Geoff Smart

Randy Street

A manager's guide to hiring the right employees introduces the practical and effective A Method for Hiring, which draws on the expertise of hundreds of high-level executives to present a simple, easy-to-follow program to guarantee hiring success. 50,000 first printing.

The A Method for Hiring

matej yangwao

** spoiler alert **
           Books shows you few tactics whenever you're hiring your first ten folks 😄 bad ones and good ones. It shows your few usual hiring cognitive traps and proper questions, great hiring manual if you recently raised bags :)

≥The most important decisions that business people make are not what decisions, but who decisions.

≥“Who” refers to the people you put in place to make the “what” decisions.

≥The success of your business is simply the result of how good you are at hiring the people around you.

≥Due diligence takes time, and time is the one commodity most lacking in busy managers' lives. One of the hardest challenges is to hire people from outside the company and one of the fundamental failures in the hiring process is a resume.

≥A resume is a record of a person's career with all of the accomplishments embellished and all the failures removed.

≥Executives who are talented in so many ways have trouble finding the right people for their teams

≥The Art Critic
When it comes to judging art, going on gut instinct sometimes works just fine. A good art critic can make an accurate appraisal of a painting within minutes.

≥You need to hire people who have at least a 90% chance of succeeding in the role you have defined.

≥Gores learned to rely on people with job-specific talents rather than gunning for all-around athletes.

≥Scorecards are the guardians of your culture. The beauty of scorecards is that they are not just documents used in hiring. They become the blueprint that links the theory of strategy to the reality of execution. Finding great people is getting harder, but it is not impossible. Systematic sourcing before you have slots to fill ensures you have high – quality candidates waiting when you need them.

≥What are your career goals?
• What are you good at professionally?
• What are you not good at or not interested in doing professionally?

≥The questions are:
• What were you hired to do?
• What accomplishments are you most proud of?
• What were some of the low points during that job?
• Who are the people you worked with?
• Why did you leave that job?

≥In the A method, five simple questions are asked during the reference interview:
• In what context did you work with the person?
• What were the person's biggest strengths?
• What were the person's most areas for improvement back then?
• How would you rate his/her overall performance in that job on a 1-10 scale? What about his/her performance causes you to give that rating?
• The person mentioned that he/she struggled with some things in the job, can you tell me more about that?


≥Care about what they care about. It turns out that candidates tend to care about 5 things.

≥The 5 areas are called the five F's of selling, and they are fit, family, freedom, fortune, and fun.

 ≥Fit ties together the company's vision, needs, and culture with the candidate's goals, strengths, and values.
• Family takes into account the broader trauma of changing jobs.
• Freedom is the autonomy the candidate will have to make his or her decisions.
• Fortune reflects the stability of your company and the overall financial upside.
• Fun describes the work environment and personal relationships the candidate will make.

≥The waves are:
• When you source
• When you interview
• The time between your offer and the candidate's acceptance
• The time between the candidate's acceptance and his or her first day
• The new hire's first one hundred days on the job

≥“Who are the most talented people you know?” Get new names, continue to build your list, and continue to talk with at least one person per week.

Luke Kanies

Like most business books, it should be half the length, but it's a very tactical book to help you hire better, which everyone needs to do.

In particular, it provides a simple guide for making sure you really do the hard work on all of your hires to be sure you're getting what you need and expect. We completely rebuilt our hiring around the recommendations of this book, and it resulted in an immediate improvement.

It's not final, of course - you can't just rely on this book's recommendations, and it doesn't say much about behavioral interviewing, in particular - but it's a very helpful, tactical book.

Christian Beck

Good overview of hiring. Definitely recommend for those new to leadership positions. My biggest challenge was that it doesn’t cover creative or innovative roles like engineering, design or product management. Most of the book is still applicable but there are a lot of nuances missing that you need to hire in those fields.

In this instant New York Times Bestseller, Geoff Smart and Randy Street provide a simple, practical, and effective solution to what The Economist calls “the single biggest problem in business today”: unsuccessful hiring. The average hiring mistake costs a company $1.5 million or more a year and countless wasted hours. This statistic becomes even more startling when you consider that the typical hiring success rate of managers is only 50 percent. The silver lining is that “who” problems are easily preventable. Based on more than 1,300 hours of interviews with more than 20 billionaires and 300 CEOs, Who presents Smart and Street’s A Method for Hiring. Refined through the largest research study of its kind ever undertaken, the A Method stresses fundamental elements that anyone can implement–and it has a 90 percent success rate. Whether you’re a member of a board of directors looking for a new CEO, the owner of a small business searching for the right people to make your company grow, or a parent in need of a new babysitter, it’s all about Who. Inside you’ll learn how to • avoid common “voodoo hiring” methods • define the outcomes you seek • generate a flow of A Players to your team–by implementing the #1 tactic used by successful businesspeople • ask the right interview questions to dramatically improve your ability to quickly distinguish an A Player from a B or C candidate • attract the person you want to hire, by emphasizing the points the candidate cares about most In business, you are who you hire. In Who, Geoff Smart and Randy Street offer simple, easy-to-follow steps that will put the right people in place for optimal success.

Who The A Method for Hiring

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