Who Book Summary

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Key Insights

In this book, the authors argue that who you choose to hire can make or break your business, either costing or saving your company a fortune. They go on to explain how broken, outdated, but somehow still trendy hiring methods keep companies from finding the right people from the beginning and losing more with every inadequate hire. They propose their ultimate solution, the “A Method for Hiring”, which offers an organized way to find and recruit the best people for your company’s needs.

Hiring errors can be extremely costly. Choosing the wrong person typically ends up costing 15 times their salary.

When looking for your next employee, you’re hoping to strike gold. You want to find the person that will perform exceptionally, a part of the top 10% performers who can meet all the outcomes you set for them. 

You’re probably wondering why in reality, hiring managers end up settling for less. In fact, managers make 50% of their overall mistakes during the hiring process, says famed management consultant Peter Drucker, costing their team money and resources by choosing the wrong person.

Just how much do hiring mistakes cost a company? The authors found that it costs, on average, 15 times the hire’s base salary. Some of these costs come from the hire’s poor decisions on the job, but a majority come from the labor needed to fire, replace, and then onboard new talent. 

In other words, a bad hire is never worth the consequences. To stop this cycle of trial-and-error, the authors recommend stepping back and taking a close look at your hiring process. How can you select a reliable candidate from the beginning and avoid these extreme costs? 

Bad hiring happens because managers use inadequate and outdated techniques to select their candidates instead of an organized system.

Where are hiring mangers going wrong? They may not understand the demands of the job or feel none of the candidates in their pool of potential hires meets their standards. But most of the time, managers hire the wrong people because their hiring process isn’t systematized. 

Instead, hiring managers rely on what the authors call “voodoo hiring methods”, or methods that rely on short-cuts instead of careful and balanced evaluation.

For example, an “art critic” manager expects to understand a candidate based on a short first impression, likely to be fooled by appearances like the candidate’s charisma. A “prosecutor” may ask indirect and tricky questions in interviews to try and get the candidate to slip up, putting the candidate on the defensive. A “fortune-teller” manager asks candidates about hypothetical future problems which have little to do with the candidate’s ability to handle the current problem of the company while an “animal lover” asks bizarre questions like “what’s your spirit animal?”.

Not only do managers lean on unhelpful interview questions, but they squander interview time. A “chatterbox” manager spends the interview making small talk while a “suitor” spends it trying to sell the company, instead of collecting information about the potential hire.

Even managers that test their candidate's skills can rely too...

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