By: Geoff Smart Randy Street

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According to Smart and Street, “Who” is your number-one problem. Not “What”. What refers to the strategies you choose, the products and services you sell, and the processes you use.  Focusing solely on the challenges of “What” means you will feel stressed, likely make less money than you desire, and lack the time to do what you want.

“Who” refers to the people you put in place to make the “What” decisions. Those who can ensure “What” doesn’t take over. “Who” is where the magic begins, or with the wrong “Who”, where the problems start.

“Who” failures infect every aspect of our professional and personal lives. “Who” mistakes happen when managers:

• Are unclear about what is needed in a job
• Have a weak flow of candidates
• Do not trust their ability to pick out the right candidate from a group of similar-looking candidates
• Lose candidates they really want to join their team

“Who” problems are also preventable and Smart and Street give you a solution to your number-one problem—to help you make better who decisions and find A Players.

Finding A Players

What is an A Player? Smart and Street 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. Just take time to think of the math behind this. Someone who has 90 percent of the top 10 percent candidate competencies is a rare beast.

Hiring A Players takes hard work. You have to dig hard, ask tough questions, and be prepared sometimes for disturbing answers. Hire C Players, and you will always lose to the competition. Hire B Players, and you might do okay, but you will never break out. Hire A Players, and life gets very interesting no matter what you are pursuing.

How do you get an A team? Smart and Street suggest following a four-step evaluation.

Step 1 - The Scorecard

The scorecard is a document that describes exactly what you want a person to accomplish in a role. It is not a job description, but rather a set of outcomes and competencies that define a job done well.

Scorecards are your blueprint for success. They take the theoretical definition of an A Player and put it in practical terms for the position you need to fill. Scorecards describe the mission for the position, outcomes that must be accomplished, and competencies that fit with both the culture of the company and the role.

The scorecard is composed of three parts: the job’s mission, outcomes, and competencies.

The mission is an executive summary of the job’s core purpose. It boils the job down to its essence so everybody understands why you need to hire someone into the slot. For a mission to be meaningful, it has to be written in plain language, not the gobbledygook so commonly found in business today.

Outcomes, the second part of a scorecard, describe what a person needs to accomplish in a role. Most of the jobs for which we hire have three to eight outcomes, ranked by order of importance. Being specific on outcomes frees new hires to give the job their best shot. They know what they’ll be judged on. They know what the company and the boss think is important in their position.

Competencies flow directly from the first two elements of the scorecard. The mission defines the essence of the job to a high degree of specificity. Outcomes describe what must be accomplished. Competencies define how you expect a new hire to operate in the fulfilment  of the job and the achievement of the outcomes.

Job v Culture Competencies for A Players

Competencies work at two levels. They define the skills and behaviours required for a job, and they reflect the broader demands of your organisational culture. Job competencies are generally easier to list, but cultural fit is just as important. Evaluating culture sometimes means removing people who are not a fit. The best salesperson in the world is the wrong hire if you value respect for others and he is openly disrespectful. Scorecards are the guardians of your culture. They encapsulate on paper the unwritten dynamics that make your company what it is, and they ensure you think about those things with every hiring decision.

With a blueprint for success in hand, you are now ready for the second step: finding the people who can deliver the A performance specified by your scorecard.

Step 2 - Source

Finding great people is getting harder, but it is not impossible. Systematic sourcing before you have slots to fill ensures you have high-quality candidates waiting when you need them.

Smart and Street suggest whilst ads are a good way to generate a tidal wave of resumes, they are a poor at generating the right flow of candidates. They suggest the number one method is to ask for referrals from your networks.

You can almost certainly identify ten extremely talented people in your network off the top of your head. Calling your list of ten and asking, “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 soon you will have moved into many other networks and enriched your personal talent pool with real ability. The authors suggest you also ask your customers for the names of the most talented salespeople who call on them.

As valuable as outside referrals are, in-house ones often provide better-targeted sourcing. After all, who knows your needs and culture better than the people who are already working for you? Maybe the greatest benefit of in-house sourcing 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.

Recruiters remain a key source for executive talent, but they can do only so much if you don’t expose them to the inner culture and workings of your business. In fact, great recruiters are unlikely to accept an assignment from you unless they have an opportunity to get that view. They educate you about the market for talent, much as a real-estate agent might take you around to multiple houses to gauge your tastes.               

How, then, do you winnow the candidates that you have found through referrals or that your recruiters and researchers have identified? Use Step 3.

Step 3 - Select

Selecting a talent involves a series of four structured interviews that allow you to gather the relevant facts about a person so you can rate your scorecard and make an informed hiring decision.

The four interviews are:

• The screening interview
• The “Who” interview
• The focused interview
• The reference interview

The screening interview is a short, phone-based interview designed to clear out B and C Players from your roster of candidates. The goal here is to save time by eliminating people who are inappropriate for the position as quickly as possible.

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? What are you really good at professionally? What are you not good at or not interested in doing professionally? Who were your last five bosses, and how will they each rate your performance on a 1–10 scale when we talk to them?

The Who interview is the key interview within the “Select” step. 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.

Question 1 - What were you hired to do?

Question 2 - What accomplishments are you most proud of? These questions confirm detail likely written in the candidate’s resume.

Question 3 - What were some low points during that job? Don’t let the candidate off the hook here. Keep pushing until the candidate shares the lows.                

Question 4 - Who were the people you worked with? Question four builds on the fourth question of the screening interview and the “threat of reference check”. By asking “What will your ex-boss say of you?” you are signaling that this isn’t a hypothetical question. Candidates quickly realise they have to tell you the truth because you are going to learn it from your reference calls anyway.

Question 5 - Why did you leave that job? This is one of the most insight-producing questions you ask. Were the candidates for your position promoted, recruited, or fired from each job along their career progression? Were they taking the next step in their career or running from something? How did they feel about it? How did their boss react to the news?

Think of yourself as a biographer interviewing a subject. You want both the details and the broad pattern, the facts and texture. That’s how you make an informed who decision.

The Focused interview allow you to gather additional, specific information about your candidate: a finer degree of granularity. These interviews also offer a chance to involve other team members directly in the hiring process. The focused interview is similar to the commonly used behavioural interview with one major difference: it is focused on the outcomes and competencies of the scorecard, not some vaguely defined job description or manager’s intuition. Focused interviews also give you a final gauge on the cultural fit that so many business leaders cite as critical to the hiring process. Just be sure to include competencies and outcomes that go beyond the specifics of the job to embrace the larger values of your company.

The Reference Interview. There are three things you have to do to have successful reference interviews. First, pick the right references. Review your notes from the Who Interview and pick the bosses, peers, and subordinates with whom you would like to speak. Second, ask the candidate to contact the references to set up the calls. You will have twice the chance of actually getting to talk to a reference if you ask the candidate to set up the interview—whether it is during business hours or after hours at home. Third, conduct the right number of reference interviews. Smart and Street recommend that you personally do about four and ask your colleagues to do three, for a total of seven reference interviews. Interview three past bosses, two peers or customers, and two subordinates.

Note, speaking and hearing are two different skills. Nearly half the industry leaders we interviewed warned that you can still get poor information from a reference call if you fail to read between the lines. People don’t like to give a negative reference. They want to help their former colleagues, not hurt them. Your best defence is to pay very close attention to what people say and how they say it.      The referee’s belief in the former colleague will come through in how he or she talks about the person. That excitement and spark are the clearest indicators that you are both talking about the same A Player.

To conclude Step 3 you need to make that selection.

Take out your scorecards that you have completed on each candidate and given each candidate an overall A, B, or C grade. Make any updates you need to based on the reference interviews. Look at the data, consider the opinions and observations of the interview team, and give a final grade. If you have no A’s, then restart your process at the second step: source.  If you have one A, decide to hire that person. If you have multiple A’s, then rank them and decide to hire the best A from among them.

Step 4 - Sell

Once you identify people you want on your team through selection, you need to persuade them to join.

The key to successfully selling your candidate to join your company is putting yourself in his or her shoes. Care about what they care about. Candidates tend to care about five things - fit, family, freedom, fortune, and fun.

• Fit ties together the company’s vision, needs, and culture with the candidate’s goals, strengths, and values.
• Family takes into account the broader trauma of changing jobs. 
• Freedom is the autonomy the candidate will have to make his or her own decisions.
• Fortune reflects the stability of your company and the overall financial upside.
• Fun describes the work environment and personal relationships the candidate will make.                

Identify which of the five F’s really matter to the candidate and and execute a plan to address the relevant F’s between offer and acceptance, between acceptance and the first day, and during the first one hundred days on the job. Be persistent. Don’t give up until you have your A Player on board.

In conclusion, The A Method for hiring is simple. The A Method works. The A Method will help you go further.