Who: The A Method for Hiring

by Geoff Smart

These successful executives don’t allow recruiting to become a one-time event, or something they have to do only every now and then. They are always sourcing, always on the lookout for new talent, always identifying the who before a new hire is really needed.

Of all the ways to source candidates, the number one method is to ask for referrals from your personal and professional networks. This approach may feel scary and timeconsuming, but it is the single most effective way to find potential A Players.

This is an instance where innovation matters far less than process and discipline.

a full 77 percent of them cited referrals as their top technique for generating a flow of the right candidates for their businesses. Yet among average managers it is the least often practiced approach to sourcing.

Ryan’s approach is among the easiest we have seen. Whenever he meets somebody new, he asks this simple, powerful question: “Who are the most talented people you know that I should hire?”

Talented people know talented people, and they’re almost always glad to pass along one another’s names.

You can almost certainly identify ten extremely talented people off the top of your head. Calling your list of ten and asking Patrick Ryan’s simple question—“Who are the most talented people you know that I should hire?”—can easily generate another fifty to one hundred names. Keep doing this, and in no time you will have moved into many other networks and enriched your personal talent pool with real ability.

“We told the employees, ‘If you spot somebody like us, at a customer, at a supplier, or at a competitor, we want to hire them.’ That became very successful. People would say there is a great person there; let’s go after them. Employees referred 85 percent of our new hires!”

Maybe the greatest benefit of in-house sourcing, though, is how it alters the mind-set throughout an enterprise. By turning employees into talent spotters, everyone starts viewing the business through a who lens, not just a what one.

doing everything else you can to bring an outside recruiter inside both streamlines the process and enhances the results.

The most high-tech tracking system in the world won’t do you any good if you don’t use it on a systematic basis.

“Now that you know a little about me, who are the most talented people you know who might be a good fit for my company?”

Hiring needs always ebb and flow with the business, but simple systems and disciplines—and simple questions such as the one just shown—will enable your sourcing network to grow exponentially over time.

If you don’t own the process, no one will.

To be a great interviewer, you must get out of the habit of passively witnessing how somebody acts during an interview. That puts you back in the realm of voodoo hiring methods, where you end up basing your decision on how somebody acts during a few minutes of a certain day. The time span is too limited to reliably predict anything useful. Instead, the four interviews use the time to collect facts and data about somebody’s performance track record that spans decades.

The four interviews are: • The screening interview • The Who Interview® • The focused interview • The reference interview

The goal here is to save time by eliminating people who are inappropriate for the position as quickly as possible. We recommend that you conduct the screening interview by phone and that you take no more than thirty minutes.

As with all the interviews we present with the A Method, we advocate a structured approach to screening interviews. This means following a common set of questions every time you screen somebody. The commonality fosters consistency and accelerates your ability to discern differences between candidates. Plus, it is just plain easier to know what to ask when you get on the phone with somebody. Why make up questions every time? There is no need to reinvent the wheel.

Four essential questions will help you build a comprehensive fact base for weeding out clear B and C Players in a screening interview.

What are your career goals? This first question is powerful because it allows you to hear about a candidate’s goals and passions before you taint the discussion with your own comments.

Ideally, a candidate will share career goals that match your company’s needs. If he or she lacks goals or sounds like an echo of your own Web site, screen the person out. You are done with the call. Talented people know what they want to do and are not afraid to tell you about it.

You also want to hear the candidate speak with passion and energy about topics that are aligned with the role. A clear misalignment should put you on alert. No matter how talented or qualified a candidate might be, someone who wants to be a manager is not going to be happy if you are trying to hire an individual contributor. Pass the name along to one of your colleagues

What are you really good at professionally? This second question always generates plenty of dialogue. You won’t have any trouble getting people to list their strengths. We suggest you push candidates to tell you eight to twelve positives so you can build a complete picture of their professional aptitude. Ask them to give you examples that will put their strengths into context. If they say they are decisive, press for an example of a time when this trait served them well, and remember, you are listening for strengths that match the job at hand. If you see a major gap between someone’s strengths and your scorecard, screen that person out.

What are you not good at or not interested in doing professionally? The third question captures the other side of the balance sheet. You could ask for weaknesses outright, but too often that approach yields cookie-cutter, self-serving answers like “I am impatient for results” or “I work too hard.” Instead, let the candidates answer as they will. Then if you’re not satisfied, push them for a real weakness or a real area for development. If you hear these cookie-cutter answers, simply say, “That sounds like a strength to me. What are you really not good at or not interested in doing?” Talented people will catch the hint and reconsider their responses.

“If you advance to the next step in our process, we will ask for your help in setting up some references with bosses, peers, and subordinates. Okay?” The candidate will say, “Okay.” Then you say, “So I’m curious. What do you think they will say are some things you are not good at, or not interested in?” Now you’ll get an honest and full answer.

Your balance sheet on a candidate will be incomplete if you can’t identify at least five to eight areas where a person falls short, lacks interest, or doesn’t want to operate. If you come up woefully short, if the weaknesses are all strengths in disguise, or if you see any deal killers relative to your scorecard, then screen the candidate out.

Who were your last five bosses, and how will they each rate your performance on a 1–10 scale when we talk to them? Notice the language used in the question: “How will they rate you when we talk to them?” Not “if we talk to them.” When.

Ask candidates to list each boss and offer a rating for each. Follow up by pressing for details. What makes them think their boss would rate them a 7? Candidates will reinforce and expand upon the list of strengths and weaknesses they gave you in response to the first two questions.

You are looking for lots of 8’s, 9’s, and 10’s in the ratings. Consider 7’s neutral; 6’s and below are actually bad. We have found that people who give themselves a rating of 6 or lower are really saying 2.

Review the scorecard before the call to refresh your memory. Then begin the call by setting expectations, saying something like this: “I am really looking forward to our time together. Here’s what I’d like to do. I’d like to spend the first twenty minutes of our call getting to know you. After that, I am happy to answer any questions you have so you can get to know us. Sound good?” Candidates will almost always agree to that plan. If they are interested enough in the job to talk with you, they’ll go with whatever you propose. Now you can launch right into the screening interview questions.

While you don’t want to waste time with the wrong people, you want to make all the time necessary for the right ones.

After conducting the interview, ask yourself, “Do this person’s strengths match my scorecard? Are the weaknesses manageable? Am I thrilled about bringing this person in for a series of interviews based on the data I have?”

Rather than create a screening guide that tries to cover all the possibilities, we use a simple process called “getting curious.” Here’s how it works. After a candidate answers one of the primary questions above, get curious about the answer by asking a follow-up question that begins with “What,” “How,” or “Tell me more.” Keep using this framework until you are clear about what the person is really saying.

What do you mean? What did that look like? What happened? What is a good example of that? What was your role? What did you do? What did your boss say? What were the results? What else? How did you do that? How did that go? How did you feel? How much money did you save? How did you deal with that?

It wasn’t always pretty, but in fact hitting the gong fast is exactly what good screening is all about. Too many managers make the costly mistake of lingering with candidates who are a bad match. Some are simply avoiding confrontation. Others think, “If I have my colleagues Janet, Rick, and Charlotte interview this person, they’ll see something I don’t.” That might sound collegial, but you are just wasting everybody’s time. Better to miss out on a potential A Player than to waste precious hours on a borderline case that turns out to be a B or C Player.

It goes a long way toward giving you confidence in your selection because it uncovers the patterns of somebody’s career history, which you can match to your scorecard.

Matt Levin of Bain Capital put it this way: “Boards make mistakes when they don’t take the time to learn the story of the person. Everybody has strengths and weaknesses. If you want to enhance your predictive capabilities, you have to really understand their story and their patterns.”

So what is the Who Interview? It’s a chronological walk-through of a person’s career. You begin by asking about the highs and lows of a person’s educational experience to gain insight into his or her background. Then you ask five simple questions, for each job in the past fifteen years, beginning with the earliest and working your way forward to the present day.

These five questions are so straightforward that the discussion they generate seems more like a conversation than an interview. Boards and CEOs find this attractive because they can interview senior executives wit...

What were you hired to do?

This first question is a clear window into candidates’ goals and targets for a specific job. In a way, you are trying to discover what their scorecard might have been if they had had one. They might not know off the top of their head, so coach them by asking how they thought their success was measured in the role. Build a mental image of what their scorecard should have been. What were their mission and key outcomes? What competencies might have mattered?

What accomplishments are you mo...

Question number two generates wonderful discussions about the peaks of a person’s career. This is where you will hear the stories behind the polished statements on a resume. In our experience, most candidates naturally focus on what really mattered to them at that time...

On the flip side, we are always wary when a candidate’s accomplishments seem to lack any correlation to the expectations of the job. Be sure to listen for that clue.

A Players tend to talk about outcomes linked to expectations. B and C Players talk generally about events, people they met, or aspects of the job they liked without ever getting into results.

What were some low points duri...

People can be hesitant to share their lows at first, opting instead to say something like, “I didn’t have any lows. Those were good years! Yup, those were good years, I tell you!” The disclaimers are understandable, but there isn’t a person alive who can seriously make this claim. Everybody, and we mean everybody, has work lows. Our recommendation is to reframe the question over and over until the candidate gets the message. “What went really wrong? What was your biggest mistake? What would you have done differently? What part of the job did you not...

Who were the people you w...

This is one part of the Who Interview where the precision and order of the questions really matter.