Olivia: The average manager has a 50% success rate when hiring. That’s a coin flip. Jackson: Whoa, hold on. A coin flip? That can't be right. We spend weeks, sometimes months, interviewing people. Olivia: It’s right. And it gets worse. A single bad hire for a job with a $100,000 salary can end up costing a company over one and a half million dollars. Jackson: Okay, that’s insane. That’s not just a mistake, that’s a catastrophe. How is that even possible? Olivia: That is the exact question that drives the entire book we're talking about today. It’s Who: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. And this isn't just their opinion. What's fascinating is that this book is based on one of the largest, most comprehensive studies on hiring ever conducted. They spent over 1,300 hours interviewing more than 20 billionaires and 300 CEOs to figure out what actually works. Jackson: So they went straight to the source. They didn't just theorize, they asked the people who build massive companies how they do it. I like that. So what did they find? Why are most of us essentially gambling when we hire?

Olivia: They found that the fundamental problem is that most businesses are obsessed with the 'what'—what’s our strategy, what’s our product, what’s our marketing plan? But they completely neglect the 'who'. The authors argue, and the data backs them up, that if you get the 'who' decisions right, the right people will figure out the 'what'. Jackson: That makes intuitive sense. A team of superstars can make a mediocre idea work, but a team of C-players will sink even the best strategy. But it still feels abstract. What does this failure actually look like in the real world? Olivia: It looks like a nightmare. There’s a story in the book about Nate Thompson, the CEO of a tech company called Spectra Logic. He was a meticulous guy, he thought he was doing everything right—thorough interviews, detailed resume reviews, the works. Jackson: Sounds like most managers I know. Trying their best. Olivia: Exactly. But his company was bleeding from bad hires. He hired a Sales VP who seemed perfect on paper. That VP ended up embezzling over $90,000 by faking his own commission sheets. He hired other people who were incompetent or just a terrible cultural fit, and he was constantly putting out fires. Jackson: Oh, I know that feeling. The constant, low-grade anxiety of waiting for the next thing to break because you don't fully trust your team. Olivia: It gets more vivid. The moment it all crystallized for him was during a family ski trip to Vail, Colorado. It was supposed to be a real vacation, a chance to disconnect. But for the first four hours of every single day, instead of skiing with his kids, he was locked in his room on the phone, dealing with yet another crisis caused by one of his bad hires. Jackson: Wow. That’s heartbreaking. That’s the real cost, isn't it? It’s not just the $1.5 million on a spreadsheet. It’s your life. It’s the moments with your family that you can never get back. Olivia: Precisely. He later estimated that his early hiring mistakes cost Spectra Logic as much as $100 million in value. But the personal cost was just as high. He was a CEO haunted by the ghosts of his bad hires. Jackson: And the book argues this isn't just a problem for CEOs of big tech companies, right? This is universal. Olivia: It's universal. And it happens because most of us rely on what the authors call 'voodoo hiring'. Jackson: Voodoo hiring? I love that. What is it? Olivia: It’s all the unproven, superstitious, and frankly useless methods we use. Things like relying on your 'gut feel,' asking bizarre trick questions like 'If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?', or being overly impressed by a slick resume. George Buckley, the former CEO of 3M, has a great quote in the book. He says a resume is just "a record of a person’s career with all of the accomplishments embellished and all the failures removed." Jackson: That is so true. It's a highlight reel. It’s like judging a potential spouse based only on their Instagram profile. You’re not seeing the messy reality. So this 'voodoo hiring' is why we’re all stuck at a 50% success rate. We're basically rolling the dice. Olivia: We're rolling the dice, and the house always wins. The cost of a bad hire isn't just their salary. It's the lost productivity, the damage to team morale, the time everyone else has to spend cleaning up their messes, and the massive opportunity cost of what an actual A Player could have accomplished in that role. Jackson: Okay, I’m convinced. The problem is huge, it's personal, and our current methods are broken. So if voodoo hiring is out, what's the alternative? How do we move from a coin flip to something that actually works?

Olivia: This is where the book becomes incredibly practical. The authors distill all their research into a simple, four-step process they call the 'A Method'. It’s designed to take the guesswork out of hiring and raise that success rate from 50% to 90%. Jackson: A 90% success rate? That sounds almost too good to be true. What are the four steps? Olivia: They are Scorecard, Source, Select, and Sell. It’s a logical progression. You first define what you need, then you find people, then you pick the best one, and finally, you convince them to join. Jackson: Let's break that down. 'Scorecard' sounds a bit like corporate jargon. Is that just a fancy word for a job description? Olivia: That’s the key distinction. It’s not. A typical job description is a lazy list of responsibilities and desired experiences. A Scorecard is a blueprint for success. It has three parts: a Mission, Outcomes, and Competencies. Jackson: Okay, explain those. Olivia: The Mission is a short, crisp summary of why the role exists. Not what the person does day-to-day, but the ultimate purpose. For a Head of Sales, it might be something like, "To triple company revenue in the European market within two years." Jackson: I see. It’s purpose-driven, not task-driven. What about Outcomes? Olivia: Outcomes are the 3 to 5 most important, measurable things that a person must accomplish for them to be considered a success. For that Head of Sales, an outcome might be "Grow the sales team from 5 to 15 people in the first year" or "Achieve a 40% market share in Germany by the end of year two." They are specific and time-bound. Jackson: So it removes all the ambiguity. You either hit the outcome or you don't. There's no hiding. And Competencies? Olivia: Competencies are the 'how.' These are the behavioral traits that will allow someone to succeed in your company's culture and achieve the outcomes. Things like 'high integrity,' 'efficiency,' or 'ability to hire A Players.' This is where you align the role with your company's core values. Jackson: So the Scorecard basically forces you to define what success actually looks like before you even start looking for someone. You’re building the target before you start shooting arrows. Olivia: Exactly. And it prevents one of the biggest hiring mistakes: hiring a generalist 'all-around athlete' for a specialist's job. The Scorecard forces you to define the specific skills needed. There’s a fantastic story that shows how powerful this is. Jackson: Let's hear it. Olivia: It’s about a private school, Sewickley Academy. They needed to hire a new Head of School. They created a detailed scorecard: the mission was to improve the curriculum, strengthen the faculty, and get the school on solid financial footing. Jackson: A clear set of outcomes. Olivia: Very clear. They interviewed several candidates, and one of them was a man named Kolia O'Connor. The board's initial gut reaction was negative. He came across as too "corporate," too aggressive for a school environment. He didn't fit their mental image of a Head of School. Jackson: Ah, the classic 'gut feel' trap. They were about to fall right into it. Olivia: They almost did. But they had their Scorecard. So, they disciplined themselves to ignore their initial bias and instead systematically compared each of the final candidates against the outcomes and competencies on the Scorecard. When they did that, the data was undeniable. Kolia O'Connor, the 'corporate' guy, was the only one whose track record proved he could actually achieve the specific results they needed. Jackson: So they trusted the data over their feelings. What happened? Olivia: They hired him. Five years later, he had completely transformed the school. He reversed a budget deficit, increased annual giving to record levels, hired a team of A-Player faculty, and even overhauled the curriculum to add Mandarin Chinese. He succeeded for exactly the reasons the Scorecard predicted he would. Jackson: That's incredible. It shows that our intuition about people, especially in a 30-minute interview, can be wildly misleading. The Scorecard acted as a filter against their own biases. Olivia: It’s a perfect example of the whole method. The rest of the steps build on this foundation. 'Source' is about proactively finding great candidates, not just posting a job and praying. 'Select' is a series of structured interviews, including the 'Who Interview,' which is a deep chronological dive into a candidate's entire career, looking for patterns of achievement and failure. And 'Sell' is about persuading the A Player you've chosen to actually take the job. Jackson: This all sounds incredibly thorough. But I have to ask the practical question: this seems like a lot of work for one hire. Can a small business owner or a manager who's already swamped really implement all of this? Olivia: That's the most common critique—that it's too rigid or time-consuming. But the authors' counter-argument is powerful: which is more time-consuming? Spending a few extra hours upfront to get the hire right 90% of the time, or spending hundreds of hours over the next year managing a C Player, cleaning up their messes, and eventually having to fire them and start the whole painful process over again? Jackson: When you put it like that, it's a no-brainer. It's the classic 'pay me now or pay me later' problem, but the 'later' payment is a hundred times bigger.

Olivia: Exactly. And that really gets to the core of the book's message. The big shift is from seeing hiring as a soft skill, an art, a mysterious gut feeling... to seeing it as a hard skill, a science, a core business process as critical as finance or operations. Jackson: It’s about taking the ego out of it. Admitting that our gut feelings are often just a mashup of our own biases and a reaction to how charismatic someone is in a single meeting. The A Method provides a system to protect us from ourselves. Olivia: It does. It’s about realizing that your biggest business problem probably isn't your product, your strategy, or your marketing. It's the person you're about to put in that empty chair. That single 'who' decision can change the trajectory of a team, a department, or an entire company. Jackson: So the real takeaway here isn't just a new list of interview questions. It's a fundamental mindset shift. Every hiring decision is a potential million-dollar decision, and you need to treat it with that level of rigor and discipline. Olivia: That's the perfect way to put it. And you don't have to implement the entire system overnight. The authors suggest starting small. Jackson: What’s a good first step for someone listening right now? Olivia: For your very next open role, don't just dust off the old job description. Try building a simple Scorecard. Just ask three questions: One, what is the essential mission of this role? Two, what are the three to five most important, measurable outcomes we need in the next year? And three, what are the core competencies that will define success in our culture? Jackson: That feels manageable. It’s a concrete action that forces you to think with more clarity. I love it. And on that note, we'd love to hear from our listeners. We all have hiring horror stories or, hopefully, some great success stories. Find us on social media and share what you've learned. What's the one 'voodoo hiring' tactic you swear you'll never use again? Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.