Where to Start with Geoff Smart and Randy Street: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Geoff Smart and Randy Street — how to approach Who, their research-backed hiring system using scorecards and structured interviews to eliminate gut-feel decisions and dramatically reduce mis-hires. A complete reading guide.
By Marcus Webb
Geoff Smart (born 1970) is an American business consultant, researcher, and co-founder of ghSMART, an executive advisory firm. He earned a PhD in organisational psychology at Claremont Graduate University under the supervision of Peter Drucker, where he studied what distinguishes effective hiring decisions from ineffective ones — the research that became the foundation of Who. Randy Street is a managing director at ghSMART and co-author of the book. Together they have interviewed and assessed thousands of executives and have advised hundreds of organisations on talent selection. Who (2008) is their systematic distillation of that experience.
Where to Start: Who (2008)
Smart and Street built the methodology behind Who from thousands of structured hiring interviews conducted through their ghSMART consulting practice — and the result is less a conventional business book than an engineering solution to the problem of mis-hiring. Who opens with a diagnosis: 90 percent of the management problems leaders report are actually people problems, and people problems are largely the downstream consequence of bad hires. The book’s goal is to make bad hires much harder to make.
The Scorecard is the system’s first and most important component. Before sourcing a single candidate, the hiring manager writes a document defining the role with specificity: the outcomes the person in this role must achieve in their first year, the competencies required to achieve those outcomes, and the cultural behaviours that fit this organisation. The Scorecard is not a job description (vague, input-focused, often copied from a previous posting) but a definition of success. Every subsequent hiring decision — who to interview, what to ask, whether to hire — is measured against the Scorecard.
The Who Interview is the book’s central methodological contribution. It is a structured, chronological career history covering every job the candidate has held, with the same probing questions at every stop: what were you hired to do, what accomplishments are you most proud of, what were you least good at and least enjoyed, who were your managers and how did they rate you, and why did you leave? The chronological structure reveals patterns that single-position interviews miss; the consistent questions produce comparable data across candidates; the question about how managers rated the candidate predicts what their references will say.
The reference check protocol challenges the widespread habit of treating references as a formality. Smart and Street argue that a structured phone reference check with direct supervisors — not HR, not peers, not the references the candidate chose — is among the most predictive sources of data in the hiring process. The key technique is getting on the phone (email references dodge difficult questions), identifying the right reference (direct supervisors only), and asking open-ended questions about both strengths and development areas.
The A/B/C Player distinction is the framework’s underlying theory: A Players (the top 10 percent of available talent for a given role and compensation level) consistently outperform B and C Players, recruit other A Players, and resist working for organisations that tolerate poor performance. The mis-hire problem is not random; it is the predictable consequence of hiring processes that cannot distinguish A Players from everyone else.
Reading Geoff Smart and Randy Street
Who is Smart and Street’s essential book. Readers who want to extend the framework to organisational culture should look at their work on team building and performance at ghSMART, or follow up with the academic research on structured interviewing that underlies their methodology.
For the full Geoff Smart and Randy Street bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Geoff Smart and Randy Street author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Geoff Smart and Randy Street?
Who: The A Method for Hiring (2008) is Smart and Street's essential book — a practical, research-backed hiring system built on four components: the Scorecard (defining the role before interviewing begins), the Source (structured sourcing to build a candidate pool), the Select interview process (four specific interview types with defined protocols), and the Sell process (closing A Players who have multiple options). The methodology is grounded in Smart's doctoral research on hiring decisions and thousands of subsequent executive interviews. The central premise is that mis-hires are the single most expensive mistake a manager makes and that most are preventable with a disciplined process.
What is Who about?
Who argues that most hiring fails not because managers are unintelligent but because they rely on gut feel — an unstructured, socially biased, unreliable process that produces inconsistent results. The A Method replaces gut feel with systematic components. The Scorecard defines the role's outcomes, competencies, and culture requirements in writing before a single interview begins; this document is the basis for every hiring decision. The Who Interview traces the candidate's complete career history chronologically, asking at every stop who they worked for, what they accomplished, what they were good and bad at, and why they left. The structured reference check, conducted by phone with direct supervisors, is presented as one of the most predictive and most underused hiring tools available.
Is Who applicable to small companies and non-executive hiring?
Smart and Street are primarily addressing senior and executive-level hiring, where a mis-hire can cost one to five times annual salary in lost productivity and replacement costs. The methodology scales down to non-executive roles with adaptation, but some elements — the multiple-stage structured interview process, the reference network calls — require time investments that small teams making junior hires may not be able to sustain for every position. The Scorecard and Who Interview principles apply at any level; the full four-step process is most cost-effective when the stakes of a mis-hire are high. The book is most immediately useful for founders, managers, and HR leaders making consequential hiring decisions.
What should I read after Who?
After Who, Smart and Street's Leadocracy (2012) extends the talent argument to public sector leadership. For other hiring-adjacent frameworks, Amy Edmondson's The Fearless Organization covers what happens after the hire — the psychological safety conditions that allow A Players to perform. Lou Adler's Hire With Your Head covers competency-based hiring with comparable depth. For the broader question of building a high-performance culture, Jim Collins's Good to Great dedicates significant space to the 'first who, then what' argument that directly precedes and informs Who's approach.
