Geoff Smart and Randy Street

Geoff Smart and Randy Street are American management consultants whose Who: The A Method for Hiring is the most widely used framework for structured hiring interviews and the book most often cited by CEOs on the subject of talent acquisition.

Geoff Smart is the chairman and CEO of ghSMART, a management consulting firm advising private equity firms and their portfolio companies on leadership selection. Randy Street is a partner at the same firm. Who: The A Method for Hiring (2008) is the distillation of their work with hundreds of companies on the question of how to hire well — the single most important and most neglected driver of organizational success.

The Who method involves four types of interviews: the screening interview, the Who interview (a chronological walk through the candidate’s career, asking what they accomplished and what their managers would say about them), topgrading interviews for each functional role, and reference checks conducted with people the interviewer chooses rather than people the candidate provides. The framework is simple enough to implement and rigorous enough to substantially reduce the rate of hiring mistakes.

The book’s central argument — that most hiring decisions fail not because of skills gaps but because of will or fit problems that structured interviews would have revealed — is backed by a significant amount of research and client experience. It has been widely adopted by private equity firms evaluating management teams and by startups trying to build cultures of high performance from the beginning. The CEO of Netflix, the CEO of LinkedIn, and dozens of other prominent executives have cited it as essential. Smart and Street write without academic hedging, which makes the book more immediately useful than most management literature.