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Books : Who: The A Method for Hiring

Books : Who: The A Method for Hiring
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Who: The A Method for Hiring
by: Geoff Smart, Randy Street

List Price: $24.00
Amazon.com's Price: $16.32
You Save: $7.68 (32%)
Prices subject to change.




Amazon.com Details:
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.311
EAN: 9780345504197
ISBN: 0345504194
Label: Ballantine Books
Manufacturer: Ballantine Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 208
Publication Date: September 30, 2008
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Release Date: September 30, 2008
Studio: Ballantine Books
Sales Rank: 6318




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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
In this landmark book, 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 CEOs, Who presents Smart and Street’s A Method for Hiring. Refined through the largest research study of its kind ever undertaken, the A Method stresses fundamental elements that anyone can implement–and it has a 90 percent success rate.

Whether you’re a member of a board of directors looking for a new CEO, the owner of a small business searching for the right people to make your company grow, or a parent in need of a new babysitter, it’s all about Who. Inside you’ll learn how to

• avoid common “voodoo hiring” methods
• define the outcomes you seek
• generate a flow of A Players to your team–by implementing the #1 tactic used by successful businesspeople
• ask the right interview questions to dramatically improve your ability to quickly distinguish an A Player from a B or C candidate
• attract the person you want to hire, by emphasizing the points the candidate cares about most

In business, you are who you hire. In Who, Geoff Smart and Randy Street offer simple, easy-to-follow steps that will put the right people in place for optimal success.



Customer Reviews
Average Rating:  out of 5 stars

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars - Let me trim the fat from the meat..and add more meat
American people have been prone to overrate different things over time. In the last years they got crazy about Internet companies and next over real state, valuing them way above what they were really worth. And now I see a small bubble forming up.

Just like real state and the early Internet start-ups, "Who" is both quite useful and has quite potential benefits. Now, keep on mind the diversity of "corporate cultures" (funny name when companies are nothing but wild jungles) or values. Geoff and Randy (G & R) emphasized that a great candidate should always have his references quite excited when recommending him, but values are quite different in different companies, sometimes within themselves. There are places where "working too hard" is indeed a true defect.

What I've been seeing where I live -in the Mid-west- is a pressure from companies to drop the salaries to 3rd world levels, while trying to offer other things to make up, particularly "making you happy". One staffing agency, Stat-Tek, even shows a guy dressing Hawaii clothing, with a slogan "another day at the office!"; below that, a funny paragraph describes the "associates" (employees) having fun with activities such as shaving the boss' head.

A contract company I worked for (EPL-BAS) would overstaff and then have the employees wasting hours and hours playing cards and telling jokes, no exaggeration at all. It was actually a priority socializing a lot there. This company gets some government benefits when hiring more and more people, which makes it overstaffed. At the same time, it wants costs at almost zero, which makes their staff very very badly paid. Their solution is hiring unqualified staff and focusing in creating a "happy" atmosphere. It should boost morale to motivate the employees to work well while keep salaries way down. That's why their key value was being quite social.

Companies can be outrageously different.

G & R have shown us how to get some clues on how to discover false good recommendation. Yet, they forgot to take into account that different values in companies also lead to wrongful good recommendations...and equally important, these different values lead to wrongfully bad recommendations too. Thus, think twice when bosses complain about former employees, they virtually do it always. And think twice when they are thrilled at someone, he may just have being politics master.

As G & R say, get curious but they don't tell you how for these cases. Well, focus on the skills ... Read More



Rating: 1 out of 5 stars - Save your money - get "Hire With Your Head" instead.
Within the hiring world, there is a split:
* Interviews can predict great hires,
* Assessments (like IQ tests) can predict great hires.

This book is all about longer and more complex interviewing.

The book focuses on hiring CEOs and top management, so remember that when looking at this book.

This book is useless for hiring college grads, IT professionals (Software Developers, Project Managers or Business Analysts). In fact, as I specialize in hiring tech people, I find this system goes against best practices for hiring technical people in any field as the book focuses on interviewing direct reports (people the candidate manages).

The main problem that I had was the that the book (nor the website) provided their research for review. Interviewing as the main stay of hiring has been PROVEN to be the WORST predictor of hiring success. However, this book suggest the main solution is to do more stringent interviewing.

The book supports three questionable interviewing techniques. The first is to THREATEN the candidate. The books suggest that the interviewer use phrases like, "WHEN I speak with your last boss, what will they tell me your strengths are." The author suggest that the use of "WHEN" lets the candidate know you will be speaking with their past manager. This, and other suggestions, seems a little heavy handed.

Then their is a lack of transparency in this hiring process. This system is quite manipulative and an experienced candidate could be turned off. One technique is to get the candidate to agree to the compensation early in the process. Any shewed candidate that wants to hold off salary negotiations until they know enough about the position, is toss out. In fact, the book authors brag about only hiring one person in 500 (at their web site) This is NOT a useful metric.

More bothersome is the suggestion that the interviewer find out about the candidate's spouse. This can be all sorts of illegal as martial status can be grounds for discrimination law suits. The book suggest that the candidate's spouse, and family, must be sold the job as well. While I agree that a candidate may decline an offer if their spouse objects to moving, a company needs to be VERY careful how they ask this question. "Would you and your family be comfortable with moving?" would be a much better way to ask this question. If the book's advice is followed, an inexperienced HR manager may ask, "would your SPOUSE be comfortable with relocation?" This is all kinds of bad.

Read More



Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Good book on hiring
Great book on hiring the right people - If you hire right, 85% of your manager's job is complete!



Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Clear, Concise and Actionable
Finally, a business book that is clear, concise and actionable. This book very clearly lays out the authors' methodology for hiring great people. This methodology is complete, easy to understand and is presented in a way you can truly incorporate into you business. We started using this methodology with our most recent open position and although we have not successfully hired anyone, we have screened out two candidates who looked really good on paper but ultimately would not have been a fit. NOT hiring the wrong candidate is as valuable as finding the right one.



Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Easy-to-Read, a True Mirror & Actionable
I rate WHO 5 stars for 3 primary reasons:

Easy-to-Read - If a resource is to be useful, it must be accessible. The book was so easy to read, that when I gave a copy to a fellow executive of my company (an operator who has hired 100s of people over his nearly 30-year career), he read it over the weekend and has found it very valuable. Candidly, I was surprised that he had completed it when we talked the following Monday. We have since talked about how to effect some recommended changes at our company. I started reading the much more dense Topgrading, but I stopped halfway thru. I doubt I would ever have been able to get my colleague to read Topgrading. Topgrading is more academic, which suits me fine on occasion, but I needed a quicker read here.

A True Mirror - WHO is honest & relevant, as it exposed several key areas of improvement. In several instances, we saw ourselves in the examples of poor hiring methods...perhaps a little "painful & embarrassing" to see, but it's necessary to know your shortcomings to improve them.

Actionable - Finally, WHO provides actionable recommendations for the key hiring phases, a critical barometer for determining the value of such a book. We have been able to quickly begin to employ some of the techniques discussed in the book at my company.

FYI, I bought 10 copies of the book to give to colleagues & friends.