Plutos at Work: How We Hire Hidden Star Performers

As more Gen Zs start to enter the workforce, there’s a new breed of star performers on the horizon, we call them the ‘Plutos’.

In a nutshell, Plutos are ultra-productive, extremely resilient individuals who defy the conventional norms of work-life policies.

In a pre-pandemic hiring processes, this archetype of star performers stay hidden and as a result, are often misidentified as regular talent. But in the context of post-pandemic hiring where hybrid or remote-first environments are being adopted, Plutos become key players in driving growth and innovation.

Here’s more on who these ‘Plutos’ are, how we target them at Criclabs and build a working environment that allows them to excess in what they do.

Who are Plutos?

Like other types of star performers, Plutos are ultra-productive, self-reliant and resilient individuals in the organization.

But the key to maximizing these traits differ greatly for Plutos.

Distinct from traditional star performers, Plutos are characterized by their rejection of conventional work-life policies.

They’ve entered the workforce during or after the pandemic, and do not share the same assumptions about work as previous cohorts of star performers.

Characteristically, this means that they:

• Despise Micromanagement: Plutos thrive under trust and autonomy rather than constant supervision.
• Oppose Over-tracking: They believe in demonstrating value through results, not hours logged.
• Time-wasting: Whether from having to commute to work, unnecessary meetings, nonsensical policies, Plutos are optimizers who will not tolerate time being poorly spent.

Where do Plutos perform best?

Plutos find traditional working paradigms of compulsory office attendance, time-consuming ceremonies and unnecessary meetings as disenfranchising, draining and meaningless.

This means that they perform best in organizations that have adapted their culture to the post pandemic world.

Put Plutos in a traditional corporate environment and they’re often sidelined by management as regular team members. Stick them in a hybrid-work environment and you start to see their potential. Place them in a remote-first environment and they truly shine as star-performers.

Why Plutos are important in the post-pandemic world

As our work environment shifts, the kind of talent necessary to drive growth also changes. Here’s why Plutos are so important for businesses in the post-pandemic world.

1. Plutos excel in a hybrid or remote-first environment: As hybrid work has become the norm, Plutos become essential members of the team that outshine traditional star performers.
2. Plutos are becoming the dominant type of star performers: Younger employees have grown up in a hybrid environment, whether that’s through school, university or their first job. Overtime, in the next decade, Plutos will become the dominant star performer archetype of young companies.
3. No one is as well equipped as Plutos to excel in the digital world: Plutos are true digital natives. They adopt to changes in the digital world faster than their colleagues, making them the go-to candidates for tomorrow’s leadership teams.

Identifying and hiring Plutos

Over the past two years, we’ve tweaked our hiring process specifically to target Plutos. Here’s how we do it:

Step 1: The first interview

After qualifying a candidate through screening calls, every hiring process starts with the first interview. For us, this interview only has one goal: Find cultural fit.

How do we do this?

• Scenario based questions: Basic get-to-know questions aside, we’ve created a list of scenario-based questions that are catered specifically to our work environment. We’re testing how candidates handle different scenarios that are not set in the standard onsite work context.
• Online format: We keep our first interviews online, testing the candidates’ ability to present themselves clearly in an non-face-to-face environment and challenging their skills to form human connections over a call.

With these two formats, Plutos easily standout.

Unlike other types of star performers, they’re able to connect with our interviewers at a human level, presenting themselves online in a nature way that helps foster a seamless remote-work ¡experience.

They understand that there’s a lot more than just ‘turning on your camera’ that will turn an online call from a detached one to an engaging and energizing one (more on this in another article).

Step 2: The documentation test

We’re looking for Plutos who have a deeply ingrained habit to document things, not just for themselves, but for others to easily understand.

At Cric, documentation is one of the single most important skills we value as a remote-first company.

Any small innovations, changes in execution strategies, tactics, and processes are expected to be accompanied by Loom recordings and written documentation in our company library.

This helps us quickly new team members up to speed whether they are interns, junior specialists, through to the leadership team.

Step 3: The presentation

Finally, we give our candidates an assignment to test their technical skills further and have them come back to present their assignment in the final face-to-face interview round.

This can range from creating an online course summary presentation for interns, doing a demo mock-up for designers through to mapping out an audit strategy for SEO experts.

Why is this important?

1. It tests their ability to present their ideas in a clear, convincing, and engaging way.
2. Putting their technical skills to the test beyond past experience, making them show real-time work that relevant to our business context.
3. Finding the right working chemistry with candidates as we go back and forth to challenge them in their presentation.

Summary points

• Plutos are a new breed of star performers emerging as more Gen Zs enter the workforce.
• They are characterized by being ultra-productivity, extremely resilience, and defiant of traditional work-life policies.
• Plutos will soon become the dominant archetype of star-performers as more Gen Zs enter the workforce.
• They’re handicapped in traditional in-office settings, show their potential in hybrid environments, and excel in a remote-first culture.
• Hiring for Plutos involves testing their ability to communicate effectively online, have documentation as an ingrained habit, and ability to show their work in real-time.