A Method for Hiring
The A Method for Hiring, developed by Geoff Smart and Randy Street, is a structured approach to talent acquisition built on the premise that hiring is the single most consequential management decision — and that most organizations treat it with less rigor than their smallest operational decisions. The book’s foundational claim:
“The most important decisions that businesspeople make are not what decisions, but who decisions.” — Jim Collins, cited as epigraph
Management talent, according to research cited by Smart and Street, accounts for over half of business success — more than strategy (17%) or external factors (11%). Yet “the hiring success rate of managers is a dismal 50 percent” (Drucker’s estimate, confirmed in their field research). The A Method exists to fix this.
The Cost of Bad Hires
“The average hiring mistake costs fifteen times an employee’s base salary in hard costs and productivity loss.”
This number — 15x base salary — includes not just recruitment and training costs, but the productivity loss of the role underperforming, the management time diverted to managing the problem, the cultural damage to surrounding team members, and the opportunity cost of work that wasn’t done well. Smart and Street argue that this cost is so large that even extremely rigorous (and apparently expensive) hiring processes pay for themselves many times over.
Why Standard Hiring Fails
The authors identify four failure modes:
- Unclear requirements — Hiring managers don’t know exactly what they need
- Weak candidate flow — Relying on job ads rather than network-based sourcing
- Inability to assess — “Voodoo hiring” with unstructured interviews, gut instinct, and cognitive biases
- Losing candidates — Poor selling during and after the process
“Otherwise smart people struggle to hire strangers. People unfamiliar with great hiring methods consider the process a mysterious black art.”
The deeper structural problem: conventional interviews are strongly biased toward impressionability and social comfort rather than performance prediction. Interviewers fall into the “suitor” trap — competing to impress candidates rather than assessing them.
The A Player Definition
An A Player is defined precisely, not qualitatively:
“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.”
This definition is crucial. An A Player is not a generic superstar — it is the right person for this specific role at this specific stage of company development. Someone who is an A Player at one company may be a C Player at another.
The Four-Step Method
1. Scorecard
The scorecard replaces the job description with a results-oriented document:
“The scorecard is a document that describes exactly what you want a person to accomplish in a role. It is not a job description, but rather a set of outcomes and competencies that define a job done well.”
A scorecard has three components:
Mission — The core purpose of the role in plain language. Not “responsible for sales operations” but “grow domestic revenue from 600M by December 31.”
Outcomes — Three to eight specific, measurable deliverables ranked by importance. The distinction from job descriptions is fundamental:
“While typical job descriptions break down because they focus on activities, or a list of things a person will be doing (calling on customers, selling), scorecards succeed because they focus on outcomes, or what a person must get done (grow revenue from 50 million by the end of year three).”
Competencies — The skills and behaviors required, at both the job level and the cultural level. Scorecards explicitly encode culture:
“Scorecards are the guardians of your culture. They encapsulate on paper the unwritten dynamics that make your company what it is.”
The practical implication: scorecards cascade. The CEO’s scorecard is derived from strategy; the leadership team’s scorecards are derived from the CEO’s; individual contributors’ scorecards are derived from the leadership team’s. The company’s strategy is translated, step by step, into individual performance requirements.
2. Source
Sourcing is treated not as a crisis response but as a continuous organizational practice:
“They are always sourcing, always on the lookout for new talent, always identifying the who before a new hire is really needed.”
The most reliable sourcing channel is personal referrals — 77% of surveyed executives cited referrals as their top technique. The network activation question: “Who are the most talented people you know that I should hire?”
The authors recommend scheduling 30 minutes weekly specifically for talent identification and relationship cultivation — regardless of whether a position is open. This transforms hiring from a reactive scramble into a proactive pipeline.
3. Select
Selection involves four structured interviews that build on each other:
Screening Interview (phone, 30 min): Four questions covering career goals, strengths, weaknesses, and boss ratings. Goal is to eliminate mismatches quickly.
Topgrading Interview (3+ hours): A chronological walkthrough of the candidate’s entire career history — not a highlights reel but a complete examination. The structure ensures that patterns of performance emerge:
“It goes a long way toward giving you confidence in your selection because it uncovers the patterns of somebody’s career history, which you can match to your scorecard.”
The TORC technique (Threat of Reference Check) is deployed throughout: candidates are told explicitly that references will be contacted for every role, which dramatically increases truthfulness about weaknesses and failures.
“Forcing candidates to spell the name out no matter how common it might be sends a powerful message: you are going to call, so they should tell the truth.”
A Players and C Players are distinguished by how they describe past performance: “A Players tend to talk about outcomes linked to expectations. B and C Players talk generally about events, people they met, or aspects of the job they liked without ever getting into results.”
Focused Interview: Structured behavioral questions derived directly from scorecard outcomes and competencies. Multiple interviewers each assess different scorecard elements.
Reference Interviews (seven total: 3 bosses, 2 peers, 2 reports): Conducted directly, not just by HR. The “back then” technique: asking what someone’s weaknesses were “back then” liberates references to discuss real information. Warning signs: lukewarm praise, hedging, and hesitation.
“Faint praise in reference interviews is damning praise.”
4. Sell
Closing A Players requires understanding what they actually care about — the Five F’s:
- Fit: How their goals, talents, and values align with the company vision and culture
- Family: Addressing the concerns of spouse and family who will be affected
- Freedom: Autonomy to work without micromanagement
- Fortune: Compensation that rewards performance
- Fun: The pleasure of the work itself and the people doing it
“Show that you are as concerned with the fit for them as you are in the fit for you. Ninety-nine percent of your competitors are not doing that.”
Selling is not a one-time close — it occurs across five waves: during sourcing, during interviews, between offer and acceptance, between acceptance and first day, and during the first 100 days.
Red Flags
The most reliable warning signs during the process:
- Candidate mentions no past failures
- Candidate exaggerates answers or takes credit for others’ work
- Candidate speaks poorly of past bosses
- Candidate can’t explain job moves
- Candidate prioritizes compensation over the work
- “That’s just the way I am” — signals unwillingness to adapt
- Starting sentences with “no, but, however” during interviews — signals ego and difficulty with collaboration
“Passing the buck. Blaming is always bad. Winners don’t blame.”
The Skill-Will Bull’s Eye
The selection synthesis: every candidate is assessed on two dimensions against the scorecard:
- Skill: Can they do the job? (90%+ confidence required)
- Will: Do they want to do this job, in this culture? (90%+ confidence required)
“An A Player is someone whose skill and will match your scorecard. Anything less is a B or C, no matter the experience or seeming talent level.”
This framing eliminates the common mistake of hiring technically competent people who are a poor cultural or motivational fit — and the reverse mistake of hiring enthusiastic people without the capability to execute.
Team Building Implications
The A Method extends beyond individual hires to a philosophy of team construction:
“A Players can and do work well together because each understands and is selected for a unique role in the broader context of the team. They don’t get in one another’s way because they are specialists who are particularly good at what they do.”
This challenges the common fear that A Players are difficult to manage because of ego. The friction comes not from talent density but from role ambiguity and poor role design. When scorecards define specialized outcomes clearly, A Players self-coordinate.
“In reality, great leaders gain more control by ceding control to their A Players.”
Connection to Other Frameworks
The A Method’s scorecard system is structurally similar to OKRs — both translate strategy into role-specific measurable outcomes. The key difference: OKRs operate at organizational and team levels; scorecards operate at the individual role level and embed cultural fit requirements alongside performance outcomes.
The talent-density concept from Reed Hastings at Netflix is the philosophical cousin of the A Player standard — both argue that concentrating talent above a threshold changes the organizational experience qualitatively, not just quantitatively.