- Hiring runs on four steps: Scorecard, Source, Select, and Sell [1]. Most managers only ever consciously practice the last two.
- The scorecard is a mission, a ranked set of outcomes, and a set of competencies, written down before you talk to a single candidate [2]. This document became The MOC.
- An A Player is defined precisely, not vaguely: someone with at least a 90 percent chance of achieving outcomes that only the top 10 percent of candidates could achieve [1].
- Referrals from your own network, not job postings or recruiters, are the highest-yield source of candidates: 77 percent of the leaders interviewed named referrals their top sourcing technique [3].
- Selection runs through four interviews in a fixed sequence, each doing a different job: the screening interview, the Who Interview, the focused interview, and the reference interview [4].
- In a University of Chicago study of 313 private-equity-backed CEOs, fast, accountability-driving “Cheetahs” succeeded 100 percent of the time, against 57 percent for people-pleasing “Lambs” [5].
WHO: The A Method for Hiring
Smart and Street's synthesis of ghSMART's research — over 1,300 hours of interviews with more than twenty billionaires and dozens of CEOs, plus a University of Chicago statistical study matching 313 CEO assessments to financial outcomes — into the Scorecard framework (mission, outcomes, competencies) that shaped how a generation of founders learned to hire.
- Author
- Published
- 2008 · 208 pp.
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- AmazonBookshop.org
- When you’re about to open a role and reach straight for a job description: write The MOC first. Smart and Street’s mission-outcomes-competencies scorecard [2] forces you to define what winning the role looks like before anyone starts filtering resumes, which is the step most managers skip.
- When you’re sourcing candidates only by posting the job and waiting: the book’s data says you’re fishing in the wrong pond. Referrals from your own network were the technique 77 percent of interviewed leaders relied on most [3], and that’s the pond average managers barely fish.
- When your interview process is one long, unstructured conversation: the four-interview sequence exists because each interview catches something the others don’t. Skipping straight to a “gut feel” chat and a reference call as an afterthought is exactly the voodoo hiring pattern the method was built to replace.
- When you’re choosing between a candidate who’s easy to work with and one who’s demanding but drives outcomes: the Cheetah/Lamb finding is a real caution against over-weighting likability. It’s a single study of private-equity CEOs, not a universal law, but it’s evidence worth sitting with before you default to the more agreeable candidate [5].