Who
by Geoff Smart · first published 2008
71% recommend29% neutral
Why HN recommends it
A practical guide to hiring that offers methods for structuring interviews and evaluating candidates. Especially useful for founders and managers building a team or learning to run interviews.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
In this instant New York Times Bestseller, Geoff Smart and Randy Street provide a simple, practical, and effective solution to what The Economist calls "the single biggest problem in business today": unsuccessful hiring. The average hiring mistake costs a company $1.5 million or more a year and countless wasted hours. This statistic becomes even more startling when you consider that the typical hiring success rate of managers is only 50 percent. The silver lining is that "who" problems are easily preventable. Based on more than 1,300 hours of interviews with more than 20 billionaires and 300 C
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…technical management. 4. "Measure What Matters" by John Doerr on setting objectives and measuring their progress. 5. "The Checklist Manifesto" by Atul Gawande on thinking through replicable processes. 6. "Who" by Geoff Smart on hiring. 7. "Start with Why" by Simon Sinek and "The Culture Code" by Daniel Coyle on creating culture and reasons for why people do the work. It's an important part of any management…
on “Ask HN: What makes a good technical leader – any recommended books?” ↗…join your team and a basic structure for the process - https://blog.ycombinator.com/convincing-engineers-to-join-yo... General thoughts about hiring - http://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-hire The book "Who" gives a good idea about a good process. Hard to apply when you are not looking for a "generalist" - https://www.amazon.com/Who-Geoff-Smart/dp/0345504194/ Some of the manager tools podcasts episodes…
on “Guide to scaling engineering organizations” ↗The best book on hiring, no doubt, is Who: http://www.amazon.com/Who-The-A-Method-Hiring/dp/0345504194 We used it to build our hiring process for http://www.thinkful.com/ and it consistently proves valuable. We also use it to help our students…
on “In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal” ↗I don't understand question #1. Maybe you can rephrase? #2 requires a mix of (i) reference interviews, and (ii) digging into details during candidate interviews. Read these books to learn how: * Who: https://www.amazon.com/Who-Geoff-Smart/dp/0345504194 * Topgrading: https://www.amazon.com/Topgrading-3rd-Promoting-Turbocharges...
on “Getting to the Product Manager interview stage” ↗In our experience, the best way to learn how to interview is to talk with hiring managers. The 2nd best way is to pretend you are one. We SWEAR by this book: Who (http://www.amazon.com/Who-The-A-Method-Hiring/dp/1400158389) Skip to chapter 4. It's structured our interviews as we grow our team at http://thinkful.com/ as well as work with students to improve their…
on “Must-Reads When Recruiting Programmers” ↗Who: The A Hiring Method http://www.whothebook.com/ by Geoff Smart (son of Brad Smart of Topgrading fame)
on “What are the best books you've read on hiring?” ↗…(https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1491973897) * The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0787960756) * Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0787976377) * Who: The A Method for Hiring (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345504194) * Power Score: Your Formula for Leadership Success (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345547357) I'm not sure I'll get to all…
on “Ask HN: 2019 Winter Reading List?” ↗…just like on HN. A couple of thoughts: * It would be great if each book were to have its own URL (for sharing). * Consider allowing the search to allow author input, e.g. if I want to find the book 'Who' by Geoff Smart, the single-word title isn't specific enough to show that book at the top of the search results.
on “Show HN: 40k HN comments mentioning books, extracted using deep learning” ↗Interesting that they mention topgrading. It's a concept explained in the book Who: the 'A' Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. When I first read the book, I was really skeptical, but maybe there's something to it.
on “From $0-100million with no sales people. Atlassian's commandments for startups.” ↗