Who: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street, published in 2008, is a practical guide to hiring the right people, written by two consultants at the leadership advisory firm ghSMART. The book draws on the firm’s work assessing executives and on interviews with hundreds of CEOs and investors. Its message is that hiring mistakes cost far more than most leaders realise, and that a disciplined process cuts them sharply.
What is Who about?
Smart and Street start by listing the bad habits most managers use when they hire. They call them voodoo hiring: trusting gut feel after a friendly chat, asking trick questions, grilling candidates like a prosecutor, relying on personality tests or falling for the candidate who talks the best game. These methods feel productive and predict little about future performance.
The replacement is a four-step method. First, the scorecard: a short document listing the mission of the role, the measurable outcomes the person must deliver in the first year or so, and the competencies needed to get there. Second, sourcing: building a steady flow of candidates through referrals from your own network, your team and trusted advisers, long before you need them. Third, selection, the longest part of the book. It walks through a brief screening call, a long chronological interview that covers every job in the candidate’s history, focused interviews on specific outcomes and reference calls you arrange yourself.
The fourth step is selling. The authors argue that strong candidates have options, so you need to persuade them on the things they care about: fit with the mission, their family’s situation, freedom to act, pay and enjoyment of the work. The book defines an A player as someone with a high chance of achieving outcomes that only a small share of candidates could reach, which ties the whole method back to the scorecard.
What are the main lessons for founders?
- Define the job by results. Before posting a role, write three to five outcomes the person must hit, such as closing 20 enterprise deals in year one. Judge every candidate against those outcomes.
- Source all the time. Ask advisers, investors and your team for introductions every week. The best early hires rarely answer job ads.
- Walk through the whole career. Ask about each past role in order: what they were hired to do, what they achieved, what went wrong and why they left. Patterns appear quickly.
- Make your own reference calls. Ask the candidate to set up calls with former bosses and colleagues, then ask specific questions about the outcomes you care about.
- Sell after you choose. Once you decide, spend time on what the candidate needs to say yes, from flexibility to growth.
Who should read Who?
It is one of the best tools for founders making their first hires and for any startup that has suffered a bad hire. Managers building a team in a growing company get a repeatable process they can teach to others. Investors who sit on boards and help recruit executives also find it useful.
Solo founders without hiring plans and people looking for advice on job hunting can skip it. The method is written for the employer’s side of the table.
How do you put Who to work this week?
- Write a one-page scorecard for your next hire: the mission of the role, three to five outcomes and the competencies needed.
- Email ten people in your network, share the scorecard and ask who they would recommend.
- Draft your list of chronological interview questions and test them on one current team member.
If you need a sparring partner to sharpen the scorecard, the free AI co-founder Elona from Fe/male Switch can review your role outcomes and suggest interview questions.
Where does Who fall short?
The method was built for hiring senior executives in large companies, and the long interviews and reference checks are heavy for a startup hiring its first developer. Heavy reliance on referrals tends to reproduce the founder’s own network, which can make a team less diverse. The language of A players also sorts people into fixed grades, which sits awkwardly with research on how people grow in the right role. The book barely touches on remote hiring or compensation design. For building the team culture new hires join, read The Culture Code.