During the last 20-plus years as an executive recruiter, I have placed in excess of 2500 senior executives and board directors throughout Australia and overseas. In addition to this, I coach groups of CEOs on a monthly basis, and a regular topic of conversation is how to ensure new employees perform to their full potential. A lot of time, effort and money goes into recruiting new employees, who often are excellent at selling themselves through the recruitment process, but then go on to be underwhelming in their actual work performance. Here is a framework to support you in ensuring that your new employees start on the right foot and live up to your and their own expectations:Be absolutely clear about your expectations even before you go to the market and document it. What does success look like in the role? What are the key deliverables for the first three, six and 12 months of employment? If various stakeholders are involved, make sure they contribute their expectations so that you are on the same page. We call this document a Performance Profile. Too often employers outsource their recruitment to internal or external recruiters who are only provided with a generic position description, that does not clearly articulate what the new hire specifically needs to do. You want to hire someone who has “done it before, done it well, and is motivated to do it again”.From the very first day of their employment, embrace them into a culture of “love and accountability”. Employees want to be accountable, they want to do good work, and they want to be recognized for doing so. Too much love and not enough accountability and they become soft and underperform. Too much accountability and not enough love and they become brittle and purely self-interested, or they leave.Because you have been specific about the key deliverables in your Performance Profile, especially the first three months, there should be no confusion about what the person has been hired to do. Meet with them every week to begin with and make sure that progress towards achievement of these deliverables, through clear and measurable KPIs, is the first topic of conversation. Acknowledge good performance with plenty of praise. Also, acknowledge non-performance by clearly setting the tone around expectations and the gravity of non-achievement. Too often as leaders, we start too soft and forgive non-performance. We have just invested in this person, and we want them to do a great job. However, trying to move from being soft to being hard is far more difficult than moving from hard to soft. You want to be friendly, but not friends.“Hire well and fire fast”. Most leaders have heard this saying, yet most choose to disregard it, including myself in the past. We always think to ourselves, “They’ll come right”. Rarely does performance improve, unless there are some specific external factors at cause. If so, do what you can to remediate the situation, otherwise make the tough decision and exit them. A short amount of pain is definitely worth the long-term gain.By month three, both you and your new employee will have settled into the groove of working together. The six- and 12-month deliverables can be reviewed and amended if necessary. Your frequency of one-on-one meetings may no longer need to be weekly, however they should definitely continue. Jointly set new goals, determine specific, measurable KPIs around them, and continue the momentum by ensuring that these KPIs are measured and reported on as your first point of business, in each of your meetings. This will ensure that your employee continues to perform, and through praising their achievements, continue to feel loved.This process should be followed at every level within the organization, from board appointments, CEO hires, and so on down to your front-line operational staff. Ensuring all of your leaders are trained and follow this approach will dramatically improve both the performance of new and existing employees. It will allow you to outperform your competition in both the recruitment and retention of top performers, which is what we all want, right?