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Geoff Smart and Randy Street

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Geoff Smart and Randy Street

Geoff Smart and Randy Street are co-founders and senior partners at ghSMART, a management assessment firm that advises CEOs, boards, and private equity firms on leadership and talent decisions. They developed the A Method for Hiring through decades of applied research across thousands of executive placements and organizational assessments.

Geoff Smart holds a PhD in organizational psychology from Claremont Graduate University (where Peter Drucker was a faculty mentor) and has written extensively on the relationship between talent decisions and organizational performance. He is the chairman of ghSMART.

Randy Street is a managing partner at ghSMART and has led major talent assessment engagements with Fortune 500 companies and private equity-backed firms. He is a co-designer of the Topgrading interview methodology described in Who.

Together they have advised major private equity firms (Blackstone, KKR, Sequoia) and large public companies on the talent decisions that determine organizational outcomes.

Core Philosophy

Smart and Street’s foundational claim is both obvious and consistently violated: who decisions (the people you put in place) determine organizational outcomes more than what decisions (the strategies you choose, the products you build). Most organizations invest enormous resources in what decisions and minimal rigor in who decisions.

“The most important decisions that businesspeople make are not what decisions, but who decisions.” — Jim Collins (cited as epigraph)

Their research finding: management talent accounted for over half of business success in their field interviews — more than strategy (17%) or external factors (11%). Yet hiring success rates hover around 50%, and the average mistake costs 15x base salary.

The A Method addresses this gap with structured rigor: scorecard definition, systematic sourcing, standardized interview protocols, and a disciplined selection process designed to maximize predictive accuracy.

Key Contributions

The Scorecard System

Replacing job descriptions (activity-focused) with scorecards (outcome-focused) is the framework’s most important structural innovation. Scorecards define:

  • The mission (the job’s core purpose in plain language)
  • Outcomes (3–8 specific, measurable deliverables)
  • Competencies (skills and cultural fit requirements)

Scorecards cascade from strategy to role, ensuring that every hiring decision is anchored in what the business actually needs to accomplish.

The Topgrading Interview

A structured chronological interview (3+ hours) that examines a candidate’s complete career history, not just highlighted achievements. The TORC (Threat of Reference Check) technique — explicitly telling candidates that their references will be contacted — dramatically increases honesty about failures and weaknesses.

The Five F’s of Selling

The insight that closing A Players requires understanding what they actually care about (Fit, Family, Freedom, Fortune, Fun) and addressing those concerns proactively across five waves of the hiring process.

A Player Definition

A precise, non-qualitative definition: “a candidate who has at least a 90 percent chance of achieving a set of outcomes that only the top 10 percent of possible candidates could achieve.” A Players are not generic superstars — they are role-specific fits where skill and will match the scorecard.

Book: Who: The A Method for Hiring (2008)

Who is structured as a practical guide to the four-step A Method: Scorecard, Source, Select, Sell. Each chapter provides detailed protocols including specific interview questions, scorecard templates, and reference interview scripts.

The book is backed by extensive primary research: interviews with 313 executives about their most important hiring decisions and failures. The patterns that emerge — why smart people hire badly, what distinguishes A Players from B and C Players, how to close reluctant candidates — are drawn from real organizational experience rather than theory.

Best for: CEOs and senior leaders responsible for key talent decisions; HR leaders building systematic hiring processes; founders scaling from founder-led to team-led organizations.

Intellectual Connections

  • The scorecard system is structurally related to okrs-objectives-and-key-results — both translate strategy into role-specific measurable outcomes
  • The A Player concept aligns with Reed Hastings’ talent-density framework — both argue for concentrating above-threshold talent
  • The Topgrading methodology’s emphasis on career patterns over interview performance connects to deliberate-practice-and-character-skills — track record is the best predictor of future performance
  • Kofman’s player/victim distinction in conscious-business-principles maps directly to A/B/C Player indicators — B and C Players externalize failure; A Players own their contribution to outcomes

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