Score the Job Before the Person

The Core Insight

The average hiring mistake costs fifteen times an employee's base salary in hard costs and lost productivity. On a 100,000 dollar hire that is 1,500,000 dollars. Ten of them in a year comes to 15,000,000 dollars.

Geoff Smart and Randy Street published Who in 2008 to attack that bill. Peter Drucker and other management writers have long put the hiring success rate of managers at 50 percent.

Most managers treat hiring as a talent for reading people. Sit across from the candidate, ask good questions, and trust what an hour reveals. Smart and Street treat it as a process of four steps, with a written definition of success at the front. Their evidence is a review of four thousand studies and meta-analyses. Traditional interviewing does not predict job performance.

An A Player has at least a 90 percent chance of achieving the outcomes on the scorecard. Only the top 10 percent of possible candidates reach that set of outcomes.

The Framework

The book opens by naming ten ways managers hire without a method, and calls the set voodoo. The Art Critic goes on gut feel, the Sponge lets everyone interview and nobody compare notes, and the Prosecutor runs trick questions. The Suitor sells instead of assessing, and the Trickster throws a wad of paper on the floor. The Animal Lover asks which animal you resemble, and the Chatterbox covers the Yankees and the weather. The Psychological Tester and the Aptitude Tester hand the judgment to an instrument, and the Fortune-Teller asks hypotheticals. All ten assume that reading a person is easy, and a resume is a career with the failures edited out.

The A Method replaces the ten with four steps, run in order.

• Scorecard. Write the mission, the ranked outcomes, and the competencies before anyone is contacted.
• Source. Build the candidate list continuously, so the flow exists before the seat does.
• Select. Run four structured interviews that gather facts about a track record spanning decades.
• Sell. Close against the five Fs from first contact onward.

Steven Kaplan's team at the University of Chicago spent two years on the firm's data. The named dataset is 313 Who Interviews of private-equity-backed CEOs from 2000 to 2005, matched against financial performance.

Key Ideas

The Scorecard Replaces the Job Description

A job description lists activities: calling on customers, selling, managing a team. A scorecard lists what the person must get done. It has three parts: mission, outcomes, competencies.

The mission is one to five sentences on why the role exists, in plain language. The sample for a customer service representative is to resolve customer questions and complaints with the highest level of courtesy possible. The test is whether candidates, recruiters and teammates read it without asking a clarifying question.

Most roles carry three to eight outcomes, ranked by importance. Each one is objective, observable, numeric where a number exists, and always dated. Grow revenue from 25,000,000 dollars to 50,000,000 dollars by the end of year three. Improve customer satisfaction on a ten-point scale from 7.1 to 9.0 by December 31.

Add the role-based competencies the job needs, then put five to eight cultural competencies on every scorecard. The prioritized list for A Players starts with efficiency, honesty and integrity, organization and planning, aggressiveness, and follow-through on commitments. One in three of the billionaires and CEOs interviewed named a failure to evaluate cultural fit as a top cause of hiring mistakes.

Referrals Outrun Every Other Source

The CEOs in the book call themselves chief recruiting officers, and they source before a seat opens. Of the leaders interviewed, 77 percent named referrals from their own networks as the top technique. Among average managers it is the least practiced.

The referral question is one line, asked at the end of every call. Ask who the most talented people they know are, and say plainly that you want to hire them. Calling ten talented people on your own list can produce another fifty to one hundred names.

Patrick Ryan grew Aon from a 1964 start-up into a 13,000,000,000 dollar company, and recruited thirty people a year himself. The step that matters most is thirty minutes on your calendar every week, spent finding and nurturing A Players. That habit connects you with forty or more new people a year.

The Screen Exists to Cut Fast

The screening interview happens on the phone, in twenty to thirty minutes, with the same four questions. Ask about career goals first, before anything you say taints the answer. Ask what they are good at professionally, and push for eight to twelve strengths with examples. Ask what they are not good at or not interested in doing, and refuse the rehearsed answers about impatience and working too hard.

The follow-up that breaks those loose names the reference calls to come, then asks what those bosses, peers and subordinates will say. Target five to eight genuine shortfalls.

The fourth question asks who the last five bosses were and how each will rate the candidate from one to ten. The future tense assumes the calls happen, and that assumption is the pressure. Look for 8s, 9s and 10s. A 7 is neutral. A self-rating of 6 or lower means 2.

Every answer gets the same three follow-ups: what, how, and tell me more. Then hit the gong fast, because missing a possible A Player costs less than hours spent on a borderline case. At Halma only 10 to 20 percent of screens pass, and the target is a list of two to five candidates.

The Career Walk Starts at the Earliest Job

The Who Interview is a chronological walk through the career, adapted from Brad Smart's topgrading interview. A half century of research in industrial psychology makes it the most valid predictor of performance the authors found. It opens with the highs and lows of education, then takes each job in the past fifteen years in turn.

Start at the earliest job and work forward to the present day. Do not start at the most recent job and work backward. Long careers get divided into chapters of three to five years, and each chapter gets the same five questions.

• Ask what they were hired to do, which reverse-engineers the scorecard nobody wrote for them.
• Ask which accomplishments they are most proud of, and listen for outcomes rather than events and people met.
• Ask what the low points were, and press until they name what went wrong and their biggest mistake.
• Ask who they worked with, which is where the reference threat gets planted.
• Ask why they left, and sort the answer into promoted, recruited, or fired.

The fourth question holds the machinery, and the book calls it TORC, the threat of a reference check. Ask for the boss's name and have the candidate spell it aloud while you write it down in view. Then ask what Mr. Smith will say about their biggest strengths and areas for improvement. Two minutes spent on the boss buys two minutes of the candidate standing in the boss's shoes. The book names reciprocity as the reason.

The interview runs three hours on average, five hours for CEOs of multibillion-dollar companies, and ninety minutes for entry-level roles. The hiring manager runs it with one colleague, one asking and one taking notes. Expect to interrupt at least once every three or four minutes.

Do not hire anybody pushed out of 20 percent or more of their jobs. Those candidates carry three times the chance of being a chronic B or C Player.

The focused interviews come next. The example splits a scorecard of four outcomes and six competencies across three interviewers, at forty-five minutes to one hour each.

You Pick the References and the Candidate Books Them

Skipping reference calls costs 25 percent of the information you need. Of the business leaders in the book, 64 percent make reference calls for every hire.

Pick the references yourself from your Who Interview notes instead of working the list the candidate hands you. Ask the candidate to set up the calls, which doubles the chance of reaching the person. Do seven: about four yourself and three by colleagues, split across three past bosses, two peers or customers, and two subordinates.

The five questions run in a fixed order, opening on the context in which the reference worked with the person. Ask for the biggest strengths, in the same words used in the screening interview. Ask about the biggest areas for improvement back then, because those two words free a reference to name a weakness that no longer exists. Ask for a rating from one to ten, and set it against the rating the candidate predicted.

For the fifth, name the weakness the candidate predicted this reference will raise, credit it to the candidate, and ask for more. Faint praise in a reference call is damning praise.

Skill is what the candidate can do against each outcome. Will is what they want to do, read from motivations and competencies. Rate A only when the data support a 90 percent chance or better. No A's means restarting at source, one A means hiring that person, and several A's means ranking them and hiring the best.

Sell Across Five Waves and Assume a Counteroffer

The five waves are sourcing, interviewing, and the gap between offer and acceptance. The last two run from acceptance to the first day, and through the first one hundred days.

• Fit ties where the company is going to the candidate's goals and values, and it sells hardest.
• Family covers the trauma of a job change, and in a small company you sell the spouse and children.
• Freedom is a stated promise of decision rights and no micromanaging.
• Fortune links variable pay to performance against the scorecard, though money is seldom the key motivator.
• Fun is the culture line, and it costs nothing to state.

The close assumes a counteroffer from the current employer, because A Players get them. Silence is the worst enemy between the offer and the start date. Persistence is the book's one-word answer to what matters most in selling.

Practical Applications

Build the scorecard for your open role before the ad goes out: mission, three to eight dated outcomes, five to eight cultural competencies. The book prints the enforcement rule as no scorecard, no requisition.

Put thirty minutes a week on the calendar for sourcing, and end every call with the referral question. Pay a bounty for referrals that pass the phone screen.

Run the screen yourself with the four questions in the same order every time, and cut to two to five candidates. Book the Who Interview with a colleague for three hours, and spell every boss's name out loud.

Make the seven reference calls before you extend the offer, then sell across all five waves. John Zillmer hired or promoted twenty-seven A Players at Allied Waste in eighteen months, at 90 percent success. Company value rose 67 percent.

Who This Is For

Founders making their first executive hires get the most from this book. So does any manager who made a bad hire and cannot name what went wrong.

Skip it for high-volume hiring where a miss costs a week. Skip it too if your team already writes scorecards and runs structured interviews, because the rest of the book repeats itself by design.

The method was built for executive hiring at private-equity scale, and the evidence base shows it. The named study covers 313 private-equity-backed CEOs. The full sequence costs many hours per candidate. Count a three-hour chronological interview run by two people, three focused interviews of about an hour each, and seven reference calls. A startup hiring its fourth engineer must compress that, and the book does not say how.

The cost multiple comes from studies the authors ran with their own consulting clients, and it carries no outside audit. The book's counts of the leaders it interviewed do not reconcile between the introduction and the back matter. Take the mechanisms as the durable part and every rate as a claim to test in your own hiring.

The Decision

Hand the scorecard for your open role to two people who will work with the hire. If either asks what the job is, the document is not finished.

Then run the whole sequence once on that one role. Screen on the phone, walk the career forward with a colleague, split the scorecard across focused interviews, and make the seven calls.

Count the hours it costs you. Set that total against what the last bad hire took out of the company. One role settles whether the method is expensive.