Talk to Who: The A Method for Hiring like its author wrote you back.
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Who: The A Method for Hiring, in detail
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.
The Who interview is the book's most distinctive contribution. Rather than asking hypothetical questions ("what would you do if..."), interviewers walk candidates through their entire work history year by year, asking the same five questions about each role: what were you hired to do, what accomplishments are you proud of, what were the low points, who did you work for and how would they rate you, and why did you leave. This structured walk reveals patterns that hypothetical questions miss.
Smart and Street make a credible case that most interviewers are winging it — running on gut instinct and hoping for the best — and that this produces mediocre results at predictable rates. The book is prescriptive almost to a fault: it tells you exactly what to ask, in what order, and how to interpret answers. That's a feature for practitioners who want a repeatable system, and a limitation for readers hoping for deeper psychological insight into why people succeed or fail in roles.
The big ideas
- 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.
