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| Who: The A Method for Hiring (Unabridged) | 
 enlarge | Author: Street, Geoff, Randy Smart
Publisher: audible.com
Category: Book
List Price: $19.99
Buy New: $10.49
You Save: $9.50 (48%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  21 reviews
Media: Audio Download
ASIN: B001H97LVO
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Product Description
In this landmark book, 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 16 more reviews...
 Get Smart: Superb Directions for How the Most Senior Executives Make Successful Hires December 27, 2008
If your success rate in hiring star performers from outside your organization is much less than 80 percent, you need this book immediately!
When you talk to CEOs and board members at most public companies, they tell you there's no task more important than hiring highly effective people who hit the ground running and just accelerate in improving performance in a sustained way. Most will also tell you that they get their best candidates by checking with their CEO and board member friends in other industries to find out who is a true star.
Most of us however aren't CEOs or board members of public companies and few have access to the kind of contacts that lead to identifying top candidates. As a result, most organizations fall back on setting a title and a salary, asking the human resources department to run some advertisements, and interviewing a whole raft of candidates until one seems to be impressive. Then in over half the cases, the new hire doesn't work out. The missed profit opportunity can be enormous. The waste of time, money, and effort to make the mis-hire is also large.
Now, you can rely instead on Who by Geoff Smart (son of the illustrious Brad Smart, coauthor of TopGrading, the management bible of building talent in organizations) to show you exactly what to do.
The process is pretty simple. It begins with defining exactly what you want someone to accomplish. Then, you source in ways that allow you to see high potential candidates who are a good fit for your needs. Next, you thoroughly interview and check out the best prospects who survive a brief telephone interview. Finally, you woo, win, and hire the best candidate who meets your standards (or re-do the process if no one of that caliber has turned up).
Okay, you can do that.
What makes this book special is that it gives you enough detail on "how to" do those steps that you will be able to increase your successful hire rate by quite a lot. Pretty soon you can have an organization that's full of high performers, and your organization's performance is bound to follow suit.
The strength of the book comes in the interviewing sections. Most people don't know how to conduct interviews, and the authors do a fine job of describing the primary ways that ineffective organizations interview before teaching the right ways to interview.
I also liked the section on how to find top candidates without using head hunters and advertising. I have used the method described (long before I had heard of either Brad or Geoff Smart), and it has always worked well for me. In fact, people I hired this way went on to become CEOs of major public companies.
I thought that the interview insights from the senior executives and investors who were included in the study made the book much richer than the typical, "here's how to do it" book. Pay close attention to those.
Bravo! This book is one of the most practical I have seen about how to turn hiring into a competitive advantage.
A key guide for any business manager and any library catering to them December 15, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The authors identify the 'single biggest problem in business today' as unsuccessful hiring - and this book tells how to hire based on Smart and Street's 'A Method', refined and based on one of the largest research studies of its kind. From identifying common hiring mishaps and defining outcomes in employees to asking the right interview questions and attracting the right people, WHO is a key guide for any business manager and any library catering to them.
Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
 Rehash of Fathers Work December 9, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
The best part of the book is at the first when he describes the importance of preparation and the creation of an outcomes focused job description. Past that point it is a rehash of his fathers published work in Top Grading. Go to the book store and skim through the information, if you are an experience recruiter you will find it remedial. If you are looking for a great recruiting book pick up Hire With Your Head.
 Let me trim the fat from the meat..and add more meat November 25, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
American people have been prone to overrate different things over time. In the last years they got crazy about Internet companies and next over real state, valuing them way above what they were really worth. And now I see a small bubble forming up.
Just like real state and the early Internet start-ups, "Who" is both quite useful and has quite potential benefits. Now, keep on mind the diversity of "corporate cultures" (funny name when companies are nothing but wild jungles) or values. Geoff and Randy (G & R) emphasized that a great candidate should always have his references quite excited when recommending him, but values are quite different in different companies, sometimes within themselves. There are places where "working too hard" is indeed a true defect.
What I've been seeing where I live -in the Mid-west- is a pressure from companies to drop the salaries to 3rd world levels, while trying to offer other things to make up, particularly "making you happy". One staffing agency, Stat-Tek, even shows a guy dressing Hawaii clothing, with a slogan "another day at the office!"; below that, a funny paragraph describes the "associates" (employees) having fun with activities such as shaving the boss' head.
At a chem lab -Niantic- I worked for, they would overstaff and then have the employees wasting hours and hours playing cards and telling jokes, no exaggeration at all. It was actually a priority socializing a lot there. This company gets some government benefits when hiring more and more people, which makes it overstaffed. At the same time, it wants costs at almost zero, which makes their staff very very badly paid. Their solution is hiring unqualified staff and focusing in creating a "happy" atmosphere. It should boost morale to motivate the employees to work well while keep salaries way down. That's why their key value was being quite social.
Companies can be outrageously different.
G & R have shown us how to get some clues on how to discover false good recommendation. Yet, they forgot to take into account that different values in companies also lead to wrongful good recommendations...and equally important, these different values lead to wrongfully bad recommendations too. Thus, think twice when bosses complain about former employees, they virtually do it always. And think twice when they are thrilled at someone, he may just have being politics master.
As G & R say, get curious but they don't tell you how for these cases. Well, focus on the skills and attitudes your job needs and enquire about them as much as possible. Remember that on these referral interviews you are on the other side of the equation, and the jerkness you can afford with job seeker no longer exits. You are now on a similar seat. You cannot cut the talk within 15 minutes if you don't like the interview or keep pushing "tell me more". AND you have to do it yourself, just like you have to interview the candidate yourself.
The companies' web sites may well be deceiving on what their true values are. Referral interviews are still a bit of dark magic. For me, my question is why so many consultants say that some referrals may keep silent for fear of being sued. Who's going to know normally? The candidates normally have no way of knowing what's being said about them, and if they do, they can hardly prove it at a court.
As for the candidate interviews, you should also skip the third one, the focused one, which is about how the candidate matches your scorecard. The previous one -the topgrading- should provide that info. More important, G & R recommend bring more people in, and well remind you that you have to prepare them with a scrip and previous info, otherwise they'll bring their voodoo methods to the table and screw the whole time-consuming process. Actually, you have to teach this method to any person you invite to join the interviews. Otherwise, they will insist on their voodoo sorcery.
In general, G & R don't prepare well enough their readers to deal with the defects of candidates. They say candidates should admit at least 5 flaws. Those are many and still normal, people are quite flawed. Will your objectivity be enough to neglect -or put up with- those many flaws that are not key to their performance? Remeber that you also have as many flaws; you have to imagine how your flaws and the candidate's would do.
Whenever you ask former employers about their flaws, they will surely tell you much more than the candidates, sometimes they will exaggerate. How to tell exaggerations from realities? Maybe the slogan that G & R mention, "if you look for...., then X is the right one" is helpful.
And by the same token (everybody is quite flawed), candidates must also be allowed to criticize their former employers at some point. If only former employers can criticize, how can an objective judgment will be done? In fact, letting the candidates criticize their employer will let you see more of their personalities and performance. A guy who just criticizes is surely a bad candidate, but what about one who keeps her tone? And finally, keeping bad comments on former bosses is widely advised all over the internet and books. I can't imagine a job seeker criticizing his boss on a job interview.
And what about those great candidates who happened not to make eye-catching resumes and letters? G & R don't cover the fact that it's not the best candidates but the best self-marketers who get interviews. These problems even happen to candidates in engineering and sciences
When you hire a CEO, you can get a lot of reliable information, but most hires are not for CEOs.
All in all, it's still a good book to get, but trimming the fat and keeping simpler to the first two candidate interviews and probably the referral one. Remeber that getting good or great staff is not cheap. If you won't pay a good salary, forget this whole book or more to China
Save your money - get "Hire With Your Head" instead. November 20, 2008
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
Within the hiring world, there is a split:
* Interviews can predict great hires,
* Assessments (like IQ tests) can predict great hires.
This book is all about longer and more complex interviewing.
The book focuses on hiring CEOs and top management, so remember that when looking at this book.
This book is useless for hiring college grads, IT professionals (Software Developers, Project Managers or Business Analysts). In fact, as I specialize in hiring tech people, I find this system goes against best practices for hiring technical people in any field as the book focuses on interviewing direct reports (people the candidate manages).
The main problem that I had was the that the book (nor the website) provided their research for review. Interviewing as the main stay of hiring has been PROVEN to be the WORST predictor of hiring success. However, this book suggest the main solution is to do more stringent interviewing.
The book supports three questionable interviewing techniques. The first is to THREATEN the candidate. The books suggest that the interviewer use phrases like, "WHEN I speak with your last boss, what will they tell me your strengths are." The author suggest that the use of "WHEN" lets the candidate know you will be speaking with their past manager. This, and other suggestions, seems a little heavy handed.
Then their is a lack of transparency in this hiring process. This system is quite manipulative and an experienced candidate could be turned off. One technique is to get the candidate to agree to the compensation early in the process. Any shewed candidate that wants to hold off salary negotiations until they know enough about the position, is toss out. In fact, the book authors brag about only hiring one person in 500 (at their web site) This is NOT a useful metric.
More bothersome is the suggestion that the interviewer find out about the candidate's spouse. This can be all sorts of illegal as martial status can be grounds for discrimination law suits. The book suggest that the candidate's spouse, and family, must be sold the job as well. While I agree that a candidate may decline an offer if their spouse objects to moving, a company needs to be VERY careful how they ask this question. "Would you and your family be comfortable with moving?" would be a much better way to ask this question. If the book's advice is followed, an inexperienced HR manager may ask, "would your SPOUSE be comfortable with relocation?" This is all kinds of bad.
The author's website says they have only a 97% client satisfaction rate. That is not all that good given the author's suggestion of the success of their technique.
To end on a positive note, ...
There is research that suggests that interviewing is only 50% predictive in hiring. That is, you could flip a coin and do as well as if you interviewed a candidate and chose. I am of this camp, I am a believer in cognitive assessments. But, if you are going to use interviews as your main screening method, I suggest "Hire With Your Head". A much better system.
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