One of the biggest drains on individual career success, and company success, is the mis-hiring of low performers. It’s a quiet epidemic undermining careers, company performance, and even national productivity. A frustrated CEO said, slightly crudely, “Job seekers who hide their mistakes are like one huge pile of elephant poop, because they contaminate hiring processes.”
If you're tired of hiring mistakes, you're in good company. But that doesn’t make you feel good, does it? Candidates are conning nearly everyone - and most hiring processes aren't designed to stop it.
Why Do Candidates Get Away with It?
The root of the problem is fear of legal liability when it comes to reference checking. Most companies instruct their managers not to take reference calls about former employees. A negative reference could trigger a lawsuit against the manager, the company, or both.
Job seekers know this. They expect you won’t verify their past job performance. That gives them the freedom to exaggerate strengths, hide weaknesses, and present themselves as someone they’re not. In short, they game the system - and win. Again: A Players tend to be open and honest and it’s the low performers who game the system and con you.
Candidate Dishonesty Is Widespread
The data backs this up. Surveys by The Wall Street Journal, Stanford University, Checkster, University of Massachusetts, and others report that between 50% and 92% of job seekers lie on resumes or during interviews.
Some sources even list 30 common lies told during job interviews. This makes recruiting top talent incredibly challenging. Even if you're using structured interviews or resume screening software, it’s easy to be fooled by candidates who know how to fool you.
So, while every CEO and HR leader wants a scalable, data-driven hiring process, the reality is: you can’t build a great team if you’re hiring based on misinformation.
The Cost of Hiring Mistakes
At Topgrading, we've long observed that most candidates exaggerate their successes and gloss over their failures. The result?
This is the true cost of poor hiring decisions: When you’re spending time and money recruiting, onboarding, training, and managing hires who don’t work out, your hiring ROI collapses. Even with the rise of AI in hiring, the problem persists - because AI can’t detect dishonesty. AI just helps companies make the same hiring mistakes faster.
Why Most Companies “Live With” B Players
Companies committed to hiring top talent often find themselves compromising. Hiring only A Players feels disruptive and slow, so they accept a mix of average performers. But the cycle is costly: to get one A Player, they often hire and replace three others. That is the reality when only 25% of your hires turn out to be high performers. For example, to build a team of 75 A Players, a company with 25% success hiring A Players will probably fire three people for every A Player, so that means hiring and firing 225 people to end up with 75 As. That’s the hidden inefficiency behind most traditional hiring practices. There is a better hiring method.
Imagine a Better Hiring Track Record
Ask yourself: if you had consistently hired 75% or more A Players, how much more successful would your team - and your own career - be today? Most leaders say, “a lot.” Multiply that impact across millions of hiring managers, and you start to understand how candidate deception affects company performance and GDP. Hiring mistakes aren’t just a business issue - they’re an economic one, dragging down our nation that suffers from so many hiring mistakes.
The Solution: A Hiring Process That Prevents Candidate Lying
When Jack Welch rolled out Topgrading at General Electric, the company moved from middle-of-the-pack to the most valuable company in the world. Welch became the most admired CEO in the world. And he praised Topgrading non-stop because he wanted thousands of vendors to serve GE with A Players. GE went from 25% to over 80% A Players hired because Topgrading introduced honest, evidence-based hiring practices that made it harder for candidates to lie and easier for managers to hire high performers consistently.
Unlike most hiring strategies, Topgrading is specifically designed to:
Our case studies show that companies using Topgrading often triple their success rate in hiring high performers.
Ready to Improve Your Hiring Results?
We don’t just help companies avoid hiring mistakes - we help them build world-class teams. If you're ready to improve your hiring results immediately (yes, as soon as next week), we’d love to hear from you.
Let’s talk about how you can stop settling - and start hiring with confidence.
Topgrading can help you hire honest, high performers. Contact us.
Dr. Brad Smart is Founder and CEO of Topgrading, Inc. Topgrading is dedicated to helping companies of all sizes maximize the hiring of high performers. Topgrading assesses candidates for senior positions (where the costs of mis-hires are high) and trains all managers to create teams of almost all high performers. Brad has seven published books on hiring; the most recent three (the first, second, and third editions of Topgrading) were all best sellers.
To learn more, download our free eGuide.
Improve your hiring success with Topgrading. Our proven hiring process will transform your selection methodology so that you get better hiring results across all industries, including hiring HR professionals. Our leadership and candidate assessment tools will help you assess, hire, retain, and grow outstanding team members. Contact us to learn more!