Dear Bob ... Your last KJR ("More Katrina lessons," 3/6/2006, which explained that having great employees is more important than having great processes) was unexpected. I didn't expect to hear someone admit publicly how vast a chasm exists between the greats, and the woefully inept. I suppose management's job is to weed out the lowest performers, challenge the top performers, and try to find the right assignment Dear Bob … Your last KJR (“More Katrina lessons,” 3/6/2006, which explained that having great employees is more important than having great processes) was unexpected. I didn’t expect to hear someone admit publicly how vast a chasm exists between the greats, and the woefully inept. I suppose management’s job is to weed out the lowest performers, challenge the top performers, and try to find the right assignment to get the most out of everybody else. I’m sure I’m not alone in asking for follow-ups on how to identify and hire the heroes you describe. – Heroically hiringDear Heroic … A couple of thoughts:* I’m hardly the first to declare, publicly, the size of the gap between the greats and the woefully inept. Way back when, in the book “The Mythical Man Month,” Frederick Brooks reported research showing that the best programmers were at least 10 times more productive than average ones, by every measure.* Hiring nothing but heroes might not be the best strategy either: Sometimes, the characteristics that make someone a hero make them among the least effective when working in highly structured situations … for example, those you have anticipated, and for which you’ve developed well-defined procedures. * More generally, while some people are poor performers in general, most are poor performers because they’re in a role for which they aren’t suited. It’s probably true that nobody in the world would be ranked in the top 10 percent of every profession, so the best leaders don’t weed out the lowest performers. They match employees to roles, weeding out those who are simply losers, and those who don’t fit any of the roles the organization needs filled.I’ve left unanswered the question of how to identify the right applicants. There’s no magic formula for this. The most insightful commentator I know of on this subject is Nick Corcodilos, who writes AskTheHeadhunter (www.asktheheadhunter.com). Nick has authored several books on the subject, including “The New Interview Instruction Book.”The short version is to have the applicant do the job in the interview … or perhaps a better way of saying it is to structure the interview so that a large part of it involves doing the work. There is, of course, more to excellent interviewing than that. See also “The value of easy questions,” (KJR 5/29/2000) for a description of the “easy question” technique. I hope this helps.– Bob Technology Industry