What's the ROI of Great Interviewing?

6-Figure Opportunities Hiding In Plain Sight

How much 💰 are you missing out on when you settle for good instead of great in a high-stakes role?

Let's take a look at a simple thought experiment where we compare what *most* companies do and what your company can do instead.

Let's say we're hiring a VP of Sales. (The logic will work for any role).

A top 2% candidate ("A Player") would add $10mm of value to your biz over 5 years. A top 20% candidate ("B Player") would add $6mm in that same period.

Five candidates have made it through your initial interview screens. One is an A, and the other 4 candidates are B's. How much time and effort should you spend trying to finely discriminate between the five candidates to select the A?

Thankfully, there's an answer to this. An interview process that can't distinguish among these 5 will end up choosing more or less randomly among the 5. (And most interviews really are no better than random). The expected value here is $6.8mm.

((6*4) + (10*1)) / 5 = 6.8 🤓

But you can do better than random, obviously. World-class talent assessors make the right call around 90% of the time. Let’s be conservative and say that—with great interview training—your team would get it right 80% of the time.

How much is that improvement worth to your company?

If your team selects the A 80% of the time, you now have an expected value from this process of $9.2mm.

.8(10) + .2(6) = 9.2

Your company's value just increased—on average—by $2.4 million by having an elite interview team and process in place. 🤯

And how much did it cost to make this happen?

Even assuming your best internal interviewer costs you $2,000/hr (*opportunity cost* of their time), performing a multi-hour Deep Dive interview with each of these 5 candidates is *easily* worth the marginal cost.

Here’s how it breaks down...

Assume a 3hr interview + 1hr reviewing notes and doing ratings + 1hr candidate roundtable. That's 5 hours invested.

At $2k/hr, that's a $10k opportunity cost per interview. For 5 candidates, that's $50k. But you gained $2.8 *million*. The ROI in this example is a staggering 4,800%.

In this case, a series of 5 properly done Deep Dive interviews was *48 times more valuable* than that person’s typical day job.

The exact math will vary based on the parameters, but the takeaway message is clear: elite interviewing has a massively high ROI.

Happy Hiring!

Jordan & Matt