Sample frameDay 200·Hiring · Outcomes

Good morning. Every instrument in this elective gets written before the candidate turns up. This one decides, a year from now, whether the hire worked.

Hiring.

The Scorecard

5 min read·Apply by lunch

The question

You'll post the advert this week and start meeting people the week after: what exactly would you hold up in twelve months' time to decide whether this hire worked, and could you write it down this morning, before a single candidate has had the chance to change your mind about what the job is?

The idea

Geoff Smart runs ghSMART, the leadership advisory firm he founded in 1995, and with Randy Street he wrote Who: The A Method for Hiring in 2008 — a method that descends directly from his father Bradford's work on topgrading, sharpened into four steps: scorecard, source, select, sell. The first step is where most hiring is won or lost. A scorecard has three parts. The mission is one short paragraph on why the role exists, in plain language a stranger could act on. The outcomes are three to eight specific, measurable results the person must deliver, ranked in order of importance. The competencies are the behaviours those outcomes will demand of whoever holds them. Their standard for a good hire falls straight out of it: someone with a high probability of achieving outcomes set at a level only a small minority of candidates could reach. The trap is that almost every organisation writes the advert first and reasons backwards, which produces a list of activities and attributes — manages the pipeline, strong communicator, five years' experience — that nobody can grade. Activities can be performed all year by someone who achieves nothing. Outcomes can't.

The framework

01
Write the mission as one paragraph a stranger could act on.
The mission is the reason the role exists, in about four sentences, and it should read like something you'd say out loud and not something a template would file. Not 'own the customer success function' — take the forty accounts we already have, keep them, and grow the twelve biggest, so that renewals stop depending on me personally. Write it before the outcomes, because the outcomes are how anyone would know the mission had been achieved. If two people who both know the business read it and describe different jobs, it isn't finished yet.
02
Three to eight outcomes, ranked — and the ranking is the hard part.
Day 12 gave you objectives and measurable key results for a team. A scorecard is that same shape pointed at one seat, with one thing Day 12 doesn't have: the outcomes are ranked, and they're written to grade a person rather than a quarter. Three to eight of them, each carrying a number and a date — grow monthly recurring revenue from this to that by December — then put them in an order and hold it, because the order is what tells the person what to drop when everything can't be done, and a list of eight equal priorities is an instruction to guess. Rank them badly and you'll buy a busy year with nothing finished in it.
03
The competencies come from the incident file, filtered through the outcomes.
You've already got the candidate list: the two or three behaviour clusters that kept separating the good days from the bad ones in yesterday's file, plus the requirements that survived being tested against it. Now filter the lot. Take each one and ask which outcome above actually demands it; drop any you can't attach to one, because a behaviour nobody's results depend on is a preference, however much you admire it. Four is plenty. Then write beside each the evidence you'd accept — if outcome one is rebuilding a support function while it runs, then having rebuilt a function while it ran is something a candidate has done or hasn't.
04
The advert is derived from the scorecard, and so is everything after it.
The scorecard isn't a planning document you file once the search begins; it's the spine of everything that follows. The advert is written from it. Interview questions come off it, roughly one per outcome. The debrief scores against it instead of against impressions. The first ninety days are set by it, the review at a year is a straight read of it, and if you and the candidate disagree about the outcomes before they join, you've found that out for the price of a coffee and not a year. Send it to your finalists and watch which ones argue with the numbers.

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