Book review: Who: The A Method For Hiring

Who: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street treats recruitment as an execution discipline rather than an exercise in intuition.

The core argument is simple and uncomfortable: most hiring failures are not caused by a lack of talent in the market, but by sloppy decision-making. Interviews reward confidence, charm, and familiarity. Real performance, however, shows up later — in execution, judgment under pressure, and consistency over time. The book proposes a structured, evidence-based alternative: define outcomes first, assess candidates against those outcomes, and rely on past behavior rather than projected potential or personal chemistry.

I used several of the techniques from Who when I was CEO of a lithium-ion manufacturing company. This was a capital-intensive, operationally unforgiving environment: factories do not tolerate “learning on the job,” and hiring mistakes compound quickly.

I still made plenty of mistakes — some roles were defined too vaguely, some references were checked too late, and in a few cases urgency overruled process. But compared to earlier phases of my career, the difference was material. The discipline of scorecards, chronological interviews, and reference triangulation consistently outperformed the familiar alternative: hiring people you “like” after a good conversation.

That is where the book is at its strongest. It does not promise perfect hires. It promises fewer bad ones. And in scaling organizations — especially industrial or deep-tech companies — avoiding one bad hire at a critical node is often more valuable than landing a theoretical superstar.

What I also appreciate is that Who aligns well with reality at the FOAK and scale-up stage. When incentives are misaligned and pressure is high, personal affinity becomes a dangerous bias. Structure acts as a counterweight. It forces founders and CEOs to articulate what success actually looks like in a role, rather than projecting their own preferences onto a candidate.

This is not a book about culture, motivation, or leadership philosophy. It is a book about decision hygiene. If you are building or scaling a company where execution matters more than storytelling — factories, infrastructure, energy, hardware — this is required reading.

Hiring based on who you enjoy talking to is easy. Hiring based on who will deliver, repeatedly, under real constraints is harder. Who provides a practical framework for doing the latter.