Who: The A Method for Hiring

Geoff Smart and Randy Street offer a clear, sensible strategy for finding, selecting and recruiting the best candidates for jobs you are trying to fill. Their process, called the "A Method for Hiring," begins with a step many managers neglect: preparing a focused, specific description of the results you will expect from the person who gets the job. The authors describe the four steps of their hiring method in just the right amount of detail, neither bogging the reader down in minutiae nor leaving important matters to the imagination. They use real-life anecdotes to connect their advice to actual business problems and issues. Many books about human resources tend to be long on vague generalizations and short on actionable, how-to information. getAbstract thinks this book is a standout and recommends its straightforward ideas to anyone who is responsible for hiring.

This book is worth a read, and it's an easy read, but hit has some real shortcomings. A lot of it is a rehash of Topgrading, by one of the author's fathers. It's a much easier read though, and you could cruise through this in 3-4 hours if you tried.

The big shortcoming of the book both their research and their written from the perspective of headhunters hiring senior executives. If that's your situation, this is probably a great book. But most of us aren't hiring senior executives and most of us aren't headhunters. And in that case, this book isn't very helpful.

I read the book this is based on about 10 years ago, and read this one thoroughly and then keep going back to it because I'm sure I missed something. I don't think I did. I think it's just not that good. Here's why.

The basic premise is that if you do an exhaustive (and exhausting) chronological interview of a candidate you'll know everything you need to know about them. Ask all about what they've done, accomplished, what their shortcomings are, etc.

This is fine if you're hiring senior people (whose key skills are managing, leading, and other nebulous stuff you couldn't test otherwise) and if you're a headhunter who doesn't have enough expertise in the particular role they're evaluating to ask really pointed questions.

But if you're hiring a non-executive, they need to have specific skills and you need to find out if they have them. You can't just say "tell me about a time you programmed in Java". You need to test them to see if they can do it.

The good news is that if you're the hiring manager, you should be able to actually evaluate the candidates for the skills you need, unlike an external headhunter.

There are some great elements of the book, like the way they handle references, and it's worth reading for that alone.

However, unless you're like the authors, and do external headhunting for senior executive roles, this is a very limited guide.

This book is the bible for hiring a superstar employee.Geoff Smart takes you on a step by step plan to accomplish your goal of finding the ideal person to take
your company to the next level.

Having gotten my MBA at Wharton and worked at Boston Consulting Group, I have read or skimmed a lot of strategy books and there are some good ones that I have enjoyed and that have changed the way I think about strategy.

In my opinion, no strategy book I have read compares to this. I realize I got lucky with the good hires I have made and now, I have a process I can follow to help me make sure I make the right hires.

By reading WHO, I have cut down on the time it takes me to do an initial interview and increased my thoroughness in evaluating candidates throughout the interview process.

I now work in education and have found that the strategy in this book applies to the hiring of non-CXO roles as I have used it to evaluate principals, teachers and others in education.

This is a book about hiring. It provides a systematic approach to hiring that the author convincingly claims to have been thoroughly field tested with great success.

The book delivers all that extremely well. I cannot fault the rigor of the approach, which places a heavy burden of developing a very complete, and widely vetted, job description on the hiring organization -- which is in turn used to create quantitative metrics and comparative grading for candidates.

The only weakness of the approach is that the proposed hiring approach seems to require perhaps a quadrupling of the time commonly spent on preparation and interviewing, and also an uncommon agreement on job requirements among all internal corporate stakeholders.

Bottom line, this is the way hiring might be done in a more perfect world, where people have more time and also agree more broadly about job requirements.