In this 13‑minute presentation, the speaker illustrates how hiring a marketing manager can swing a company’s five‑year value by up to $9 million. Three hypothetical candidates—A, B, and C—are presented, each with strong résumés and interview performance. Candidate A’s strategy multiplies the firm’s value five‑fold, adding roughly $4 million; Candidate B doubles the firm’s value, adding about $1 million; Candidate C, despite glowing references, drives the company to bankruptcy, erasing $1‑2 million of value. The speaker uses these scenarios to argue that hiring decisions are among the most financially consequential choices an organization makes, often exceeding half‑a‑million dollars in impact. He then promotes the Performia evaluation system as a rigorous screening tool that would have identified Candidate A as the optimal hire and filtered out candidates like C before they even applied. The talk is a persuasive call to action for managers and HR professionals to adopt systematic, data‑driven hiring processes to avoid costly mis‑hires.
Chapters
So now we've got these 3 candidates. We have Candidate A, Candidate B, and Candidate C. And all of them have really good resumes. All of them have more than 10 years experience. And all of them present to you like fantastic. They sit in the interview, they've got the best ideas. The best way they're going to take your organization over the next 5 years to be the, you know, one of the largest in its field. And it's a very important job. This person is going to be a marketing manager. And so let's have a look at this. So look at each scenario. So here's 5 years. And let's say up here, so this is time, up here is the value of my organization. So I hire, after lots of interviewing and, and racking my brains and having meetings with my team and everything else, I decide to hire Marketing Manager A. He comes into the organization and we start off with our benchmark here of value. And this guy comes in and after 5 years, he actually 5— his marketing plan and strategy 5x's the value of my organization. Is this a good hiring? Yeah. Yeah. Now if my organization started off being worth $1 million, How much money did this guy make for me? He made 5 times his $5 million. He made $4 million for me. Correct? Yes. Or he improved the value for the shareholders by $4 million. So of course we can sit there and we can attribute all other reasons. He was lucky, this happened, blah blah blah. But it's ultimately the marketing manager. He had the— he increased the amount of leads coming in By more than 15 times. That allowed the sales guys to be more effective. It's like he was the source of what happened. Let's look at scenario number 2. I hire Manager B. Very similar to Manager A, but I like this guy more because he's got more experience and worked at larger companies. So I hire him. So he starts here, and by the end of the 5 years, it's like he doubles the company. So that makes me $1 mil extra in the value of my business. Of course, and some profit along the way. So it's not horrible. You know, most companies would be happy to double over 5 years, wouldn't they? Yeah. Now I look at this guy C. I hire this guy because I decided to hire him because he's amazing. You know, he looks sharp, he came in, even did PowerPoint presentations of what he was going to do with the company. You know, I ring his old boss and his old boss tells me that this guy, man, he's one of the sharpest guys we ever had here and we're really sorry to lose this guy. So I hire this guy and 5 years later it's like I don't have a company anymore. It's gone. Because what I did was I listened to this guy and I spent so much money on marketing that didn't work that I basically, I sent myself broke. So I'm a little bit upset too. So now I actually ring back 5 years later and I'm sitting in the gutter. I've got a paper bag with a bottle of wine in it and I ring the guy. I ring his old boss. I go, you know, when I rang you, you said this guy's sharp and he's really good and it's like, but you know, he actually sent our company broke. I listened to this guy for 3 years thinking that he was the guru. His old boss says, Yeah, well, I don't know, we didn't really get, you know, now you say it, we didn't get any results really either. He said, you know, we put him as a marketing manager, we paid him a big wage, but now I look at it, over that 3 years he was here, our sales dropped. But we just thought it was the global financial crisis, but he's a good guy. But look at the difference, right? Because not only between this selection, so this is a major decision. And it could be just as major if you wanted to hire someone to put wheels on, on a production line in a car manufacturer. Because if those wheels aren't put on properly and the wheel falls off, that could be just as devastating to the organization. But what we have, the difference here is we had a company worth $1 million, probably making, you know, $200,000 to $300,000 profit or whatever, company now is back gone to zero. So now over this period this person has lost $1 to $2 million and has no organization. And probably the management team or the owners lost all confidence in actually going out and doing it again. So now they go, you know what, I'm just gonna run a small organization, do it myself. This guy comes in, he makes an extra $4 million on the capital value of the business, but also every year added a lot to profit. So over the period, this guy may have actually added $7 million to the shareholders. So now we have a difference, a $9 million decision on whether we hire A, B, or C. And I can play this out for every job in every organization. And it's like, you know, very rarely does it become less than a half a million dollar decision. So how you screen And how you choose people becomes one of the most important things you'll ever do in your organization. And so use the Perform Your Evaluation system because the Perform Your Evaluation system, I can guarantee you, would only have chosen A. Would have straightaway seen C probably before the person— we even looked at the person's resume. In actual fact, I can nearly guarantee you that C wouldn't have applied for the job because the way the jobs are— the job ads are written. Okay, B would have been interesting, but A would just stand out so easily. So the person would apply, so that same day we go, I think we found our person. So use the Performia system. If you haven't used it, give it a try. I'm sure you've got A, Bs, and Cs already in your organization, so put them through the Performia system and let Performia show you straight up. Go, you know what, you should never have hired this guy, this guy's interesting, but yeah, we can— you should always just find these guys. Really simple.
