools, provides a free checklist of the five production questions, and offers a free self‑assessment tool (performia.com.au/free). The presentation frames the approach as a return‑on‑investment (ROI) measurement that lets employers predict a hire’s value before onboarding, reducing hiring risk and cost.
Chapters
We all know that hiring staff can be a really tedious exercise. And so today we're going to look at how in 10 minutes you can actually just quickly do an interview with someone and know whether they're a person that you'll be interested in having work in your organisation or not. So it's really important to know how to screen precisely, very quickly, right at the start of the process so that you get the right person at the right time, but also know that you're not dealing with the wrong person when you should be dealing— you know, should be getting them out. of the process. So how's that done? I'm going to show you a little bit here. And what we know is there's an exact sequence. There's 4 steps to go through. And the first step, and the most important step, is to know the person's past production. Know how much they performed in the past, how much value they've added to an organisation. Now to do this, we actually have 5 simple questions. You can actually download these questions as part of the checklist by checking the link below. But these 5 questions, when you know the answer you're looking for and when you know how to get these questions answered, they're going to tell you very quickly where this person sits. Now, what we know for sure, that if the person sitting in front of you can't produce, if they can't show you or demonstrate how they've added value in the past, there's no point going on an interview. Because it doesn't matter how nice the person is, it doesn't matter how qualified they are, It doesn't matter what skills they have. It's like there's no point putting someone into your organisation that can't show you how they've added value in the past. Now knowing how they added value in the past, this is the skill. It's one of the key skills that Performia offers because, you know, in sport it can be really easy. Let's say we're going to hire a soccer player for our team. We need this player to kick goals. As the coach, it's really easy. I just ask this person, how many goals did you kick last season? If this person can't answer the question or they tell me really they kick no goals, it's like I know at that point I'm not really interested because this person will come on my team and they're not going to actually produce a product. They're not going to kick goals. It doesn't matter how enthusiastic they are. It doesn't matter how much I like them. There's no point. As a coach, I'm not going to take them. And so as an employer, it can be a bit tougher to do when you have a receptionist or you have a personal assistant or you have a factory worker or you have a general manager. Because it's the same rules apply. It's just knowing how many goals a person kicked is what becomes the skill. And that's what you'll learn with these 5 questions. Exactly how do I find in 10 minutes how many goals this person kicked for me? Now once you know if someone has got some sort of production record, that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to hire them. What it means now is you're interested to look at them further. But what we know is you'll probably get rid of maybe 80 to 90% of your applicants with this first step of the process. Also with Performia, we can actually automate this. So if you've got 1,000 applicants, we have an online system that can actually screen them out on a production basis so that it saves you a lot of time again. But now we're there, we can look at personality. So those that have produced well, we're interested in personality. Why are we interested in personality? Simple. It's like we know if they're going to want to fit the position. We want to know, you know, if they're going to stay or how long they're going to stay for. We also want to know how they deal with others, because most jobs the person needs to be part of a team or deal with someone outside the organisation. So with the personality evaluation that Performia uses, you know, you'll know how to train someone, you'll know whether they're more solution orientated or whether they're more focused on problems, which is not an issue because some jobs a person needs to focus on problems, other jobs you need them to focus on solutions. You know how a person gets started on the job, you know how long it takes them to get started, You know, whether you can really trust the person, you know, how they handle pressure. You know, you have some jobs where maybe you get a lot of complaints in and the other person's getting yelled at. Some people just yawn at this and it's easy. You know whether a person's really outgoing. Will they pick the phone up and cold call? You know, we can tell this from our evaluation. You know, have the person got good customer service skills? Are they someone that, you know, will make people feel better when they hang up the phone or will they feel worse? We can tell how a person works in groups, whether they're a social type of person, whether they're the person you want to bring into your organization because you need to sack lots of people, or whether you want to bring in because you want to build the organization. All this you can tell from our evaluation. And you know, it's pretty unbelievable. In fact, I know it's so unbelievable because I've spoken to a lot of people, done a lot of evaluations with this, a lot of customers use it. You know, we've done more than 1 million of these evaluations around the world. We also know that there's a lot of testing systems out there. I know that we're one of the only ones that I know of where we give you an evaluation to use for yourself. So you can do the evaluation yourself, and when we give you the results, you'll know whether we're talking about you or whether we're actually really off the mark and our system doesn't work at all. Or you can give it— the evaluation— to someone in your workplace that you've known for a few years, and we can tell you within a few minutes what it might have taken you a few years to find out about this person. To get your free evaluation, Go to performia.com.au/free. You can find out for yourself how accurate our system is. So now that you know the person can add value to the organisation, you know that they're going to fit the position, the next thing you really want to know is motivation. So, you know, with motivation, it's like you already know yourself, you know the staff members that are working in your organisation, and they're there, they're just there for themselves. You know, when you go ask them to do something, It's like their first response is, you know, look, I'm not sure if it's part of my job, or why can't you get such-and-such to do it? You know, these are people, their motivation is really like, you know, you give me something, okay, I might give something back. These guys are quite tough to manage. On the contrary, you can have the person, it's like they're there because the challenge of the job suits them. You know, when you're interviewing this person, it's like they're asking you questions about the job. They're looking to see whether they can really do this job whether it's something that makes them feel good if they can accomplish it. And then when they start working for you, it's like they're motivated by the challenge of getting it done. You know, of course they're interested in the pay they get, but, you know, the pay— they know they will get good pay when they actually resolve the challenge and they add the value to the organization. And if these people don't get the right pay, their solution is just to look for another job. Whereas a person that's there for the pay and the conditions, when they don't get the right pay, then their solution is to, okay, I'm just going to go cause more trouble for the company. You know, now I'm going to take legal action, now I'm going to find all the issues and problems with this organisation and extort them for more money. And this is why it's important to really know motivation. And again, we really can nail this in a big way. The final factor, which is a little bit odd because the final thing that we actually look at and get you to look at when you do your hiring with the Performia system is looking at knowledge and education. The first step of this is we know that knowledge doesn't equal education. It doesn't mean it's just because someone did really well at university that now they're the best doctor or the best lawyer or the best marketing manager. You know, for sure, education and high marks in education prove dedication and they prove that a person actually can apply themselves. But it doesn't always extrapolate out into the workplace. Sometimes the person with great university credentials or great training credentials doesn't do so well in a production check. They haven't actually been able to add so much good value to their organisations. Whereas somebody that comes in and has basically no training or education actually has unbelievable production. So we know that quite often people that might get excluded from a job because of their qualifications or their training or even their experience or lack of it, A lot of these people can actually be a lot more productive in the job and create a lot more value than those that have the experience and training. So if you've got a hiring system where you know the person, how valuable they are in front of you, you know how they're going to fit into the job, you know how they're motivated, you understand how their knowledge and experience weighs into it all, you have a very powerful tool because now you can start to build your organization, you can build your team with real bricks. They're bricks that you know are solid and strong. They're sitting on a foundation where you know the wall's not going to fall over. And also they're affordable bricks because where you thought you may have to spend $100,000 or $200,000 to get a particular person, now you can actually invest a lot less and get a person that may create a lot more. But you'll know when you go through before you hire the person where this value sits. And this is the real value in Performia. It's a return on investment measurement. You can measure the return on investment of a person before you decide to hire them. No longer do you need to put someone into your workforce and watch them for 6 months, 1 year, 2 years to decide whether you made the right hiring decision. You can do it before. So download our free checklist. This will get you started on the road to see some new ways and new solutions, how we've turned the whole hiring system backwards so that you get the results you expect. when you actually are going to interview someone and put them into your organisation. So for now, thank you. Download the list, and we look forward to some future cooperation.
