Who: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart & Randy Street

A bad hire is usually a failure of the hiring process, not bad luck with people, and that claim is the foundation of "Who: The A Method for Hiring." Geoff Smart and Randy Street, of the leadership advisory firm ghSMART, built the book on more than 1,300 hours of interviews with over 20 billionaires and 300 CEOs, and they argue that the method a company uses is what separates the hires that work from the ones that do not. They give the common failure pattern a name, "voodoo hiring," and catalog its variants, including the manager who forms a gut read in the opening minutes of an interview and spends the rest of the conversation collecting evidence for it. In a 25-person company, one wrong hire in a key seat is not a rounding error. It redistributes work, attention, and patience across everyone sitting near that seat, often for a year or longer. That makes hiring a question about how a business is built, and only secondarily a question about how it is staffed. It is the same reason the Inside-Out Method™ looks at who holds each role before it looks at what the role produces.

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.

— Geoff Smart, "Who: The A Method for Hiring"

The A Method breaks the hiring process into four steps: scorecard, source, select, and sell. The scorecard comes first and does most of the work. Smart and Street replace the duty-based job description: the hiring manager writes down why the job exists, the three to eight outcomes the person must deliver, and the competencies the job calls for in the context of that specific company. A controller's scorecard might call for closing the books by the fifth business day and cutting days sales outstanding by a set amount within the year. Candidates are then measured against those written outcomes instead of the interviewer's impression of them. Source is the part most owners skip: building a bench of possible candidates before a seat opens, largely through referrals from people whose judgment the owner already trusts. Select is a sequence of four interviews, each doing a different job: a short screening call, a chronological walk through the candidate's entire work history, focused interviews on specific scorecard outcomes, and a structured reference process the candidate helps arrange. Sell is the closing step, because a candidate who meets the bar usually has other options.

The longest of those interviews is the one owners find least familiar. It skips the hypotheticals about what a candidate would do in a given situation and walks through every job the person has held, in order, asking the same short set of questions at each stop: what they were hired to do, what they count as their accomplishments there, what the low points were, who they reported to and how that person would rate their work, and why they left. Repeated across a full career, the answers form a record that is difficult to stage. Someone who describes five straight departures as a boss problem has said something a single polished interview answer would have covered up.

The definition underneath all of it sets a deliberately high bar. Smart and Street write that an A Player is "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." The standard is relative to the role and the company, not to some universal ranking, which is what makes it usable in a 40-person distributor as well as a public company.

The size of the problem the book is aiming at is well documented. Gallup, examining one of the highest-stakes hiring decisions a company makes, reports that companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job 82% of the time when they name a manager ↗ (opens in new tab), and traces much of that to selection based on tenure or on success in a previous non-managerial job. The pressure is not letting up either. In NFIB's July 2026 jobs report ↗ (opens in new tab), 27% of small business owners named labor quality or availability their single most important problem, a jump of 8 points from June and 15 points above the survey's historical average of 12%.

The practical value of "Who" for an owner-led business is that it converts a vague complaint into something correctable. An owner who says the last three hires didn't work out is usually describing an outcome. The book asks what was written down before each of those searches began, who else was interviewed, and what the reference calls asked. In most cases the answer is that no written standard existed for any of them, which points the diagnosis at the process instead of the candidates. Focus 90™ works from that reframing too when the bottleneck a business brings to the table turns out to sit in its people decisions instead of its operations. The scorecard also fixes a problem GH Group sees constantly: two managers hiring for the same role, each working from a private, unwritten version of it. The job description template that prevents role confusion covers that ground from the internal side, and the 90-day window that decides whether a new hire stays picks up where the hiring process ends, since a strong selection process still fails if the first quarter is left to chance.

Two caveats are worth stating. The A Method is heavy for a company hiring twice a year; the full four-interview sequence assumes time and discipline that a busy owner has to schedule deliberately, because it will not appear on its own. And the book's language, built around A, B, and C Players, reads harshly out of context. Smart and Street mean it as a fit judgment against a specific scorecard, not a verdict on a person's worth, but a leadership team adopting the vocabulary should be careful about how it travels through the rest of the company. One note on how this title landed on the list: it is a general GH Group recommendation, not something Gary has confirmed reading, and nothing here should be taken as an endorsement of every technique in it. It is here because the scorecard-first sequence lines up with the advice GH Group gives owners whose hiring keeps producing surprises.