Who

The A Method for Hiring

By: Geoff Smart, Randy Street

Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor

Length: 4 hrs and 47 mins

Publisher's Summary

It's happened to the best of us. You have a job opening to fill. You interview a range of qualified candidates and hire the best of the bunch - or so you think. You soon realize that the person who seemed like a perfect fit during the interview doesn't have what it takes to do the job.

In Who, Geoff Smart and Randy Street, of the management consulting firm ghSmart, combine their experiences training thousands of managers and executives with the most revealing and comprehensive research ever on the subject of how to hire successfully, as well as advice and stories from more than 20 billionaires and 60 CEOs. The result is a simple, four-step method for hiring with confidence, designed for everyone from the CEO on down. Who shows you how to avoid the most common pitfalls of hiring, how to identify "A Players" - people who can perform their job better than 90 percent of the candidates in their field - and how to make sure the best candidate will be excited to join your organization.

Hiring is every bit as important an element of successful business as other key principles, such as leadership and strategy. Who should be required listening for anyone in a management position.

©2008 Geoff Smart (P)2008 Tantor

Great book but need PDF of Scorecard material

Great book and I plan to implement the methodology but this will be difficult without all the detail materials referred to in the book. Author should include a PDF with the critical materials discussed in the book.

Top Three Business Book of All Time

I've experienced that having the right people is by far the most important factor to make a business successful. More important than having the best ideas, best strategy, most capital, etc. And THIS book is the best process to use to find and hire the best people. We will be thoroughly implementing this process at Hunter Rowe. My other best business books are Traction (by Gino Wickman) and Good to Great. My favorite business biography is "Titan: The John D Rockefeller Story".

Excellent guidelines for hiring A players

If you're a hiring manager and use the traditional interview process (gut check), this is a great resource. The book provides a wealth of information and step-by-step instructions to source, screen, select, and sell top candidates. It's a short read (listen) and well worth the time.

Great Book & Problematic Narration

Excellent breakdown of how to properly interview candidates. Exceptional step by step instructions.

The narrator, however, made a hugely problematic choice when voicing the words of a non-american executive with a Spanish last name. Although his words and sentence structure are in perfect and grammatically correct English, the narrator uses affected English to communicate his assumption that the executive would speak accented, stilted English.

As a multi-lingual American I found this so exceptionally offensive and othering that it genuinely took me out of the book. It was extremely distracting, xenophobic and pointless. It was very disappointing and left me with a less than stellar feeling about the book - which the Authors do not deserve.

Great book, boring voice

The book offers simple but uncommon wisdom. In the past, I have made all the mistakes they list, and have improved my hiring thanks to this book.

Excellent help for hiring

This is a goldmine of macro and micro helps in hiring people, the right people. I even think it would be good to read if you were looking for a job to become familiar with great interview questions.

great tips

If you could sum up Who in three words, what would they be?

very informative and ground breaking.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Who?

the principals and techniques used

What about Patrick Lawlor’s performance did you like?

clear

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

made me think more about hiring

Any additional comments?

would recommend to anyone

interesting technique

Very boring book to listen to. Interesting technique and nicely revealing case study. The entire book could and should be concluded in one concise paragraph, or a simple one page worksheet.

essential

this book is essential for anyone who hires others. absolutely essential. the return-on-investment maybe a hundred times.

Disappointing book overall

The book is filled with instructions designed for hiring of executives and high end managers in large companies. Essentially it is a long advertisement for a hiring service owned by the authors. There are some very good points made, especially about mistakes to be avoided, but the authors insist their process is the only good way to hire when the elements of the process could be found in any solid hiring process.

Key takeaways are don't hire someone without knowing a lot about them, don't hire based on a single good mark in the interview, always be in the search for new hires, and don't hire someone who you don't know based on factual information will be sure to succeed in the position.