A HIGHLY PRODUCTIVE EMPLOYEE is every employer's dream. Most organizations pay recruiters through their nose to find one. And almost 70% of the time, they admit they paid for an average hire, not the star they were chasing. What's the implication?

70% of most workforces, then, are average employees whose productivity is a suspect. The real challenge is what to do with the lot that isn't unproductive either — neither star nor dead weight. If you hire regularly, this is most of your team.

Here's the bit most people miss:

Productivity multiplies. Hiring only adds.

Picture productivity as an outcome multiplier, with 1 being average. A star is greater than 1; an under-performer is less than 1. So when you say you're a 300-person company, the real productive value of that workforce is set by the average multiplier of the team. Every hire below 1 drags the whole organization down; every star lifts it. When you add manpower, you're actually multiplying productivity — it's a multiplicative operation, not an additive one. For managers and leaders with a larger span of control, the scaling factor can become logarithmic.

In plain English: more than hiring, productivity matters. And in the AI era it matters even more — when the tools amplify your best people, a 0.9 and a 1.3 are no longer close; the gap explodes.

So, what do you do with the 70%?

1. Familiarity. People do better on what they know. Your immediate job after hiring is to pull everything about your business, industry, product and team into their familiar zone fast — not leave them to acquire it at their own pace. Most teams run an "Induction." You probably do too. But do you know what's inside yours? How good is it? When was it last updated? Who measures effectiveness? At 300 people, moving one employee from 0.9 to 1.2 has a dramatic impact. Induct well.

2. Ramping up. A structured path that brings new hires up to the speed of your stars. The route to high productivity exists internally — but new hires have to discover it. You can leave them to rough it out alone, or you can document the path, build drills and milestones, and ramp them deliberately. That email that works, that winning pitch, the FAQs, the shortest way to demo your product — all the tricks of your stars should be out in the open for everyone to emulate. HR calls it "Functional Induction." Weak term. Call it Productivity Rampup and get to it. Its absence is what keeps your workforce average.

3. Hire better. Easier said than done, agreed — but doing nothing isn't an option. One straightforward way: profile your existing stars in each department, find the type that works for you, and learn what to look for in hiring. Knowing isn't enough; you have to train your hiring managers and assessment chain to measure it. When did you last run a hiring-manager skill session? A coffee chat at least? What — you never trained your hiring managers?

4. Target setting. One of the most mishandled areas, with catastrophic effects on productivity. On any day, up to 60% of a workforce has no clear idea of their target for that day, week or month. Most managers were never trained on how to set targets, so they do a poor job. What's your target-setting frequency? How many targets per person? Equal weightage or differential? How hard are they? What happens when someone misses? There's no magic formula — but not applying what you already know isn't an option either.

I titled this "boost productivity quickly." Maybe "quickly" was ambitious — there's work at your end. But I showed you the ball is in your court. Productivity can be improved.

plugHR works with ambitious entrepreneurs and committed HR heads to dig into each area of their talent practice and re-engineer it for productivity. Talk to plugHR.

Originally published on the plugHR blog.