Who: The A Method for Hiring Summary and Review

In business, you are who you hire.

Geoff Smart and Randy Street, Who: The A Method for hiring

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The One Thing – Who: The A Method for Hiring Summary and Review

The methodology in this book has been perfected by using it countless times and interviews with 20 billionaires and 25 CEOs of multibillion-dollar companies.

As the authors so eloquently state – “You are who you hire.”

Who Method Summary and Review

Have you ever wondered why hiring feels like a game of Russian roulette?

You know, you interview a bunch of folks, pick the one you think is the best fit, and then cross your fingers and hope for the best.

There’s a better way, and it’s all in this book, “Who: The A Method for Hiring” by Geoff Smart and Randy Street.

Now, these guys aren’t messing around. They’ve spent over 1,300 hours interviewing more than 20 billionaires and 300 CEOs to bring us the secret recipe for successful hiring.

How do you define an A player?

The authors and I define A players as people who have a 90% chance of achieving a set of outcomes that only the top 10 percent of possible candidates could achieve.

In other words, people that DELIVER.

Imagine how you might multiply yourself with a team of A players that can deliver with a 90% chance of success.

B players get you too ok

C players get you nowhere and might cost you your most valuable resource = time

 “I think the fastest way to improve a company’s performance is to improve the talent of the workforce, whether it is the ultimate leader or someone leading a divisional organization. It just energizes the company and leads to positive things.”

John Zillmer, CEO Allied WAste

Scorecards

Picture this: instead of sifting through resumes, you’ve got a scorecard.

It’s like your wish list for the perfect candidate, detailing exactly what you want them to achieve in the role.

It’s not just about their past experience or qualifications but about the outcomes and competencies that will make them a star in their role.

It’s like having a roadmap to success!

But how do you find these superstar candidates?

Well, it’s all about networking.

You’ve got to be proactive, tapping into your personal and professional networks to find potential candidates at all times. Never ever stop doing this, ever.

Four Interviews w/questions and best answers

Once you’ve got your candidates, it’s time for the interview. But this isn’t your typical interview. You’re going to ask questions that really dig deep, that get to the heart of who this person is and how they’ll perform in the role.

I’ve used these 4 interview types and these questions exclusively for the last ten years or so, completely unmodified, to identify and hire A Players.

1) The Screening Interview

1. What are your career goals? 
2. What are you really good at professionally? 
3. What are you not good at or not interested in doing professionally? 
4. Who were your last five bosses, and how will they each rate your performance on 1–10 scale when we talk to them? 

The key is always to dig deeper by throwing in “What…, How…, Tell Me More…”.

2) Topgrading Interview

1. What were you hired to do?
2. What accomplishments are you most proud of? 
3. What were some of the low points during your job? 
4. Who were the people you worked with? 
5. Why did you leave your job? 

3) Focused Interview

1. The purpose of this interview is to talk about [Fill in the blank with specific competencies and outcomes you need]
2. What are your biggest accomplishments in this area during your career?
3. What are your insights into your biggest mistakes and lessons learned in this area?

4) Reference Interview

Never skip this step. This is where you test what you know or think you know.

The book gives specific instructions on who and how many reference calls to make.

Questions:

1. In what context did you work with the person?
2. What were the person’s Biggest strengths?
3. What were the biggest areas for improvement back then?
4. How would you rate their overall performance in that job 1–10? What about his/her performance causes you to give that rating?
5. The person mentioned he/she struggled with XYZ in that job. Can you tell me more about that?

Tactics for Closing A-players

And the final step?

Selling the position to the candidate.

You’ve got to make them want the job as much as you want them to have it. It’s like courting, showing them all the reasons why they should choose you.

The book tells you exactly how to do this and points out pitfalls to avoid.

But don’t just take my word for it. Check out what others have to say about it:

1. Goodreads Review
2. Who: The A Method for Hiring Official Website

Buy it on Amazon – Hardback | E-book

Text

My Highlights from Kindle

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The most important decisions that businesspeople make are not what decisions, but who decisions.—JIM COLLINS, AUTHOR OF GOOD TO GREAT

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Who is your number-one problem. Not what. What refers to the strategies you choose, the products and services you sell, and the processes you use.

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Who refers to the people you put in place to make the what decisions. Who is running your sales force? Who is assembling your product? Who is occupying the corner office? Who is where the magic begins, or where the problems start.

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who failures infect every aspect of our professional and personal lives.

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To test our observations and to glean new ones, we engaged Dr. Steven N. Kaplan and his team of finance wizards at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago to conduct the largest-ever statistical study of its kind to help understand what types of candidates are successful performers and which are not.

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Who mistakes happen when managers: • Are unclear about what is needed in a job • Have a weak flow of candidates • Do not trust their ability to pick out the right candidate from a group of similar-looking candidates • Lose candidates they really want to join their team

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Peter Drucker and other management gurus have long estimated that the hiring success rate of managers is a dismal 50 percent.

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Peter drucker. 50% success rate

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What most managers do not know is that who problems are also preventable.

What does a

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It is a record of a person’s career with all of the accomplishments embellished and all the failures removed.”

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What is a resume

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VOODOO HIRING

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company. We define an A Player this way: a candidate who has at least a 90 percent chance of achieving a set of outcomes that only the top 10 percent of possible candidates could achieve.

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Definition of an A Player, person who has a 90% chance of performing the job only 10% can do

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YOU ARE WHO YOU HIRE

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You are who you hire

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In business, you are who you hire. Hire C Players, and you will always lose to the competition. Hire B Players, and you might do okay, but you will never break out. Hire A Players, and life gets very interesting no matter what you are pursuing.

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We call the solution the “ghSMART A Method for Hiring,” or the “A Method” for short. The A Method defines a simple process for identifying and hiring A Players with a high degree of success. It helps you get the who right.

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As Zillmer told us, “I think the fastest way to improve a company’s performance is to improve the talent of the workforce, whether it is the ultimate leader or someone leading a divisional organization. It just energizes the company and leads to positive things.”

Scorecards are

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Scorecards describe the mission for the position, outcomes that must be accomplished, and competencies that fit with both the culture of the company and the role.

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The first failure point of hiring is not being crystal clear about what you really want the person you hire to accomplish.

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The first failure point is not being crystal clear about what you want a hire to accomplish

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The scorecard is composed of three parts: the job’s mission, outcomes, and competencies. Together, these three pieces describe A performance in the role—what a person must accomplish, and how. They provide a clear linkage between the people you hire and your strategy.

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The mission is an executive summary of the job’s core purpose. It boils the job down to its essence so everybody understands why you need to hire someone into the slot. Take

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There is a tendency to gravitate to the best all-around athlete; you know—tremendous skill set,

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Avoid the tendency to gravitate to the all around athlete

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he deliberately sought leaders whose skills were optimized for each phase of the company’s growth. While

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Deliebrately seek employees for each phase of growth

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Outcomes, the second part of a scorecard, describe what a person needs to accomplish in a role. Most of the jobs for which we hire have three to eight outcomes, ranked by order of importance.

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While typical job descriptions break down because they focus on activities, or a list of things a person will be doing (calling on customers, selling), scorecards succeed because they focus on outcomes, or what a person must get done (grow revenue from $ 25 million to $ 50 million by the end of year three). Do you see the distinction?

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Competencies define how you expect a new hire to operate in the fulfillment of the job and the achievement of the outcomes.

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Critical Competencies for A Players • Efficiency. Able to produce significant output with minimal wasted effort. • Honesty/ integrity. Does not cut corners ethically. Earns trust and maintains confidences. Does what is right, not just what is politically expedient. Speaks plainly and truthfully. • Organization and planning. Plans, organizes, schedules, and budgets in an efficient, productive manner. Focuses on key priorities. • Aggressiveness. Moves quickly and takes a forceful stand without being overly abrasive. • Follow-through on commitments. Lives up to verbal and written agreements, regardless of personal cost. • Intelligence. Learns quickly. Demonstrates ability to quickly and proficiently understand and absorb new information. • Analytical skills. Able to structure and process qualitative or quantitative data and draw insightful conclusions from it. Exhibits a probing mind and achieves penetrating insights. • Attention to detail. Does not let important details slip through the cracks or derail a project. • Persistence. Demonstrates tenacity and willingness to go the distance to get something done. • Proactivity. Acts without being told what to do. Brings new ideas to the company.

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‘We just spent four hours in a leadership team meeting and no decisions were made or communicated. We all left unclear about where we’re going, who is supposed to do what, or what’s the time frame for a decision. Nothing was resolved.’

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value open communication and decisiveness.

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“treats people with respect” and “trustworthiness.” This scorecard

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likelihood of success.” Sure, we all want our employees to be great at everything, but in fact few are, and those who are may well demand higher salaries that make us pay for “features” that we don’t need. Remember, it’s all about the specific skill set you need, when you need it.

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They wanted someone who was professional, disciplined, caring, fair, and diplomatic. They also wanted someone who would set high standards and hold people accountable for meeting them.

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neither demonstrated a track record of getting things done.

Getting great

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Of all the ways to source candidates, the number one method is to ask for referrals from your personal and professional networks. This

Steve Kerr

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To be a great interviewer, you must get out of the habit of passively witnessing how somebody acts during an interview.

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The four interviews are: • The screening interview • The Topgrading Interview ® • The focused interview • The reference interview

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THE SCREENING INTERVIEW: CULLING THE LIST

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What are your career goals?

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What are you really good at professionally?

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What are you not good at or not interested in doing professionally?

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Who were your last five bosses, and how will they each rate your performance on a 1–10 scale when we talk to them?

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GETTING CURIOUS: WHAT, HOW, TELL ME MORE

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THE TOPGRADING INTERVIEW: THE POWER OF PATTERNS FOR CHOOSING WHO

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What were you hired to do?

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What accomplishments are you most proud of?

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A Players tend to talk about outcomes linked to expectations.

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What were some low points during that job?

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Who were the people you worked with?

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Why did you leave that job?

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CONDUCTING AN EFFECTIVE TOPGRADING INTERVIEW

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Master Tactic #1: Interrupting

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Master Tactic #2: The Three P’s

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was $ 1.2 million.)

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Master Tactic #3: Push Versus Pull

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Master Tactic #4: Painting a Picture

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Master Tactic #5: Stopping at the Stop Signs

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THE FOCUSED INTERVIEW: GETTING TO KNOW MORE

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DOUBLE-CHECKING THE CULTURAL FIT

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THE REFERENCE INTERVIEW: TESTING WHAT YOU LEARNED

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Avoid accepting a candidate’s reference list at face value

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Hearing or understanding the code for risky candidates

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Anything

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RED FLAGS: WHEN TO DIVE BENEATH THE SURFACE Some behavioral clues emerge

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What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, Goldsmith

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“Winning too

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Red flags

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With all of this great data, the decision should be easy. Here is what you do: 1. Take out your scorecards that you have completed on each candidate. 2. Make sure you have rated all of the candidates on the scorecard. If you have not given each candidate an overall A, B, or C grade, do so now. Make any updates you need to based on the reference interviews. Look at the data, consider the opinions and observations of the interview team, and give a final grade. 3. If you have no A’s, then restart your process at the second step: source. 4. If you have one A, decide to hire that person. 5. If you have multiple A’s, then rank them and decide to hire the best A from among them.

Most managers

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A seasoned executive once asked us what we thought was the single most important aspect to selling a candidate on joining a company. We knew from our research that there actually was a one-word answer to that question: persistence.

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HOW TO SELL A PLAYERS 1. Identify which of the five F’s really matter to the candidate: fit, family, freedom, fortune, or fun. 2. Create and execute a plan to address the relevant F’s during the five waves of selling: during sourcing, during interviews, between offer and acceptance, between acceptance and the first day, and during the first one hundred days on the job. 3. Be persistent. Don’t give up until you have your A Player on board.

The A Method

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remembering the five F’s of selling to seal the deal.

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Visit www.ghsmart.com to learn more.

BIOGRAPHIES OF CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY

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Exclusively for this book project, we interviewed more than eighty truly exceptional businesspeople, whom we affectionately refer to as “captains of industry.”