Who: The A Method for Hiring (Randy Street and Geoff Smart)

A thought provoking book on how to populate your team (or company) with top performing talent.  Not just about the selection process itself but it also covers techniques for filling the pipeline so you have candidates when you have vacancies to fill.

The basic premise is that as a manager, your role is to select the team (the who) who do the tasks (the what), not to do the tasks yourself.

The book lays out a structure for defining the characteristics of who you want to hire, then a very structured process to screen and interview and background check the candidates.

A definite must read for anyone hiring staff, or who wants to build a top-performing team.



Locn. 20-22 The most important decisions that businesspeople make are not what decisions, but who decisions. —JIM COLLINS, AUTHOR OF GOOD TO GREAT

Locn. 28-30 Who refers to the people you put in place to make the what decisions. Who is running your sales force? Who is assembling your product? Who is occupying the corner office? Who is where the magic begins, or where the problems start.

Locn. 61-62 “Your success as a manager is simply the result of how good you are at hiring the people around you.”

Locn. 67-68 who mistakes are pricey. According to studies we’ve done with our clients, the average hiring mistake costs fifteen times an employee’s base salary in hard costs and productivity loss.

Locn. 107-8 One of the basic failures in the hiring process is this: What is a resume? It is a record of a person’s career with all of the accomplishments embellished and all the failures removed.”

Locn. 170-71 We like to see people as fundamentally truthful. We wish that it were so, but one of the painful truths of hiring is this: it is hard to see people for who they really are.

Locn. 177-78 We define an A Player this way: a candidate who has at least a 90 percent chance of achieving a set of outcomes that only the top 10 percent of possible candidates could achieve.

Locn. 199-201 In business, you are who you hire. Hire C Players, and you will always lose to the competition. Hire B Players, and you might do okay, but you will never break out. Hire A Players, and life gets very interesting no matter what you are pursuing.

Locn. 270-71 The mission is an executive summary of the job’s core purpose. It boils the job down to its essence so everybody understands why you need to hire someone into the slot.

Locn. 323-24 Outcomes, the second part of a scorecard, describe what a person needs to accomplish in a role. Most of the jobs for which we hire have three to eight outcomes, ranked by order of importance.

Locn. 330-33 While typical job descriptions break down because they focus on activities, or a list of things a person will be doing (calling on customers, selling), scorecards succeed because they focus on outcomes, or what a person must get done (grow revenue from $25 million to $50 million by the end of year three). Do you see the distinction?

Locn. 345-46 Competencies define how you expect a new hire to operate in the fulfillment of the job and the achievement of the outcomes.

Locn. 522-31 HOW TO CREATE A SCORECARD 1. MISSION. Develop a short statement of one to five sentences that describes why a role exists. For example, “The mission for the customer service representative is to help customers resolve their questions and complaints with the highest level of courtesy possible.” 2. OUTCOMES. Develop three to eight specific, objective outcomes that a person must accomplish to achieve an A performance. For example, “Improve customer satisfaction on a ten-point scale from 7.1 to 9.0 by December 31.” 3. COMPETENCIES. Identify as many role-based competencies as you think appropriate to describe the behaviors someone must demonstrate to achieve the outcomes. Next, identify five to eight competencies that describe your culture and place those on every scorecard. For example, “Competencies include efficiency, honesty, high standards, and a customer service mentality.” 4. ENSURE ALIGNMENT AND COMMUNICATE. Pressure-test your scorecard by comparing it with the business plan and scorecards of the people who will interface with the role. Ensure that there is consistency and alignment. Then share the scorecard with relevant parties, including peers and recruiters.

Locn. 556-57 The overwhelming evidence from our field interviews is that ads are a good way to generate a tidal wave of resumes, but a lousy way to generate the right flow of candidates.

Locn. 574-77 You can almost certainly identify ten extremely talented people off the top of your head. Calling your list of ten and asking Patrick Ryan’s simple question—“Who are the most talented people you know that I should hire?”—can easily generate another fifty to one hundred names. Keep doing this, and in no time you will have moved into many other networks and enriched your personal talent pool with real ability.

Locn. 608-10 “We told the employees, ‘If you spot somebody like us, at a customer, at a supplier, or at a competitor, we want to hire them.’ That became very successful. People would say there is a great person there; let’s go after them. Employees referred 85 percent of our new hires!”

Locn. 685-87 The final step in the sourcing process, the one that matters more than anything else you can do, is scheduling thirty minutes on your calendar every week to identify and nurture A Players. A standing meeting on Monday or Friday will keep you honest by forcing you to call the top talent on your radar screen.

Locn. 687 plan for how to use the timr to best efffect

Locn. 907-9 Screening interviews separate the wheat from the chaff, but they are not precise enough to ensure a 90 percent or better hiring success rate. To be more confident and accurate in your selection, you will want to conduct a Topgrading Interview.

Locn. 1350-52 Have you heard the riddle about the five frogs on a log? It goes like this: Five frogs are on a log and one decides to jump off. How many are left? If you answered “five,” you are correct. Deciding to do something and actually doing it are two different things.

Locn. 1463-67 George Buckley of 3M grants freedom by building trust with his employees. “A lot of CEOs think the role of the CEO is to be aloof, like a judge in a courtroom,” he told us. “But the role of the CEO is to inspire people, and you cannot inspire people unless you get to know them and them you. Don’t cut corners on that. It takes energy. CEOs are sometimes afraid to be real people. If you want to extract as much value as possible out of somebody in an organization, you have to let them be themselves.

Locn. 1483-85 Freedom matters to today’s workforce, and especially to the most valuable among them. A Players want to operate without micromanagement, develop their own leadership styles, and prove their own worth. Show them that both you personally and your organizational culture will support their need for freedom, and you’ll go a long way toward sealing the deal.

Locn. 1645-47 HOW TO INSTALL THE A METHOD FOR HIRING IN YOUR COMPANY You have to do ten things if you want to install the A Method for Hiring in your business: (you need to get the book to see the list)

Locn. 1817-19 When we met with General Clark, he said, “What got you promoted to one rank won’t necessarily get you promoted to the next rank.” The scorecard changes the higher somebody climbs in an organization, which means how you think about a person’s capabilities must change.

Locn. 1866 Not everybody was good at everything. They just had to be exceptional at one thing.

Locn. 1902-3 Visit www.ghsmart.com to learn more.