Who
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 mostIn business, you are who you hire.
Stats for nerds
5recommend
9mentions
7people
2011–2021years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I don't understand question #1. Maybe you can rephrase?
#2 requires a mix of (i) reference interviews, and (ii) digging into details during candidate interviews. Read these books to learn how:
* Who: https://www.amazon.com/Who-Geoff-Smart/dp/0345504194
* Topgrading: https://www.amazon.com/Topgrading-3rd-Promoting-Turbocharges...
- 1. "An Elegant Puzzle - Systems of Engineering Management" by Will Larson. His blog & "Staff Eng" posts are helpful as well. https://lethain.com/tags/staff-eng/
2. "The Phoenix Project", "The Unicorn Project" (novels), and "DevOps Handbook" by Eugene Kim, on how different parts of a tech + non-tech organization come and work together.
3. "High Output Management" by Andrew Grove on overall technical management.
4. "Measure What Matters" by John Doerr on setting objectives and measuring their progress.
5. "The Checklist Manifesto" by Atul Gawande on thinking through replicable processes.
6. "Who" by Geoff Smart on hiring.
7. "Start with Why" by Simon Sinek and "The Culture Code" by Daniel Coyle on creating culture and reasons for why people do the work. It's an important part of any management process, double import because of how often it is lost in technical management.
- Some additional great resources related to hiring:
How to hire your first engineer - https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-hire-your-first-engineer...
Convincing Engineer to join your team and a basic structure for the process - https://blog.ycombinator.com/convincing-engineers-to-join-yo...
General thoughts about hiring - http://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-hire
The book "Who" gives a good idea about a good process. Hard to apply when you are not looking for a "generalist" - https://www.amazon.com/Who-Geoff-Smart/dp/0345504194/
Some of the manager tools podcasts episodes - https://www.manager-tools.com/map-universe/hiring-0
Edit: formatting
- Who: The A Hiring Method http://www.whothebook.com/ by Geoff Smart (son of Brad Smart of Topgrading fame)
- The best book on hiring, no doubt, is Who: http://www.amazon.com/Who-The-A-Method-Hiring/dp/0345504194
We used it to build our hiring process for http://www.thinkful.com/ and it consistently proves valuable.
We also use it to help our students prepare for job interviews.
- In our experience, the best way to learn how to interview is to talk with hiring managers. The 2nd best way is to pretend you are one.
We SWEAR by this book: Who (http://www.amazon.com/Who-The-A-Method-Hiring/dp/1400158389)
Skip to chapter 4.
It's structured our interviews as we grow our team at http://thinkful.com/ as well as work with students to improve their resumes as junior engineers.
