Who: The A Method for Hiring
by Geoff Smart & Randy Street
A repeatable hiring process that survives contact with reality, padded with consultant gloss.
- Status
- Read · January 2022
- Bought
- January 11, 2022
- For
- Engineering managers running interview loops · Founders making their first key hires · Anyone who hires on gut feel and regrets it
Where it earned its place
The one-paragraph verdict
The core idea is sound and underused: write a scorecard before you interview, define the outcomes the role must deliver, then run a structured “Topgrading” interview that walks the candidate chronologically through their career. The discipline of deciding what “good” looks like before you meet anyone is the whole point, and most teams skip it. Where the book wears thin is the relentless framing — the “A Player” branding, the 90%-success-rate claim that no one can reproduce, and a pace that stretches a long blog post into 200 pages. [Who on Goodreads] reflects that split: people love the method and roll their eyes at the packaging.
Who should read it
Engineering managers and founders who hire on instinct and keep getting burned — this gives you a repeatable process you can hand to a panel. If you already run scorecard-driven, structured interviews, you know everything here and can skip it.
Where it earned its place
The scorecard-first discipline shaped how I wrote up on-call expectations in on-call culture & hiring: defining the concrete outcomes a person must own before the loop, so “good in an incident” becomes testable instead of a vibe.
Skip it if…
You want depth on assessing technical skill specifically — this is general-management hiring, light on engineering signal, and heavy on its own brand.