Who: The A Method for Hiring

Most of a company’s performance can be traced to hiring decisions, and I sorely lack the expertise in this area and I used this book to start to remedy this. The book is an overview of a methodology for hiring, defined by its four components: the Scorecard for outlining what outcomes a role should achieve, the Sourcing process of networking to funnel talent into the process, the Select phase when the interviews happen, and the Sell methodology of persuading the hire of the company’s vision and culture. The most valuable part of the book for me was the interviewing process within Select, which is interesting and it tries to get at honest responses with persistent threat of reference checks built in to the questions, while the questions themselves stay inquisitive and relevant and never unreasonably probing. The Scorecard is also a useful tool, especially for sales roles (less so for engineering) in that it defines a job by the outcomes of a great performance: achieve x% growth in y years; defining a job by its outcomes rather than by what the employee will actually do builds off of Peter Drucker’s result-oriented rather than action-oriented approach to management.

The threat of reference call is something that I haven’t thought much about before reading but seems so useful having read the book. It usually comes in the form of: “who was the last boss you worked for? What would he/she say about your strengths and areas of improvement?” Any dishonesty in these questions would be glaring after the reference calls have actually been made, and psychologically, just the additional asking of “what was your last boss’s name, and how do you spell that?” gets across the inevitability of the reference call and the futility of lying (or at least, the need to lie with much greater nuance and skill). Presented this way, reference calls don’t serve just as a last and ceremonious check to the hiring decision, but rather a validation to what should have already been noted before. At the same time, I think it’s great that such a threat also assesses self-awareness and thereby emotional maturity which is always in short supply. The terminology “threat” sounds negative but it really is positive for everyone since it promotes honesty and cuts away useless fluff or baseless self-aggrandizement in interviews.