Geoff Smart – Author Biography
Geoff Smart is the leadership advisor and bestselling author who wrote the definitive book on hiring. His Who: The A Method for Hiring, co-written with Randy Street, gave managers a systematic method for recruiting top talent — and became one of the most influential business books of its decade.
Early Life
Smart studied economics at Northwestern University and earned his PhD in psychology, with a focus on leadership and organizational behavior. His academic training in assessment and decision-making became the foundation of his consulting career.
Career
In 1995, Smart founded ghSmart, a leadership advisory firm that counsels CEOs, boards, and investors on hiring and talent decisions — from CEO succession to private-equity portfolio leadership. The firm has advised on thousands of senior hires and is known for its rigorous, research-backed approach to what most companies do by gut feel. With his colleague Randy Street, Smart distilled the firm’s methods into Who: The A Method for Hiring (2008), which introduced the now-famous “A Player” concept and a four-part interview methodology. He followed it with Leadocracy (2012) and Power Score: Your Formula for Leadership Success (2015, with Randy Street and Alan Foster).
Major Works
Who: The A Method for Hiring (2008) is his landmark — a step-by-step system (Scorecard, Source, Select, Sell) for defining a role, sourcing candidates, conducting structured interviews, and closing top talent. The book argues that hiring mistakes are the costliest errors in business and that great hiring is a learnable discipline, not an art.
Writing Style and Themes
Smart writes as a consultant-practitioner: clear frameworks, memorable labels (“A Players,” “torpedoes”), interview scripts, and scorecards readers can use immediately. His central theme is that talent decisions are the highest-leverage decisions leaders make — and that most hiring failure comes from vague criteria and unstructured interviews, both fixable with method. His work bridges industrial psychology and boardroom practice.
Legacy
Who became the standard text on hiring for a generation of managers and remains one of the bestselling business books on the subject. ghSmart has grown into one of the world’s leading CEO advisory firms. Smart’s contribution was to take the most consequential — and most sloppily executed — decision in business and make it systematic.
