PDF Summary:Who, by Geoff Smart and Randy Street

In Who, business executives Geoff Smart and Randy Street say that many companies struggle to succeed because they lack an effective hiring process. Thus, these companies hire unfit candidates who fail to complete their responsibilities and harm the companies. Smart and Street seek to solve this problem by sharing their own hiring process, which is designed to more accurately identify the candidate who can best fill a specific role. To develop this process, they drew on their experiences as business executives, as well as the hiring experiences of over 300 successful CEOs they interviewed for the book.

In this guide, we’ll walk through the four steps of Street and Smart’s hiring process, from determining what you’re looking for in an employee to persuading the best candidate to commit to the job. In our commentary, we’ll compare the authors’ advice to that of other experts, such as Brian Tracy and Gallup Press.

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We’ll highlight two particular steps in the authors’ advice for creating a talent pool:

1. Ask for referrals every time you meet someone whose skill and knowledge you respect. This includes asking for referrals in unconventional situations from unusual sources. For instance, the authors say to ask for referrals even if your company doesn’t have open roles, and to source these referrals from anyone skilled and knowledgeable, even new acquaintances or candidates who don’t fit the role you’re filling but who still impressed you. Casting this wide net lets you grow your talent pool quickly so you’re prepared when a role does open up.

(Shortform note: These unusual tactics may build a large talent pool quickly, but typical methods have benefits, too. Hiring experts say you’d usually ask for referrals when filling a specific role, and you’d source them mainly from employees. This speeds up the hiring process by narrowing the scope of your search: Since you shared the role’s specific requirements, your employees can refer people who fit that particular role instead of people who could generally succeed in your company, but not the role you’re filling. And since your employees are familiar with both the company’s needs and the potential hire, they can better determine if that person’s a good fit. As a result, people who are referred by employees for a specific role are more likely to both accept and remain in a position.)

2. Cultivate relationships with the referrals you gathered in the previous step by staying in regular contact. By learning more about these people, you can confirm if they’re a good fit for your company or a particular role. Building a relationship also makes them more likely to accept a job if you offer them a position. The authors suggest building these relationships by setting up a rotating weekly schedule to contact promising candidates and chat about their careers, goals, and interests.

(Shortform note: Cultivating a relationship can make people more likely to accept a job because you’ve been gradually familiarizing them with the company, some hiring experts say. As they grow more interested and engaged, working for the company becomes more appealing. These experts recommend using candidate relationship management software (CRM) to automate texts and emails, making it easier to stay in regular contact with every member of your talent pool. This technology can also create and store records on each candidate, making it easier to track their careers and interests and to analyze how they could fit into your company.)

Step #3: Interview Candidates

Once you’ve created a hiring rubric and a talent pool, the next step is to compare the candidates in your talent pool to your hiring rubric to determine if they can properly fill a particular role. As we noted earlier, you want candidates who have a 90% likelihood of completing all the role’s responsibilities, which you measure by tracking how many of the specifications on your hiring rubric they meet. Eliminate anyone who falls below this benchmark so you don’t waste time pursuing unfit candidates.

As mentioned previously, many hiring managers don’t spend enough time with their candidates to determine if they can fill a role. Smart and Street say the solution is an in-depth interview process that analyzes candidates’ performances throughout their careers. Performing this in-depth interview process is time-consuming, the authors acknowledge. However, you’ll ultimately save time, effort, and money by not hiring unfit candidates who’ll have to be replaced.

(Shortform note: Some business experts say making short-term sacrifices to gain long-term benefits is important to becoming exponentially successful. These sacrifices let you form a strong foundation that you can later build greater success on. For instance, taking extra time to hire strong candidates strengthens your employee base. Whereas mediocre employees might make only gradual improvements, strong employees can each use their unique, specified skills to improve the company right away. With every strong employee you hire, the company improves further, making it successful at an increasingly rapid rate.)

The authors break this process into four types of interviews, conducted in the following order:

Type 1: The evaluation interview. The purpose of this interview is to quickly eliminate candidates who don’t meet the expectations outlined in your hiring rubric. It’s usually conducted over the phone. Most candidates are eliminated during this step; the authors say only three should remain.

(Shortform note: While other hiring experts don’t specify that only three people should pass the evaluation interview, they do indicate that this stage should have one of the lowest yield ratios in your hiring process: the lowest percentage of candidates that successfully pass to the next hiring stage. Low yield ratios indicate that your hiring process efficiently eliminates poor candidates. You can lower your ratio by making your hiring criteria more demanding. For example, if you used to pass skilled candidates who had proven experience in meeting half of the role's goals, you may now only pass those with experience in meeting three-quarters of those goals.)

Type 2: The sequential interview. In this interview, your goal is to identify candidates’ behavioral tendencies so you can predict how they’ll likely behave in the future. You do this by discussing each job the candidates have held sequentially, which we’ll explore in more detail in the following section.

Type 3: The targeted interview. The purpose of this interview is to discuss any specific goals or qualities that weren’t covered in the sequential interview.

Type 4: The performance interview. In this final interview, your goal is to get outside perspectives on candidates’ past performances from their previous superiors and peers.

(Shortform note: Another interviewing method you may want to try is getting the opinions of a candidate’s future superiors and peers. Some small-business experts suggest ensuring all of your existing employees agree that a candidate would be a good fit before offering them a job. This lets you use your team’s different perspectives and insights to ensure the candidate is a good choice, increases team loyalty, and makes chosen candidates feel welcomed, as they know the whole company approves of them.)

Targeted vs. Talent Interviews: How to Identify Specific Qualities

Gallup Press doesn’t discuss targeted interviews in First, Break All the Rules. However, they do suggest you conduct a talent interview, which arguably works in the opposite way of a targeted interview. In a targeted interview, you confirm the candidate has qualities you’ve already determined will help them complete the role’s goals and purpose. In a talent interview, on the other hand, you identify traits and abilities they’re naturally inclined to and then determine if those qualities will help them fulfill the role.

For example, in a targeted interview, you might decide creativity is important and then see if the candidate has that quality by asking them to share examples of times they showed creativity. In contrast, in a talent interview, you might ask candidates what their best traits are and then judge whether the traits they list would help them fulfill the role’s purpose.

This approach stops candidates from putting on an act: If you’re looking for specific talents and abilities, candidates can recognize that and project those qualities. If you’re just trying to identify whatever’s there, they won’t know what to project, giving you the chance to identify their real qualities.

In this guide, we’ll focus on exploring the sequential interview. The authors say this is the most important of the interviews, as it provides enough information for you to accurately analyze a candidate’s long-term career performance and thus determine if they can properly fill a role.

Identifying Behavioral Tendencies Through a Sequential Interview

As mentioned above, the sequential interview lets you identify a candidate’s behavioral tendencies. Understanding how a candidate has behaved in the past helps you predict how they may behave in the future and whether that behavior will help them fulfill the role.

For example, say you own a software company. You have a candidate who’s created multiple popular apps for each of their past employers, but who hasn’t performed well in roles that required them to pitch their projects to investors. This behavioral tendency tells you that the candidate is innovative, has a good understanding of what customers want, and is bad at explaining their work to people who aren’t software engineers. If you’re hiring for a purely developmental role, they’re a good candidate, but if you need someone who can communicate with non-experts, they’re not a good fit.

To identify a candidate’s behavioral tendencies, the authors recommend discussing each job the candidate has held in the last 15 years in sequential order. Analyzing this long period of time lets you identify the candidate’s behaviors that remain the same over the years and are likely to continue if you hire them. Also, discussing the candidate’s history sequentially is easier for both of you: The candidate can share their experiences in a simple narrative order, rather than trying to remember things out of order, and you can see how their behavioral tendencies and career progressed, which helps you understand their likely future trajectory.

(Shortform note: The authors say to use this method for every candidate, but what if a candidate has little work experience? What can you do if you can’t analyze a long work history like Smart and Street suggest? Some hiring experts suggest adjusting your questions to fit the experience they do have and focusing on their interests. This information is less directly related than work history but can still help you determine a person’s suitability. For instance, you may ask a candidate to describe their past hobbies and activities. If they’ve taken computer science classes and participated in hackathons, that shows an interest in software development that could make them a valuable employee, even if they lack software engineering experience.)

Can You Identify Behavioral Tendencies In a Non-Sequential Interview?

Some business experts say you can use non-sequential behavioral interviewing to identify candidates’ behavioral tendencies, too. In this method, you ask the candidate to tell you about a particular experience and extrapolate their behavioral tendencies from how they behaved in that example. An added benefit of this method is that the example a candidate shares can help you understand how they think and what they find difficult. For example, you may ask the candidate to describe a time they had to get out of their comfort zone. If they give an example of pitching projects to investors, you can deduce that they may find communication difficult.

Other hiring experts prefer non-sequential interviews because discussing a candidate’s history sequentially is too easy. It’s easy to become a passive listener when hearing a story, they say, instead of assessing the candidate’s suitability for the role. This is arguably even more true when hearing a long story, like one that covers the past 15 years. They recommend focusing on relevant information by asking what skills and knowledge the candidate currently uses at work and then discussing how they developed those skills and knowledge.

There is a potential problem with these non-sequential methods, however: cherry-picking. Since the candidate only shares isolated examples of their performance, they could choose examples that make them look good while disguising their real behavioral tendencies. For example, if the candidate tells you about a time they successfully pitched a project, you may think they do so regularly when their success is actually an outlier.

We’ve consolidated the authors’ advice into two main behavioral tendencies you should look for in a strong candidate:

Tendency #1: Meets Employer Expectations

According to the authors, identifying whether the candidate has regularly met previous employers’ expectations can help you judge whether they’ll meet your own. To identify this tendency, first ask why the candidate was hired for each role. This helps you understand what their previous employers expected from them. Then, discuss their successes and struggles in each role to see to what extent they met those expectations.

For example, let’s say a candidate was hired to create a unique marketing strategy that reached audiences on several platforms. She successfully created a unique strategy but struggled to execute it on several platforms. Thus, she only partially met her past employer’s expectations. If the candidate had trouble fully meeting expectations in her other past jobs, as well, she’ll likely struggle to fully meet yours.

(Shortform note: Some business experts disagree with Smart and Street, saying a candidate’s past performance isn’t a good indicator of future success. Differences in company cultures and rapidly changing industries can cause a person who successfully met expectations in the past to fail in the future. Instead, experts recommend evaluating the candidate’s problem-solving skills, as these are helpful regardless of culture or industry changes. Before the interview, write down a flawed version of a process the candidate would use in the role—for instance, if you describe the process to get a marketing strategy approved, the paperwork may be overly complex. In the interview, ask the candidate to identify those flaws. Then, ask how they’d solve the issues.)

Tendency #2: Has Good Relationships With Superiors

The authors argue that ascertaining whether the candidate usually has good relationships with their superiors is important for two reasons:

First, it helps you understand how the candidate interacts with their superiors—and therefore how they’ll likely interact with you if you become their superior. You can ascertain this by having the candidate describe their past employers. You’re looking for a candidate who speaks mostly positively about these employers, as this suggests they had a good relationship.

(Shortform note: On the candidate side, what should you do if you’ve had a bad relationship with a past superior? Hiring experts emphasize the importance of being honest and fair: Tell the interviewer upfront about the conflict and avoid putting all the blame on your past superior. This shows that you’re mature, willing to admit and learn from your mistakes, and not afraid of hard conversations. After explaining the situation, emphasize what you learned from the experience—this may be particularly effective in a sequential interview, if you can point to positive relationships with later employers as proof that you learned from your mistakes.)

Second, it helps you see whether the candidate’s past employers considered them a valuable employee, which can help you determine if they’ll be valuable to you. You can ascertain this by asking why the candidate left their past roles. You want a candidate who left on good terms to advance their career. This suggests their employers didn’t want them to leave because they were a good employee. In contrast, a candidate who was fired or left on bad terms is likely less valuable.

(Shortform note: Some business experts define a valuable employee as reliable and willing to learn, as well as good at problem-solving, teamwork, conflict resolution, and communication. Other experts add a word of caution, saying that a candidate leaving a role voluntarily doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a valuable employee or left on good terms. Sometimes, companies will list a candidate as leaving voluntarily as part of a severance agreement, even if it isn’t really true. To determine the truth, contact the candidate’s previous employer and pay attention to their tone when they describe the candidate’s “voluntary exit”—if they respond half-heartedly instead of having a positive tone, the candidate likely left on bad terms and wasn’t considered valuable.)

Step #4: Encourage Candidates to Commit

Once you’ve identified your ideal candidate, you can move to the final step of the hiring process: encouraging your chosen candidate to fully commit to your job offer. The authors say this step starts during the interview process and continues until the employee has been employed for 100 days. This step is important because many people change their minds about accepting job offers shortly before or after their employment. Thus, they either turn down the offers or quit their new positions. If they stay in their new position beyond 100 days, however, they’re likely committed and don't need further encouragement.

The Importance of the First 100 Days

Other business experts agree that it’s essential to encourage commitment during the first 100 days of employment as employees adjust to the company and decide whether they actually want to work there. One study of over 50 companies found that up to 70% of employees leave within this 100-day window. Within this period, the first day of employment is particularly impactful, with 74% of employees saying that their decision to stay at a company is influenced by their experiences on their first day.

Thus, the experts say to make this 100-day window—and especially the first day—an exciting and memorable time. You can do this by varying your methods of communication (such as meeting in-person, talking over video, and sending gifts) and planning community-building events on employees’ first days so they can meet their coworkers.

Here, we’ll discuss the authors’ primary strategy for encouraging commitment: promptly addressing your candidate or new employee’s apprehensions.

Address the Person’s Apprehensions

The authors explain that candidates and new employees may have apprehensions about the role. For candidates, you address their apprehensions about accepting the job offer; for new employees, you address their apprehensions about staying in the role past 100 days. Addressing apprehensions encourages the individual to commit by either removing their objections or offering them incentives that outweigh them.

The way you’ll address the apprehensions depends on their nature and on how valuable the person is to the company. The authors say most people’s apprehensions fall into one or more of these five main categories:

• The company or role doesn’t align with their goals and abilities
• Their loved ones will be negatively impacted
• They’ll have limited autonomy
• They’ll receive insufficient compensation
• They won’t enjoy the work environment

For example, say your candidate would have to move to Spain if she accepted your job offer, and she’s worried about entering an unfamiliar culture. This could fall under the fifth category, as she’s not familiar enough with Spanish culture to know if she would enjoy the work environment. If your company provides an “introduction to Spanish culture” course, the candidate may feel more comfortable accepting the job offer and committing to her new role. If the candidate is still unconvinced, you may try to outweigh her apprehension by offering a higher salary. The more valuable she is to the company, the higher you’ll be willing to increase her salary.

(Shortform note: According to some hiring experts, other reasons a candidate may drop out of the hiring process include a bad experience with an interviewer and a lack of communication. Other experts add that an employee may quit a new role because of a poor onboarding process or because they think the role won’t help their career. Collectively, these experts recommend encouraging commitment by being more responsive and supportive. Similarly to Smart and Street, they suggest you start doing so when you first share the job description with candidates and continue doing so for the first few months of their employment.)

When the individual’s loved ones (usually immediate family members) are affected by their decision, you must address those people’s apprehensions as well, the authors add. Without their loved ones’ approval, the individual may not accept the job offer or stay in the role, even if they’re personally ready to do so. Continuing our example, if your candidate’s family doesn’t want to leave their community, you’ll have a harder time convincing her to commit to the role. To address this problem, you may offer the whole family the culture course, or you may institute a support program that helps new hires and their families build a new community in Spain.

(Shortform note: The sway a person’s loved ones have on their career decisions may depend on whether they’re from a collectivistic or individualistic culture. Psychology experts say that collectivistic cultures value group well-being over that of the individual, while individualistic cultures primarily prize autonomy. Thus, you may need to be particularly vigilant in addressing the apprehensions of collectivistic families, while individualistic families may be less concerning. This may be especially true when a role requires candidates to move, as individuals from collectivist cultures might be more reluctant to live far from their communities and families.)

However you choose to address the person’s or their loved ones’ apprehensions, do so quickly. If you leave them unaddressed for long enough, the apprehensions could grow more serious, making the candidate less likely to accept the job offer or stay in the role. Thus, the authors say you must stay in regular contact with your candidates and new employees, so you can recognize and address their apprehensions before they have time to worsen.

Can You Prevent Apprehensions From Forming?

An employee value proposition (EVP) is another method of encouraging commitment. An EVP is a document that summarizes the benefits people get by working at your company, business experts explain. This goes beyond listing compensation or insurance benefits to include important elements of the company’s culture and brand. Essentially, you’re answering the question, “What do people value most about this company?”

EVPs encourage commitment by presenting candidates and employees with your company’s main incentives upfront. This entices prospective candidates to join the company. It also gives others a positive view of the company: If they decide to leave their jobs in the future, they’re more likely to look for a job in your company. For current employees, the EVP acts as a reminder of everything they like about the company, increasing goodwill and encouraging them to stay with the company and actively promote it to customers and potential hires.

Sharing your company’s main incentives upfront arguably makes your EVP a preventive measure: Instead of waiting for people’s apprehensions to develop and then rushing to outweigh them with incentives, you stop them from forming. For example, a candidate may realize their abilities and the role’s goals aren’t perfectly aligned. They’re willing to learn any needed skills as long as they have autonomy to do so on their own terms. If they’re unsure how much autonomy they’d have in the role, an apprehension will form that you’ll have to quickly address. However, if that candidate knows from your EVP that the company’s culture encourages autonomy, that apprehension won’t arise.

Furthermore, these experts recommend you ask your existing employees for their input when making the document, which could highlight categories you need to address. For example, if many employees report that they value the friendly work environment, you likely don’t have to worry about that category of concern. However, if none of your employees say they value their compensation, you may need to address that category.

Once you’ve created your EVP, the experts recommend sharing it everywhere, including on the company website, in job descriptions, and in advertising. They add that your brand and PR department should also communicate the incentives from your EVP, creating a consistent narrative that encourages commitment.

While EVPs can be powerful tools, they are one-size-fits-all, rather than customized to specific apprehensions a person might have or how valuable they are to the company. Thus, you may want to also maintain regular contact, so you can address any apprehensions not covered in your EVP or add further incentives to entice particularly valuable individuals.