--- title: "Never make the wrong hiring decision again · Performia" description: "Every team follows the same productivity curve of trouble makers, doers and performers. A clear, complete guide to reading it, and to hiring so your whole team's curve shifts to the right." url: https://performia.com/en-rw/insights/the-productivity-curve markdown_url: https://performia.com/en-rw/insights/the-productivity-curve.md language: en-RW locale: en-rw type: article author: "Mårten Runow" site_name: "Performia" publisher: "Performia International AB" image: https://performia.com/og/en-rw.png updated: 2026-09-29 breadcrumbs: - name: "Performia" url: https://performia.com/en-rw - name: "Insights" url: https://performia.com/en-rw/insights - name: "Never make the wrong hiring decision again" url: https://performia.com/en-rw/insights/the-productivity-curve organization: name: "Performia International AB" url: https://performia.com founded: 2001 founder: "Mårten Runow" headquarters: "Bergviksgatan 27, 152 50 Södertälje, Sweden" phone: "+46 8 586 101 40" email: info@performia.net alternates: en: https://performia.com/insights/the-productivity-curve en-AU: https://performia.com/en-au/insights/the-productivity-curve zh-CN: https://performia.com/zh-cn/insights/the-productivity-curve es-CO: https://performia.com/es-co/insights/the-productivity-curve es-CR: https://performia.com/es-cr/insights/the-productivity-curve cs-CZ: https://performia.com/cs-cz/insights/the-productivity-curve es-EC: https://performia.com/es-ec/insights/the-productivity-curve et-EE: https://performia.com/et-ee/insights/the-productivity-curve fi-FI: https://performia.com/fi-fi/insights/the-productivity-curve fr-FR: https://performia.com/fr-fr/insights/the-productivity-curve de-DE: https://performia.com/de-de/insights/the-productivity-curve el-GR: https://performia.com/el-gr/insights/the-productivity-curve es-GT: https://performia.com/es-gt/insights/the-productivity-curve hu-HU: https://performia.com/hu-hu/insights/the-productivity-curve en-IT: https://performia.com/en-it/insights/the-productivity-curve ja-JP: https://performia.com/ja-jp/insights/the-productivity-curve ru-KZ: https://performia.com/ru-kz/insights/the-productivity-curve en-MU: https://performia.com/en-mu/insights/the-productivity-curve es-MX: https://performia.com/es-mx/insights/the-productivity-curve nl-NL: https://performia.com/nl-nl/insights/the-productivity-curve no-NO: https://performia.com/no-no/insights/the-productivity-curve ro-RO: https://performia.com/ro-ro/insights/the-productivity-curve en-RW: https://performia.com/en-rw/insights/the-productivity-curve sk-SK: https://performia.com/sk-sk/insights/the-productivity-curve es-ES: https://performia.com/es-es/insights/the-productivity-curve sv-SE: https://performia.com/sv-se/insights/the-productivity-curve de-CH: https://performia.com/de-ch/insights/the-productivity-curve zh-TW: https://performia.com/zh-tw/insights/the-productivity-curve tr-TR: https://performia.com/tr-tr/insights/the-productivity-curve uk-UA: https://performia.com/uk-ua/insights/the-productivity-curve en-GB: https://performia.com/en-gb/insights/the-productivity-curve es-VE: https://performia.com/es-ve/insights/the-productivity-curve --- [Performia](https://performia.com/en-rw) › [Insights](https://performia.com/en-rw/insights) › [Never make the wrong hiring decision again](https://performia.com/en-rw/insights/the-productivity-curve) [Back to Insights](https://performia.com/en-rw/insights) The productivity curve · a complete guide # Never make the wrong hiring decision again Two people apply for the same job. On paper, they look the same. One of them will lift your whole team; the other will quietly drain it. For months, you will not know which one you hired. This is the picture that lets you know *before* you decide. Read it once and you will never look at a stack of CVs the same way again. > “The importance of hiring productive personnel cannot be underestimated. The success of your business depends on it.” — Mårten Runow · Founder & Chairman, Performia International Where it goes wrong ## The most expensive guess a manager makes Every result your company produces is produced by a person. Hire a productive one and the work gets lighter, the results climb, and your week frees up for the next thing you want to build. Hire an unproductive one and the work does not disappear. It lands on everyone around them, and you spend your days managing the problem instead of the business. That is why the decision to add a person is the most consequential one a manager makes. And in most companies, it is made on the two things that reveal the least about a person's production: **a CV**, and **one good conversation**. Does any of this sound familiar? 1 You pour time and effort into hiring, and still don't get the result you expected. 2 You pay a recruiter a large fee, and have little to show for it. 3 Your job ads bring in the wrong applicants, or too few of the right ones. 4 A seat has been empty too long, so you hire the first person who seems able. 5 You keep raising the salary and the perks, hoping that is what better people need. 6 You finally hire someone good, and a few months later they leave. 7 Reading a stack of CVs, you cannot tell which one will be excellent, which will be adequate, and which will quietly cost you. If any of these ring true, the problem is not that you hire badly. It is that, like almost everyone, you are hiring blind. You are deciding on the only evidence the usual process gives you, which happens to be the evidence that matters least. Start here ## One word has to be perfectly clear Everything in this guide rests on a single word, so before we go further, let's make it exact. The word is **production**. In plain words · Production **Production** is the finished result a person creates: the report written, the deal closed, the machine repaired, the patient well cared for. It is *not* the hours they sit at the desk, and *not* the tasks they start. It is the thing that exists once the work is done that did not exist before it began. Hold on to what production is *not*. It is not being busy. It is not arriving early and leaving late. It is not being agreeable in meetings. A person can do all three and produce very little. And, as you're about to see, that person is often the hardest one in the building to spot. The shape of every team ## Rank people by production, and this appears Take any group of people, whether a team, a company or a whole industry, and line them up by one thing: how much they actually produce. Not how busy they look. What they get done. Do that, and the people do not spread out evenly. They fall into the same shape, every time. The Performia productivity curve 1. Production is never evenly spread across a team. 2. A few make trouble, most are steady doers, and a vital few truly perform. 3. Hire for real production, and your whole curve shifts to the right. On the **left** is a small group who take out more than they put in. On the **right** is a smaller group who produce far more than their share. And in the wide **middle** are the steady majority who keep the operation running. Performia lets you know, before you hire, which part of this curve a candidate belongs to. Five people you already know ## The curve, in five kinds of people Zoom in, and the curve is really five kinds of people. You have met all five. The skill is naming which is which *before* the hire, not months after. Here they are, side by side. | The person | Roughly | What you tend to see | What they actually produce | If you hire one | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | The Real Trouble-Maker | ~2.5% | Confident, well-liked, seems indispensable. | Little real output, and disruption around them. | Ongoing stress. At worst, the team quietly breaks down. | | The Potential Trouble-Maker | ~17.5% | Capable in flashes, but uneven. | Good results, undone by a careless mistake. | Unpredictability: pleasant and unpleasant surprises. | | The Not-Willing Doer | part of ~60% | Does what's asked, but only while the manager watches. | Only what supervision forces out of them. | Constant monitoring, just to get a fair day's work. | | The Willing Doer | part of ~60% | Cooperative, steady, easy to direct. | Reliable output, and it improves with support. | A dependable contributor, and a real foundation to build on. | | The Performer | ~20% | Sometimes quiet, always moving things forward. | Most of the team's real production. | Relief. Results grow, even when you're not in the room. | Trouble-makers make up roughly one in five people (about 2.5% in earnest, 17.5% who could go either way). Doers are the ~60% majority. Performers are the ~20% who carry most of the production. The percentages shift between companies; the pattern does not. The instrument problem ## Why a good interview can't see production If production is what matters, why not simply watch for it in the interview? Because an interview measures the wrong thing, and it measures it brilliantly. An interview measures how well a person presents in a conversation. That is a real skill. It is just not the same skill as producing results. Some people are superb in the room and thin on output; others are quietly excellent at the work and undersell themselves badly. The trouble-maker survives, everywhere they go, by being liked, so they are often the *best interviewer you will meet all week*. The performer is judged on results, not charm, so they can be the one who least expects the job. You are using a scale to measure temperature. It gives you a confident number for entirely the wrong thing. This is not a failure of effort or instinct. It is a failure of instrument. No amount of experience turns a scale into a thermometer. You need a different tool, one built to read production directly. What to measure instead ## The four things a CV can't show you So you measure the four things that *do* predict production: the four points of the Performia emblem. A person strong in one and weak in another produces very differently from what their CV suggests, which is why a real process checks all four, not just the first. - **Knowledge (Can they?)** What the person actually knows and can do. It is the easiest of the four to check, and the one most hiring stops at. - **Production (Have they?)** Their real productivity: the record of what they have produced, not the titles they have held. - **Motivation (Will they?)** What actually drives the person, and whether it points the same way as the job. - **Personality (What is it like?)** How they behave under pressure, alongside colleagues, and when no one is directing them. Measure all four and a candidate's place on the curve stops being a guess. You see who will produce *before* you make the offer, not months after. Measure all four and the guessing stops. You are no longer asking “did I like them?” You are asking “what will this person actually produce, and what will it be like to work with them while they do?” For the first time, you have an answer before you decide. Two ways to fill the same seat ## The usual way, and the Team Builder way ### The usual way - The decision rests on a CV and the impression from a single interview. - It is made on a gut feeling, or handed to an outside expert. - What you learn is how well the person presents themselves. - You find out you were wrong months later, once the cost is already paid. - The ability stays with the agency; next time, you start over. - A year on, the same personnel problems come round again. ### The Team Builder way - The decision rests on measured production, motivation and personality, plus a structured interview. - You make it yourself, with the evidence in hand, because you live with the result. - What you learn is how well the person actually produces. - You find out before you hire, while being wrong still costs nothing. - The ability stays inside your company, ready to use again and again. - A year on, the whole team's curve has shifted to the right. What's really at stake ## A wrong hire is a bill paid in instalments When people picture the cost of a mis-hire, they picture the salary. The salary is the smallest line on the bill. The real cost arrives quietly, over a year, in pieces: 01 The salary The part everyone counts, and the smallest part of the bill. 02 The work not done The results the seat was meant to produce, and didn't. 03 The work redone The hours colleagues spend fixing and covering. 04 The customers The ones who felt it before you did. 05 The months lost Time to notice, decide, exit, re-advertise and re-hire. 06 The team's morale What it does to good people to watch it go unaddressed. > “It's a very simple and genius technology. The data is really workable. It's applicable, which is exactly what is needed.” — Performia client The payoff ## You don't fix a hire. You move the whole curve. Fix one hire and you have solved one problem. Learn to hire this way and you have changed the slope of the whole company. Every person you add on the right of the curve pulls the average up. Do it consistently and the entire distribution moves: the same number of people, producing more, needing less management. That shift has a name: your future curve. It is simply what happens when the people you add are, reliably, the people who produce. And it is what Performia exists to make ordinary. What Performia gives you ## From guesswork to certainty Reading the curve is the insight. Learning to *act* on it is the skill, and it is really five skills, each one a piece of what it means to be a Team Builder. Here is what Performia actually puts in your hands, and what each one changes. 01 ### Attract Bring in people who produce, not just a bigger pile of applicants. More applicants is not better hiring. A bigger pile only means more sorting, more interviews, and more chances to be fooled by someone who looks right on paper. What you actually want is the opposite: fewer, stronger applicants. You want a short list where even the people you don't choose would have been a safe hire. The people who produce and the people who coast are drawn to different things. Producers are attracted to a clear role, real responsibility, and being measured on results. Passengers are attracted to vagueness, comfort, and a title with no accountability. So the way you describe the job silently decides who bothers to apply. Performia teaches you to build the role, the advert and the offer around what the seat must actually produce. That one shift pulls the results-driven people toward you, and it makes the coasters lose interest long before they ever reach your inbox. You begin the whole process with a better pile, and a better pile is already a better hire. 02 ### Spot See the strongest candidate on evidence, precisely and fast. Once the applications are in, the usual process asks you to pick the best one from a CV and a conversation. But a CV shows history and an interview shows charm. Neither one shows production. The strongest producer is often the quietest person in the room; the biggest risk is often the smoothest. Spotting means making the right person visible on evidence instead of impression. You measure the four dimensions and add a structured interview, and the candidate who will genuinely produce stands out, even when they undersell themselves, even when a natural charmer is out-talking them across the table. And it is quick. The candidate does the tests online in their own time; your local Performia office reads the results and comes back with a clear, plain recommendation. You are no longer staring at a stack of CVs hoping the right one leaps out. You can simply see which one it is. The best person stops depending on who happens to interview best. 03 ### Predict Know how a person will really work before you commit, not after. Every wrong hire is a prediction that turned out false: you predicted this person would produce, and they didn't. Almost the entire cost of hiring is the cost of discovering that you were wrong, months too late, once the money is already spent. Prediction turns that around. Before you make the offer, you already know how the person tends to behave under pressure, alongside colleagues, and when no one is directing them; whether what drives them points at this particular job; and whether their record of real output holds up under a close look. You are no longer staking the decision on a good feeling. Sometimes the four things don't line up: strong knowledge but a thin record, or high motivation aimed the wrong way. That gap is not a flaw in the method. It is exactly the information you were after, and it arrives while being wrong still costs you nothing. You find out before you pay, instead of after. 04 ### Lift See why a team's production stalls, and the exact steps that raise it. Hiring well is only half of building a team. Sometimes the people are right and the production still stalls: a producer stuck in the wrong seat, a target nobody has ever made clear, one trouble-maker being quietly carried by everyone around them, a strong performer being managed as though they were the problem. Performia gives you the tools to see where a group's production is really going, and why it is stuck. Not who looks busiest, but who is producing what. Once you can see that, the steps stop being guesswork and become concrete: put producers where they actually produce, make each seat's real output clear, and stop rewarding motion over results. This is how you move the whole curve instead of fixing one hire at a time. The very same people, placed and led well, produce more, and the average of the entire group climbs to the right. You raise the output of the team you already have, not just the next one you hire. 05 ### Lead Train and manage people so they stay productive, and so they stay. The best hire in the world is worth nothing if they walk out in six months. Re-recruiting the same seat over and over is one of the quietest and most expensive habits a company can fall into. It almost always means good people were hired and then led badly. Producers stay where they are led well: clear expectations, recognition tied to real output, and a manager who can tell a producer from a passenger and manages each of them accordingly. Get that right and your strongest people have every reason to stay, and to keep getting better while they do. A Team Builder does not just hire well once. They keep their people productive and keep them on the team, so the group they built compounds over the years instead of quietly leaking away. Build the team once, then develop it, instead of rebuilding it every single year. Put the five together and this is what you can do: attract the right people, spot them on evidence, predict how they will really work, lift the team you already have, and lead them so they stay. That is not a recruitment service. It is the skill of building a team, and once you own it, you use it for the rest of your working life. Before you ask ## Questions managers ask about the curve ### Is the curve based on real data, or is it a model? It reflects the distribution of production Performia has observed in real companies since 2001, across more than 26 countries. The exact percentages move from one organisation to the next; the shape does not. ### Isn't ranking people by production harsh? It is the opposite. Measuring production stops good people being managed as if they were the problem, and stops one quiet trouble-maker being carried by an entire team. Judging people on what they produce, rather than on who they remind you of, is the fairer way, not the harsher one. ### Can't an experienced manager just recognise the right person? Some can, some of the time. The difficulty is that you cannot tell in advance which of your judgements were skill and which were luck, and you pay for the wrong ones for months. Measurement is what makes the good judgement repeatable. ### What if someone tests well but performs badly, or the reverse? That is precisely why four things are measured, not one. A gap between what a person knows, what they have produced, what drives them and how they behave is not noise. It is the exact information you want before you take the risk, not after. ### Does this replace the interview? No. It makes the interview worth having. You still meet the person; you simply walk in already knowing what to look for and what to test, instead of hoping the right questions occur to you. ### How long does it take? Individual tests and interviews are quick: the candidate completes them online, and your local Performia office returns the results with a clear recommendation. Learning to run the whole process yourself takes days, not months. ### Does it only work for office roles? Production exists in every role. A nurse, a driver, a salesperson and an accountant each produce something specific and measurable. The method measures production wherever it is, in more than 26 countries and over 25 languages. ### What does a wrong hire actually cost? Far more than the salary. Add the work not done, the work colleagues redo, the customers affected, and the months it takes to notice and replace the person. Measuring first avoids that cost, which is why it pays for itself on the first wrong hire it prevents. ### What is the first step? A short conversation with your nearest Performia office about your own hiring, using your own candidates. That is the moment the curve stops being a diagram on a page and becomes your company. See your own curve ## The best proof is your own team The way to understand this is with your own people and your own candidates. Talk to your nearest Performia office, one of more than 26 around the world, and see exactly where your curve sits today, and where it could be. [Contact your local office](https://performia.com/en-rw/contact-us) [Back to Insights](https://performia.com/en-rw/insights) --- ## About Performia Performia is an International company that deals exclusively in hiring, founded by Mårten Runow in 2001 and operating in more than 26 countries. **We help managers build productive Teams.** Building, maintaining and developing a team is probably the single most important skill any manager can have, and it is not something to delegate to some non-proven “expert”, because it is you, the manager, who lives with the consequences of a wrong decision. So we make leaders fully functional as Team Builders. Once you know how, you use that knowledge again and again and it never loses its value: instead of firefighting personnel problems, you keep your focus on the next project of business development. Once you have a real team built around you, what you really want to do suddenly becomes possible. And that is what Performia is all about. Performia measures four things in every person: Knowledge, Production, Motivation, Personality. Since 2001 · 26+ countries · 25+ languages. Makes you build and manage teams more successfully. ## Contact - **Local office (Rwanda)**: +46 8 586 101 40 · info@performia.net · https://performia.com/en-rw - **Headquarters**: Performia International AB, Bergviksgatan 27, 152 50 Södertälje, Sweden · +46 8 586 101 40 · info@performia.net - **Sales**: sales@performia.net · **Tech support**: techsupport@performia.net - **Contact page**: https://performia.com/en-rw/contact-us ## Get started - [Help us help you more precisely](https://performia.com/en-rw/business-hiring-analysis): Answer a few questions about your organisation and hiring needs, and Performia will advise you on the most effective way to build your team. - [Login](https://tech.performia.com) - [Contact page](https://performia.com/en-rw/contact-us) ## More from Performia - [Performia — Effective Hiring Solutions](https://performia.com/en-rw): An online system for hiring success. Performia will support you to attract productive applicants, pinpoint valuable candidates and make your team more effective — in over 25 languages. - [Services](https://performia.com/en-rw/services): We help you build your team by putting the right people in the right jobs. - [About us](https://performia.com/en-rw/about-us): Performia is an International company that deals exclusively in hiring, founded by Mårten Runow in 2001 and operating in more than 26 countries. - [Contact us](https://performia.com/en-rw/contact-us): Contact Performia International — headquarters in Sweden and offices in more than 26 countries. - [Insights](https://performia.com/en-rw/insights): Performia Insights — practical, in-depth reads on hiring, motivation, productivity and building teams that lift, from founder Mårten Runow. - [One heavy weight can hold your whole company down](https://performia.com/en-rw/insights/helium-and-sand): Every person is a balloon: lift that drives them up, and weight that pulls them down. 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