Who

**Author:** Geoff Smart

**Estimated Reading Time:** 45 minutes

**What You'll Learn:** Why most hiring decisions fail, how to define success before you start looking, where to find exceptional talent, how to interview for patterns of performance rather than first impressions, and how to persuade the best candidates to join your team.

**Who This Book Is For:** Anyone who hires, promotes, or builds teams. Whether you lead a Fortune 500 company, run a small business, manage a department, or serve on a board, the method in this book will change how you think about talent decisions.

Every year, organizations spend billions of dollars on strategy. They hire consultants to analyze markets. They build sophisticated financial models. They craft detailed plans for growth, innovation, and operational excellence. Then they hand those plans to people and hope for the best. The uncomfortable truth is that most of that strategic effort goes to waste. Not because the strategies are wrong, but because the wrong people are executing them. A brilliant plan in the hands of a mediocre team produces mediocre results. A mediocre plan in the hands of a brilliant team often produces something extraordinary. Geoff Smart learned this lesson through thousands of hours of work with CEOs, boards, and leadership teams. His firm, ghSMART, has advised some of the most successful organizations in the world. The pattern they discovered was remarkably consistent. The single biggest predictor of organizational success was not the cleverness of the strategy, the size of the market, or the strength of the balance sheet. It was the quality of the people making the key decisions. This insight led to a deeper investigation. If who decisions matter more than what decisions, why do so many organizations get them wrong? The answer was uncomfortable. Most hiring processes are broken. They rely on gut feelings, unstructured interviews, vague job descriptions, and rushed decisions. The result is a hiring success rate that hovers around fifty percent. Flip a coin. That is the standard most organizations accept for their most important decisions. The cost of these failures is staggering. A bad hire at the executive level can cost up to fifteen times the person's base salary in lost productivity, missed opportunities, damaged relationships, and organizational disruption. For a senior executive earning $200,000, that is a $3 million mistake. For a CEO, the damage can run into the tens or hundreds of millions. But here is the hopeful part. These mistakes are not inevitable. They are the result of a flawed process, and flawed processes can be fixed. Smart and his team spent years studying what separates successful hiring decisions from failed ones. They interviewed billionaires, CEOs, and world-class talent leaders. They analyzed thousands of…