a.  Use two interviewers, using a 4-hour chronological interview, as the major practice in hiring, promoting, and auditing talent. After all three applications are part of a company's culture, with up to 90% of those hired and promoted turning out to be high performers, of course such rigor seems "obvious."  And when managers want to do a talent inventory, an audit to figure out who are their A, B, and C players, and who has the greatest potentials, it seems "obvious" to use the same technique as used for hiring and promoting!  (The only difference between hiring and promoting or auditing is that external references are checked for hiring, but the Topgrading interviewers actually talk with internal bosses, peers, and subordinates when using Topgrading for promoting or auditing.) These methods require rigor - 90% hiring and promoting success has only been achieved when the interviewers are trained and follow the Topgrading interview guides.
b.  Measure percent high performers hired and promoted, or measure costs of mis-hires and mis-promotions. Although business people say, "If it's important, we have to measure it," and "talent is our most important asset," no company we have ever seen, surveyed, or heard of has systematically measured how successful they were at hiring and promoting people.  In a meeting of Global 100 heads of HR, only Topgrading companies disclosed rigorous methods for measuring success.  And when asked, the Global 100 heads of HR admitted that 75%+ of the people they hired or promoted into managements jobs were mistakes.
c.  Expect candidates to arrange personal reference calls with former bosses (and others). After all, most companies prohibit their people from even taking reference calls.  But the simple truth is A players do get their former associates to accept those reference calls.  Why does it work?  Former bosses of A players are not at all worried that because they might say something negative about their former A player, that A player won't get a job and sue.  Fact:  in 30 years and hundreds of companies performing this step, 40+ Topgrading professionals have never heard of any legal issue. None!
d.  Expect managerial candidates for hire or promotion to participate in a 4-hour Topgrading Interview. High performers love the chronological interview, the walk down memory lane in which they are asked to describe all their wonderful successes and triumphs.  In addition to the ego trip, they understand that by participating in the thorough Topgrading hiring or promoting steps, there is a very good chance they will succeed in the job (if offered, obviously), and with the huge amount of information about them their new boss will be able to coach them to a) assimilate smoothly into the job, b) perform well, and c) continue a career development process right now - within weeks of joining the company.
e.  Be able to keep in mind and rate candidates accurately on 50 competencies. If you're not a Topgrader, you know you wouldn't be able to track 50 competencies, right?  But in 2-day Topgrading workshops every manager actually does it. How can this be possible?  Because in the Topgrading Interview there are thousands of data points.  For example, when the person describes a success 10 years ago, more than a dozen competencies are revealed.  "I got the President's award for pulling off the project," and in explaining how she did it, she shows teamwork, intelligence, drive, dedication, analysis skills, leadership, stress management, etc., etc.
f.  Learn enough from a competed Topgrading Career History Form to screen out most weak candidates for hire and screen in only the best.  In our Topgrading workshops people analyze the completed form of a real person (names have been changed).  They then guess at how the fellow's real boss rated him on all 50 competencies.  People amaze themselves because most are "off" only an average of 2 points on a 10-point scale and some, without even seeing the candidate, were off by only 1 point. This fun little exercise convinces everyone that 1) they can track and rate 50 competencies, and 2) this Topgrading Career History Form is the best pre-selection tool on the planet.
g.  (saving the best for last)  Achieve 90% high performers hired and promoted.  About 15 years ago, thanks to the work I did with several Global 500 companies, we proved that managers like you can be almost as good as Topgrading professionals when hiring and promoting people.  Since my profession for 3 decades had been interviewing candidates for hire or promotion, I effectively put myself out of the screening business (and into the training business).  How can managers like you do almost as well as professionals with the Ph.D. and 30 years of experience?  Use two interviewers who can cover for each other and use the Topgrading Interview Guide, with 16 basic questions for every job.  Many companies have achieved 90%+ success picking high performers, using this formula.

1.  Measure company hiring success.  What percent of people hired actually turn out to be high performers?  And what are the costs associated with those mis-hires?  It's really important to measure the success hiring and those costs.   
2.  Create a Job Scorecard.  Job descriptions are very vague.  And when the hiring manager and candidates and new hires are vague in their understanding about what the job really entails, that leads to mis-hires.  So Topgrading adds measurable accountabilities and it really helps.  
3.  Recruit from ads.  We’ve surveyed thousands of people including 26 billionaires and have found that the best way to hire A players is to get referrals from A players in your network.   
4.  Use the Topgrading Career History Form.  When you’re screening people based on their resumes that’s a problem because resumes as you know are deceptive and they’re incomplete.  But the Topgrading Career History Form has truth serum so what you get is honest information.  It asks for all the information that you’d love to have but never see on resumes:  salary history, likes and dislikes in jobs, true boss ratings, reasons for leaving jobs, and so fourth.  And it enables you to screen candidates much more quickly, and saves you a lot of time, but more importantly, it gets the top people in for face-to-face interviews.  
5.  Conduct Telephone Screening Interviews.  
6.  Conduct 1-hour competency (behavioral) interviews with finalist candidates.  You might be familiar with these round robin behavioral interviews, or competency interviews.  These are very commonplace, but the trouble is they lead to about 25-30% high performers hired.  Well, Topgrading adds a few tweaks to make those more productive.   
7.  Conduct Topgrading Interviews.  This famous Topgrading Interview is holy grail, the silver bullet.  This is what accounts for 90% hiring success.  It’s a chronological interview asking candidates, starting with their first full time job and coming forward chronologically, a lot of questions about every job, so you nail down every success, every accomplishment, every failure, every mistake, every key decision, every key relationship, and there is some truth serum built into that as well.
8.  Master Advanced Interviewing Methods.  This step is a way for you to improve you interviewing skills by getting feedback from other interviewers.
9.  Write an executive summary.  Analyze all the data and write this summary with your tandem Topgrading partner.
10.  Candidate arranges Reference Calls with bosses.  If you and the interviewee want to move forward, the next step is ask the candidate to arrange for personal reference calls with former bosses and others.  This makes reference check really valuable.  
11.  Coach your new hire.  You've hired your A player, but Topgrading is not done.  You coach the new hire because you have a ton of really fantastic, insightful information about the individual and high performers want the feedback and coaching shortly after you hire them.  We have some simple ways to do this, and the newly hired high performers are the ones who do all the work.  But it is really powerful for getting them assimilating very smoothly.  It’s the on-boarding process and the very best way to retain top talent to have them feel they are growing and are challenged.
12.  Company measures hiring success 1 year later.  Continue to measure the percent high performers hired, and promoted.  And we have some simple ways to do that.  It makes it clear that Topgraders are reducing costs of mis-hires and as their success goes up, the company makes more money.  It becomes a real incentive for the laggards to get on board with Topgrading.