Who Book Summary - Who Book explained in key points

Who summary

Name: Who
Rating: 4.2 (142 reviews)
Author: Geoff Smart and Randy Street

Geoff Smart and Randy Street

The A Method for Hiring

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4.2 (142 ratings)

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What is Who about?

Who (2008) is your guide to the greatest problem that faces every business leader: how to hire competent staff. These blinks are chock-full of actionable tips on how to ensure your firm has a steady supply of adept candidates to choose from and that all your hires are in step with your goals.

About the Author

Geoff Smart runs the consulting firm ghSMART, which helps business leaders increase their impact and achieve their goals. His other book, Leadocracy, was also a New York Times bestseller.

Table of Contents

Key idea 1 of 8

Hiring mistakes can be catastrophic and many people lack the skills to make the right decisions.

Hiring can be a nightmare. But why all the fuss about getting the right person on the first try? If a new hire doesn’t work out, you can always just replace her, right?

Well, here’s the truth: if you think hiring is a matter of trial and error, you’re probably pretty new to the grueling initiation rite that is onboarding a new employee. Furthermore, hiring errors can cost companies a fortune and they happen far more often than they should.

Studies done by the authors have found that a typical hiring mistake will cost a company around fifteen times the employee’s monthly salary. Some of these costs stem from poor decisions made by the employee; the rest, from the work necessary to fire and replace him.

To put this in perspective, imagine you hire a manager who earns $100,000 a month. If your decision turns out to be a bad one, you’ll have cost the company up to $1.5 million!

Clearly, hiring the wrong person is an expensive mistake. Yet it happens all the time. According to management guru Peter Drucker, most managers make at least 50 percent of their mistakes during hiring decisions.

This makes sense, though. Business people often lack the skills they need to make sound hiring choices. So they end up relying not on personal expertise, but gut instinct.

This approach can be likened to that of an amateur art critic whose repertoire of responses to a work of art is limited to “I like it” and “I don’t like it.” The problem is that art can easily be forged and first impressions are often weak guides. Like the rash and uninformed critic, people who hire based on instinct can be fooled by charismatic candidates with little true ability.

Or, in other instances, managers act like prosecutors, trying to trick candidates into slipping up. As you’ll learn, doing this will only put a prospective hire on the defensive, preventing you from finding out whether he has the right skills for the job. Luckily, there’s a better approach, and in the next blinks you’ll learn all about it.

To have your hiring needs met, you first need to define them.

Would you consider hiring an unlicensed contractor to remodel your kitchen? Probably not. After all, there’s no way to know whether she has the skills necessary to complete the job. By the same token, you shouldn’t hire people without knowing precisely what qualifications they need to succeed. To do that, you must define your hiring needs.

Recruiters often forget to define exactly what it is they're looking for – a lapse that can derail the entire hiring process. Indeed, it’s crucial to know exactly what you want right from the get-go.

A candidate’s ability to fit into your company’s culture is often more important than her skills.

Intellect and smarts alone won’t make an employee great. She needs to have social skills, too, something recruiters would do well to keep in mind.

But to truly ensure that new hires fit in, you also need to know what the culture of your company is. In fact, one-third of the CEOs that the authors interviewed while preparing this book admitted that they’d made massive hiring mistakes by writing off the importance of a cultural fit.

Traditional hiring methods are outdated but yours can be easily revamped.

Plenty of billion-dollar firms consider hiring to be one of their most important business operations. But despite this fact, for most companies, it’s not a continuous process.

That’s because traditional hiring methods only look for new employees when they’re needed, which is a major error. After all, with the clock ticking, the hiring team is under intense pressure to find someone – and fast. This makes it more likely that they’ll hire the wrong person.

To make top-tier hiring decisions, you need a top-tier interview system.

When sussing out candidates, interviews are crucial – and knowing how to structure them is even more important. That’s why, to ensure that your hiring decisions hit the mark, you should use a four-interview system.

Each of these interviews will build on the others, increasing in precision as the process advances. Implementing this system will require effort and dedication, but it will be worth it in the end, as you’ll be much more likely to find the perfect match for the specific role you’re filling.

By diligently investigating your candidates, you can find the perfect person for the job.

The screening interview will narrow the field, but you’ll have a way to go before you select your ideal candidate. The next step is to unearth relevant facts about these promising candidates and the who interview is your tool to do so.

This second interview is more in-depth, the goal being to find out who the candidate really is. It’s based on a method pioneered by Brad Smart, the father of one of the authors. Here’s how he came up with it:

Selling a candidate on a job means convincing him that the position fits his skills, and lifestyle.

Imagine how frustrating it would be to conduct four interviews with a perfect candidate, only for him to walk out the door. It would be a huge letdown, but you can make sure it doesn’t happen by selling the candidate on the job.

That means convincing him that the job fits both his skills and personality. After all, employees want to be set up for success and the better a job fits their skills and style, the more likely they are to flourish.

Make hiring a part of your company culture.

Management experts and CEOs agree that bringing on talented employees is the single most important facet of building a successful company. But to make hiring all-star candidates a part of your company culture, you’ll have to lay out a clear process.

First, you need to make clear to your management team that people are your top priority. This is essential. Indeed, successful managers interviewed by the authors said that they spend up to 60 percent of their time thinking about their current and future employees.

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Who should read Who

Managers, entrepreneurs and recruiters
Job seekers
Anyone with the power to hire and fire

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Who summary

Listen to the first key idea

What is Who about?

About the Author

Hiring mistakes can be catastrophic and many people lack the skills to make the right decisions.

To have your hiring needs met, you first need to define them.

A candidate’s ability to fit into your company’s culture is often more important than her skills.

Traditional hiring methods are outdated but yours can be easily revamped.

To make top-tier hiring decisions, you need a top-tier interview system.

By diligently investigating your candidates, you can find the perfect person for the job.

Selling a candidate on a job means convincing him that the position fits his skills, and lifestyle.

Make hiring a part of your company culture.

Key ideas in Who

Hiring mistakes can be catastrophic and many people lack the skills to make the right decisions.

To have your hiring needs met, you first need to define them.

A candidate’s ability to fit into your company’s culture is often more important than her skills.

Traditional hiring methods are outdated but yours can be easily revamped.

To make top-tier hiring decisions, you need a top-tier interview system.

By diligently investigating your candidates, you can find the perfect person for the job.

Selling a candidate on a job means convincing him that the position fits his skills, and lifestyle.

Make hiring a part of your company culture.

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