Thoughts after reading Who

Thoughts after reading Who, The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street.

Some context, I've been actively recruiting for and building software engineering organizations for over a decade. Most often this means hiring Software Engineers, Engineering Management, Data Scientists, and Product Managers, all at various levels. I've put a tremendous amount of effort into refining my perspective and process of recruiting over that time and I'm always looking for fresh ideas.

Who has some interesting and useful nuggets alongside some fairly standard wisdom.

The most interesting aspect of the book for me is "The Who Interview," which is effectively what I call a career deep dive but with a twist. The following 5 questions are asked for each job held by the candidate for the last 15 years of their career.

1. What were you hired to do?

2. What accomplishments are you most proud of?

3. What were some low points during that job?

4. Who were the people you worked with? Specifically.

i. What was your boss's name and how do you spell that? What was it like working with him/her? What will he/she tell me were your biggest strengths and areas for improvement?

ii. How would you rate the team you inherited on an A, B, C scale? What changes did you make? Did you hire anybody? Fire anybody? How would you rate the team when you left it on A, B, C scale?

5. Why did you leave that job?

The book isn't overly explicit but implies that the purpose of this is to surface patterns and provide data for other parts of the interview process. While only senior candidates will generally have a resume long enough to use this approach, I really like the concept. Asking these same questions about each position, perhaps including education experiences, does allow for patterns to emerge that may give critical signals about the candidate.

Some other nuggets.

I appreciated the suggestion to celebrate a candidate's acceptance by sending something meaningful and continuing to keep in touch with them until they start. I do think on-boarding should begin immediately after an offer is signed.

Another seemingly obvious concept stood out to me in a quote from General Wesley Clark, "What got you promoted to one rank won't necessarily get you promoted to the next rank." This is particularly relevant as seniority increases, technical competence does not naturally grow into management competence or the ability to traverse strategic concerns.

In terms of selling a candidate the book presented a nice simplification in five F's: fit, family, freedom, fortune, and fun. "Here is how you fit in." "I will not micromanage you." "We have a lot of fun around here." The first really stood out to me, being overly explicit about how a candidate fits into the puzzle of the existing organization.

Beyond these small nuggets though, I really didn't like the book. It felt ambiguously oriented towards hiring a new CEO and really didn't give much value to the bulk of recruiting that most hiring managers are doing. Building productive teams is a huge challenge full of nuance and a focus simply on "hiring A players" is a vast oversimplification.