The Single Most Important Skill You Are Ignoring: A Leader’s Guide to the “A Method” for Hiring

If you could wave a magic wand and fix one problem in your business today, what would it be?

Most leaders instinctively point to strategy. They want a better go-to-market plan, a sharper product roadmap, or a more efficient supply chain. But if you look closely at the root cause of every missed target, every botched launch, and every toxic culture issue, you rarely find a strategy problem. You find a people problem.

Specifically, you find a hiring problem.

In his seminal book Who: The A Method for Hiring, Geoff Smart (along with Randy Street) argues that “Who” is the number one problem in business. It isn’t the “What” (strategy) or the “How” (execution) that determines success—it is the people you invite onto the bus.

Yet, despite its critical importance, hiring is often the skill leaders practice least. We rely on “gut feeling,” informal chats, and vague job descriptions. Smart calls this “Voodoo Hiring.” It’s the equivalent of a surgeon walking into an operating room and saying, “I’m just going to wing it and see how the patient feels.”

The cost of this negligence is staggering. Smart’s research suggests a single hiring mistake costs a company 15 times the employee’s base salary in lost productivity, training time, and opportunity cost. If you hire a manager making £100k, a bad decision doesn’t cost you £100k; it costs you £1.5 million.

The solution is to stop guessing and start using a rigorous system. The “A Method” is that system. It is a four-step framework designed to generate A-Players—employees in the top 10% of talent available for the job—with 90% accuracy.

Here is your executive playbook for implementing the A Method.

Step 1: The Scorecard (Stop Writing Job Descriptions)

The first failure point in hiring happens before you even speak to a candidate. It happens when you dust off an old HR job description filled with generic buzzwords like “self-starter” or “team player.”

A-Players don’t care about generic lists of responsibilities. They care about what they can achieve. To hire them, you must replace the Job Description with a Scorecard.

A Scorecard is not a list of duties; it is a blueprint for success. It defines exactly what a person must accomplish to be considered an A-Player in the role.

The Three Components of a Scorecard:

1. Mission: This is the executive summary of the job. It should be a short statement (1–2 sentences) that explains why the job exists.
   • Bad: “Sales Manager responsible for overseeing the regional team.”
   • Good: “To build and lead a high-performance sales engine that increases regional revenue by 30% YOY while maintaining a customer retention rate of 95%.”
2. Outcomes: This is the meat of the Scorecard. Define 3 to 8 specific, objective outcomes that the person must hit. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it—and you certainly can’t hire for it.
   • Example: “Hire and train 4 new account executives by Q3.”
   • Example: “Reduce software deployment cycle time from 4 weeks to 1 week.”
3. Competencies: These are the behavioral traits required to achieve the outcomes. But unlike generic values, these must be specific to the role. If the role requires sitting in a room coding for 10 hours a day, “high social energy” might actually be a negative competency. Define how the person needs to behave to win.

The Leadership Takeaway: Before you interview anyone, ask yourself: “If this person is a smashing success one year from now, what exactly will they have done?” If you can’t answer that, you aren’t ready to hire.

Step 2: Source (Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty)

Most leaders treat sourcing like a fire drill. Someone quits, panic sets in, and we immediately post an ad on LinkedIn or Indeed.

This is a mistake. A-Players are rarely sitting around refreshing job boards. They are already employed, usually crushing it somewhere else. To find them, you need to be proactive.

The A Method highlights that Referrals are the gold standard of sourcing. They are faster, cheaper, and usually result in higher retention rates. But you can’t just wait for referrals to trickle in; you must hunt for them.

The Best Sourcing Tactics:

• The Network Catalyst: Every week, ask the most talented people you know (investors, advisors, high-performing employees): “Who is the most talented person you know who I should hire?”
• Keep a Virtual Bench: When you meet impressive people—even if you don’t have a role for them yet—stay in touch. Dig your well before you are thirsty.
• External Recruiters (Used Correctly): If you use recruiters, give them your Scorecard, not a job description. Make them hunt for specific outcomes, not keywords.

The Leadership Takeaway: Sourcing is not an HR function; it is an executive function. You should always be “always be recruiting,” even when you have zero open headcount.

Step 3: Select (The 4 Interviews)

This is where the rubber meets the road. Most interviews are a disaster of confirmation bias. We like the guy because he likes the same football team, or we like the candidate because she went to our university.

The A Method replaces “chatting” with a structured, data-driven series of four interviews.

1. The Screening Interview (30 Minutes)

Goal: Save time by weeding out B and C players quickly. This is a phone call. Keep it short. Ask four simple questions:

1. What are your career goals? (Does this role get them there?)
2. What are you really good at professionally? (Do their strengths match your Scorecard?)
3. What are you not good at or not interested in doing? (Look for deal-breakers.)
4. Who were your last five bosses, and how will they rate you on a 1-10 scale when we talk to them?

Crucial Note: That last question is the “Torque.” By mentioning you will talk to their bosses, people stop fluffing their answers and start telling the truth.

2. The Topgrading Interview (The “Who” Interview) (1.5 – 3 Hours)

Goal: Establish clear patterns of behavior over time. This is the heart of the method. It is a chronological walk-through of the candidate’s entire career. Start from their education and go through every single job up to the present day. For every role, ask:

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: What was your boss’s name, and how was it working with them?)
5. Why did you leave?

Why this works: People can fake an answer to “What is your greatest weakness?” They cannot fake a 10-year consistent pattern of leaving jobs because they “didn’t get along with the manager.” The truth lives in the patterns.

3. The Focused Interview (45 – 60 Minutes)

Goal: Drill down on specific Scorecard outcomes. Get your team involved here. Assign specific outcomes or competencies to different interviewers.

• Interviewer A: Focuses purely on technical sales skills.
• Interviewer B: Focuses purely on cultural fit and “grit.” This prevents the “halo effect” where everyone likes the candidate for their charisma but nobody checked if they can actually do the math.

4. The Reference Interview (The Truth Serum)

Goal: Verify everything. In the Voodoo Hiring world, references are useless because candidates only provide friends who will say nice things. In the A Method, you ask for specific references (former bosses) mentioned during the Topgrading interview. Ask the reference:

• “In what context did you work with the person?”
• “What were their biggest strengths?”
• “What were their biggest areas for improvement back then?”
• “How would you rate their performance on a 1–10 scale?” (Anything less than an 8 is a red flag).
• “The candidate said they struggled with X. Can you tell me more about that?”

The Leadership Takeaway: If you skip the Topgrading interview, you are guessing. If you skip the Reference interview, you are gambling.

Step 4: Sell (Closing the Deal)

You’ve done the hard work. You found an A-Player. They fit the Scorecard perfectly. Now, you have to get them to sign.

Many leaders lose candidates at the finish line because they assume the offer letter speaks for itself. It doesn’t. A-Players have options. To land them, you must address the Five F’s of Selling:

1. Fit: Show them how their goals align with the company’s vision. “You said you wanted to lead a team; this role gives you that platform immediately.”
2. Family: Acknowledge the stress of changing jobs. “What can we do to make this transition easy for your family?”
3. Freedom: A-Players hate micromanagement. Promise autonomy. “I’m hiring you because you are the expert. I’m here to clear roadblocks, not look over your shoulder.”
4. Fortune: Be clear about the financial upside. This isn’t just salary; it’s equity, bonuses, and long-term stability.
5. Fun: People spend more time at work than at home. Assure them the culture is one they will enjoy.

The Sell doesn’t end when they sign. You must keep selling through their resignation from their current job (where they will be counter-offered) and through their first 100 days.

The “Who” Mindset Shift

Implementing the A Method feels heavy at first. A 3-hour interview? Writing detailed Scorecards? It sounds like a lot of work.

But compare that work to the alternative.

• The alternative is firing someone six months in.
• The alternative is cleaning up the mess of a toxic manager.
• The alternative is missing your annual revenue targets.

The most successful business leaders—from billionaire investors to Fortune 500 CEOs—do not delegate hiring. They own it. They understand that capital is a commodity, but talent is scarce.

If you want to build a world-class company, you cannot build it with B-Players. You need A-Players. And to get A-Players, you need to stop asking “What do we need to do?” and start asking “Who is going to do it?”

Your Action Plan for This Week:

1. Pick one open role (or an upcoming one).
2. Tear up the job description.
3. Write a Scorecard with 5 clear outcomes.
4. Commit to using the Topgrading chronology in your next interview.

The quality of your life and the success of your business depend on the quality of the people you hire. Choose wisely.

You have followed the “A Method.” You have stopped guessing. You have rigorously top-graded your candidates, drilled into their past performance, and successfully recruited a team of A-Players. You have the talent.

Now, you face a new, equally dangerous problem.

A collection of high-performing individuals is not a team. Without the right environment, a group of A-Players can devolve into a group of expensive mercenaries—competing for resources, hoarding information, and pulling in different directions. You have gathered the “Stars,” but you haven’t yet formed the “Constellation.”

This is where the insights of Danny Wareham, specifically from his book Constellation: Leadership Reimagined for a Connected Age, become the critical second half of your leadership equation.

If Geoff Smart’s Who is about the nodes in your network (the people), Danny Wareham’s Constellation is about the lines that connect them (the culture). In the modern business landscape, you cannot win with just one or the other. You need both.

The Death of the Pyramid

For the last century, business leadership was modeled on the Industrial Age pyramid. The “Boss” sat at the top, directing information down through layers of middle management to the workers at the bottom.

This structure worked when markets were slow and efficiency was the only goal. But as Wareham argues, we have left the Industrial Age and entered the Connected Age. The world is now volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA).

If you put your newly hired A-Players into a rigid pyramid, two things will happen:

1. They will leave. A-Players crave autonomy and impact. If they have to wait two weeks for approval to fix a customer issue, they will find a company that lets them move faster.
2. They will slow down. The pyramid is designed for control, not speed. In a networked world, speed is the currency of survival.

Wareham suggests a powerful shift in visualisation. Stop trying to build a pyramid. Start building a Constellation.

The Leader as the Connector, Not the Capstone

In a constellation, there is no single point of failure at the top. It is a network of bright stars (your people) connected by invisible lines of communication, trust, and shared purpose. The shape of the constellation isn’t fixed; it shifts and adapts as the season changes.

This fundamentally changes your role as a leader. You are no longer the “Capstone” sitting on top of the structure. You are the Connector.

Wareham’s philosophy suggests that in a Connected Age, your power doesn’t come from your title or your ability to command. It comes from your ability to facilitate the flow of energy and information between your people.

1. Curating the “Space Between”

Most leaders obsess over the stars—the individual performance metrics of their employees. Wareham argues that culture actually lives in the “space between” the stars.

Culture is not the foosball table or the free snacks. Culture is the quality of the connection between your people.

• Do your A-Players trust each other?
• Does information flow freely from Sales to Engineering, or does it hit a wall?
• When a crisis hits, does the network tighten and support itself, or does it fragment?

The Leadership Move: Stop managing individuals in isolation. Start managing the interactions. If two of your A-Players are in conflict, don’t just solve the problem for them. Fix the connection. Force them to collaborate on a shared outcome. Strengthen the gravity that holds them together.

2. The North Star: Purpose Over Instruction

In a pyramid, you align people through instruction: “Do this, then do that.” In a constellation, you align people through Navigation.

You cannot micromanage a network of A-Players; it is too complex and moves too fast. Instead, you must provide a “North Star”—a clear, immutable sense of purpose that guides the entire constellation.

When you have a strong North Star (a clear Vision and Mission), you can trust your A-Players to make their own decisions. You don’t need to tell them how to get there; you just need to ensure everyone is looking at the same fixed point in the sky.

The Leadership Move: Audit your company’s “North Star.” Is it a generic mission statement on a website? Or is it a navigational tool used in meetings? If your A-Players have to ask you for permission to make a decision, your North Star isn’t bright enough.

Agility: The Shifting Shape

One of Wareham’s most potent observations is that constellations are not static. As the Earth rotates, the orientation of the stars appears to change.

In business, the market rotates constantly. A rigid organisational chart cannot cope with a sudden competitor or a global pandemic. A constellation, however, is fluid. Because the connections are based on trust and purpose rather than rigid reporting lines, the team can reconfigure itself around new problems.

If you have hired A-Players (using Smart’s method), they are naturally adaptable. They are “multi-skilled athletes.” Your culture must allow them to flex.

• The Old Way: “That’s not in my job description.”
• The Constellation Way: “The North Star is over there; let’s regroup to get to it.”

The “Dark Matter” of Psychological Safety

What holds a constellation together? In astrophysics, it’s gravity. In business, Wareham implies it is Psychological Safety.

You have hired high-performing, ambitious people. These people often have strong egos. If the culture is one of fear—where making a mistake leads to punishment—your stars will stop shining. They will hoard data to protect themselves. The lights will go out.

For the constellation to function, the connections must be conductive. Meaning, bad news must travel as fast as good news. A-Players must feel safe enough to say, “I messed up,” or “I disagree with the CEO.”

If your culture silences dissent, you don’t have a constellation; you have a collection of dying stars.

The Synthesis: Smart + Wareham

When you combine Geoff Smart’s Who with Danny Wareham’s Constellation, you get a complete operating system for modern leadership.

1. The “Who” (Smart): Use the Scorecard, Topgrading, and rigorous Reference checks to ensure every node in your network is a star—bright, capable, and high-integrity. B-Players dim the light of the constellation.
2. The “Culture” (Wareham): connect those stars with a culture of high trust, fluid communication, and a shared North Star. Remove the barriers of hierarchy that prevent them from shining.

The Final Challenge

As a leader, looking at your organisation through this dual lens is daunting but necessary.

Look at your org chart. Does it look like a pyramid of control? Or does it look like a dynamic map of connections?

Your job is no longer to be the smartest person in the room. You hired A-Players; they are the smartest people in the room. Your job is to be the architect of their environment. Your job is to ensure the stars are aligned, the view of the North Star is clear, and the space between them is filled with trust.

That is how you don’t just build a company. That is how you build a legacy.