Who

The problem Geoff Smart and Randy Street tackle is failed hiring: by their figures a typical bad hire costs a company at least $1.5 million a year, and managers typically get only half their hires right. Their A Method for Hiring draws on interviews with some 300 chief executives and more than 20 billionaires, over 1,300 hours in all, and they claim a 90 percent success rate for it. Its steps include avoiding what they call voodoo hiring, defining the outcomes a role must deliver, keeping a steady flow of A Players, asking interview questions that separate A Players from weaker candidates, and winning over the chosen hire. It became a New York Times best seller.

Daxue Consulting founder Matthieu David-Experton called it a very useful book on recruitment.