Talk to Who: The A Method for Hiring like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
Who is a short, methodical book about hiring — specifically about why most companies make the same predictable mistakes when choosing people, and how a structured process called the A Method can fix them. Smart and Street, both management consultants, argue that the single biggest lever leaders have is picking the right people. Most organizational dysfunction traces back to hiring errors, and most hiring errors are avoidable.
The core of the book is a four-step process. The first step is the Scorecard: before you talk to anyone, define the outcomes the role must achieve and the competencies required to achieve them. The second is Sourcing: treat talent-finding as a continuous activity, not a crisis mode you enter when someone quits. The third is Selection, which involves four types of structured interviews — the screening interview, the Who interview (a chronological career walkthrough), the focused interview, and the reference interview. The fourth is Selling: once you've found the right person, close them by addressing the five things most candidates care about.
What it gets right
- 1.
The most expensive mistake in business is a bad hire. Smart and Street estimate that a mis-hire costs up to 15 times the person's annual salary when you include lost productivity, morale damage, and rehiring costs.
- 2.
Start with a Scorecard, not a job description. Define the three to eight outcomes the role must achieve in the first year, then list the competencies required to deliver them.
- 3.
The Who interview is a structured walkthrough of a candidate's entire career. Five questions per role, asked chronologically, reveal behavioral patterns that situational questions hide.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Geoff Smart is the founder and chairman of ghSMART, a management assessment and consulting firm that advises CEOs and boards. Randy Street is a managing partner at the same firm. Together they have conducted thousands of executive assessments across industries. Smart holds a PhD in organizational behavior from Claremont Graduate University. Their research for Who drew on interviews with more than 20 billionaires and 300 CEOs about their hiring practices and what separates their best and worst talent decisions.
