Topgrading Vs. the Who Method: Which One Is “Smarter?”

Many organizations are intimidated by using Brad Smart’s Topgrading because they perceive the process it prescribes as too complicated, rigorous, and time-intensive. Some leaders profess to prefer Who: The A Method of Hiring by Brad’s son, Geoff. Paradoxically, the very structure Topgrading provides makes it simpler and more accurate to implement, helping you to increase your percentage of A Player hires to over 90%.

• • Topgrading and Who: The A Method of Hiring have the same desired outcome: hiring only A Players.

  • Who is a shorter book and is an instructive read for A Player enthusiasts. However, due to its free-form methodology, it can introduce more variability and result in more work for you.

  • Panel interviews embrace Lean principles by eliminating waste and variability. They’ll help your leadership team quickly develop a shared A Player calibration and a shortened hiring cycle.

  • Use AI to improve accuracy in the process, not to create shortcuts. 

  • The Topgrading Enhanced Questions AI agent created by A Player Advantage produces better interview questions by combining the inputs of all of the Scaling Up A Players performance tools.

  • The Topgrading interview method doesn’t simply identify candidates with the right skills. It identifies people who will thrive within your core values, culture, and standards of performance. Hiring for culture fit protects your A Player culture as your company scales.

  • The Topgrading interview process replaces “post and pray” recruiting with rifle-shot recruiting. Instead of hoping the right candidates apply, you deliberately pursue proven A Players using a disciplined, repeatable system.

Both Topgrading and Who are designed to help you hire only A Players. Both are strong, instructive reads. But sometimes CEOs, hiring managers, and fellow Scaling Up coaches tell me that Geoff Smart’s Who methodology is easier to implement than Brad Smart’s Topgrading methodology.

At first glance, I can see why there would be an assumption of greater simplicity with Who. It’s only 130 pages, while Topgrading is a whopping 333. One is a brisk read, and the other might make you think Brad Smart expects you to earn your hiring degree by the final chapter.

And yes, Brad is Geoff’s father. Both of the Smarts’ methodologies are designed to help companies hire A Players, but when Daddy has spent decades studying hiring performance and built the original system, it’s probably worth listening to him.

The reason many leaders gravitate toward Who isn’t necessarily that the method is actually easier to execute. It’s that the book is shorter and the process feels less structured. I’d argue that Topgrading’s structure is exactly what makes it easier to apply consistently.

Think of Who and Brad’s introductory book, Foolproof Hiring, as “starter” books that provide an overview of the A Player hiring philosophy. But think of Topgrading as the authoritative playbook that outlines the tools and process in detail when you are ready to implement.

Along with my book The A Player, Lou Adler’s Hire With Your Head is a canonical book on defining and recruiting A Player talent. As Lou explains in his book, the best predictor of success is proven performance in similar positions. The purpose of an interview isn’t to determine whether you like someone or whether they tell a convincing story. It’s to uncover evidence that they’ve repeatedly performed at the level required by the role.

In the battle of the Smarts, both the Who and Topgrading methods ultimately pursue the same objective. The difference is in how consistently Topgrading can help you discover evidence of A Player ability.

Structure Reduces Variability

One of the core principles of Lean is reducing variability.

The same principle applies to hiring.

When every candidate submits a different résumé, every manager asks different questions, and every interviewer uses a different definition of “great,” the hiring process becomes highly variable. Hiring managers create questions on the fly, candidates are compared using inconsistent criteria, and the final decision often depends too heavily on chemistry, confidence, or instinct.

Unlike most hiring processes, the Topgrading interview process reduces that variability.

Candidates complete a structured Topgrading Career History Form before the interview, and their answers are incorporated into a chronological Career History Interview Guide. Instead of spending valuable interview time collecting basic information, this allows the team to focus on validating performance, probing accomplishments, exploring mistakes, testing accountability, and identifying patterns across the candidate’s career. This makes the Topgrading interview process more effective at separating top talent from unqualified candidates.

The guide provides detailed information about responsibilities, job performance, measurable results, failures, leadership challenges, managers, compensation progression, reasons for leaving, strengths, weaker points, and career goals.

That structure makes the interview easier to prepare for, easier to conduct, and easier to evaluate afterward.

In our recruiting practice at A Player Advantage, we get completed Career History Forms back approximately 98% of the time because we sell candidates on the value of the process. Candidates who don’t return the form—or who provide weak, superficial input—don’t advance to the Topgrading interview.

It surprises me how many “HR” people and hiring managers initially feel guilty asking candidates to do this work and provide this data. After all, isn’t your job important enough to be worthy of it? But if they either can’t or won’t, that’s indicative in itself of their interest in the job and their subsequent performance. Once you’ve experienced walking into an interview with that depth of information, why would you ever fathom going back to interviewing from a résumé alone?

The Panel Interview Process Creates Consistency

The Topgrading Career History Interview Guide becomes even more powerful when combined with a panel interview.

At A Player Advantage, we innovated the panel interview process from start to finish for Scaling Up-sized companies, and Brad Smart has endorsed the approach as a best practice for high-growth companies to hire top performers.

Rather than having a candidate repeat the same career stories in four or five separate interviews, the interview team hears the same answers, reviews the same evidence, and evaluates the candidate against the same criteria at the same time.

This immediately introduces greater consistency into the process.

It’s also far more time-efficient for both the company and the candidate. The candidate tells their career story once, while the leadership team can probe the most important areas together.

Just as importantly, it becomes much harder for a polished candidate to fool interviewers independently. One interviewer may be impressed by charisma. Another may question the numbers behind an accomplishment. A third may recognize a recurring pattern of avoiding accountability. Because everyone hears the same answer, the team can test those observations immediately rather than discovering them later, after each interviewer has already formed a separate opinion.

Over time, something even more valuable happens: the leadership team develops a shared A Player calibration.

Managers begin to hear excellence the same way. Together, they learn how to distinguish participation from ownership, activity from results, confidence from competence, and rehearsed answers from proven performance. When a candidate says, “We did this,” the panel probes for the candidate’s specific contribution to the team effort—what they personally owned, changed, decided, or delivered.

The team also becomes better at asking questions. Leaders hear how their colleagues validate accomplishments, challenge vague claims, explore failures, and connect a candidate’s career history directly to the requirements of the role.

Interview after interview, the company matures as a talent organization.

The panel interview does more than improve one hiring decision. It strengthens the organization’s ability to make every subsequent hiring decision.

AI Doesn’t Replace Great Interviewing

Artificial intelligence is creating opportunities in recruiting, but only when it strengthens the fundamentals rather than becoming an excuse to skip them. Sadly, AI is often being used in the wrong ways in recruiting and interviewing.

Too many AI interviewing systems start with the technology instead of the hiring process. They generate vague interview questions, create generic job descriptions, automate candidate conversations, or attempt to score candidates without first establishing what success in the role actually requires.

At A Player Advantage, we take a different approach.

We’ve developed an AI agent called Topgrading Enhanced Questions, or TEQ.

TEQ reviews four sources of information:

• • The candidate’s completed Topgrading Career History Interview Guide
  • The Scaling Up A Players Job Scorecard
  • The Scaling Up A Players Performance Profile
  • The Scaling Up A Players A Player Agreement

The three Scaling Up A Players performance tools define success from complementary perspectives.

The Job Scorecard identifies the outcomes and competencies required for the role.

The Performance Profile defines the position’s purpose, priorities, accountabilities, measures, and performance expectations.

The A Player Agreement clarifies the behavioral and performance commitments required to thrive in the organization.

TEQ compares what the candidate has written against what the role requires and automatically creates specific follow-on questions for the interview team.

The candidate documents their career history. The Scaling Up A Players tools define what great performance looks like. AI connects the two.

What TEQ Produces

TEQ doesn’t simply generate generic questions such as, “Tell me about a challenging project.”

It identifies claims, gaps, patterns, and possible inconsistencies that deserve deeper investigation.

For example, one candidate reported delivering $1.1 million in savings through process-improvement projects, along with additional scrap and equipment savings. TEQ didn’t merely ask for more detail. It asked the candidate to walk through one project in each category, explain the original cost baseline, identify the specific changes made, and show how the savings were calculated and verified.

That’s a much stronger approach because it tests ownership, technical depth, financial understanding, and the credibility of the result.

In another example, the candidate acknowledged compensating for an underperforming colleague rather than addressing the issue directly. TEQ asked what the colleague was failing to do, how long the candidate tolerated the situation, and what they would do differently today given the role’s emphasis on ownership and accountability.

That moves the discussion beyond a polished statement of self-awareness. It helps determine whether the candidate actually changed their behavior as a result of their experience.

The candidate also claimed greater than 97% on-time performance across multiple product launches and major design changes. TEQ probed the exception: What was the on-time performance before the candidate took over? What improvement actions did the candidate personally implement? Were they the candidate’s initiatives or their manager’s? (Oftentimes the manager or another team member is the real A Player.)

The exception is often more revealing than the headline number.

In another case, the candidate described leading a reusable medical device platform that reduced per-procedure costs by approximately 40%, enabled more than three times reuse, and generated multiple patents. TEQ asked the candidate to explain the underlying mechanism, distinguish their contribution from that of the co-inventors, and describe how the design met applicable safety and regulatory requirements.

This is exactly the kind of question that separates participation from true ownership.

Each TEQ question also includes the context behind it—why the question matters and which requirement from the Performance Profile, Job Scorecard, or A Player Agreement it’s intended to validate.

That improves more than the interview. It improves the interviewers.

AI Needs Context

Large language models are extremely capable, but they’re only as useful as the context they receive.

Without context, AI produces generic interview questions.

With the right context, it becomes an exceptional interviewing partner.

We also use AI to generate candidate write-ups from phone-screen transcripts and then fact-check those summaries against the original conversation before presenting them to clients. We’ve used a similar process with clients by uploading transcripts of full Topgrading interviews and assessing the evidence against the Scaling Up A Players performance tools to help determine A, B, or C Player fit for the specific role.

Notice the pattern.

AI isn’t replacing a proven hiring process.

It’s making the process faster, more consistent, and more rigorous.

The technology helps the interview team prepare better, identify areas requiring deeper investigation, preserve evidence, and evaluate the candidate against the criteria established before recruiting began.

The final decision still requires human judgment.

Don’t Let AI Skip the Fundamentals

A growing number of AI interviewing systems promise to streamline or automate hiring. Some may be helpful. Others simply add artificial intelligence to a weak and inconsistent process.

AI cannot compensate for a poorly defined job. It can’t reliably identify an A Player when the organization hasn’t defined what A Player performance looks like in a specific role. It can’t evaluate a candidate against expectations that exist only in the CEO’s head.

Topgrading provides detailed candidate context. The Scaling Up A Players Job Scorecard, Performance Profile, and A Player Agreement provide the role and organizational context. The panel interview introduces consistency and develops the team’s A Player calibration. TEQ then uses AI to create sharper questions based on all of that information.

That’s how AI should be used in interviewing.

Not as a shortcut around the fundamentals, but as an amplifier of them.

Better Questions Produce Better Hiring Decisions

AI isn’t going to replace great interviewers.

Great interviewers who use AI will outperform average interviewers who don’t.

Topgrading already provides one of the most disciplined interviewing systems ever created. The opportunity isn’t to replace it. The opportunity is to make it even better.

That’s exactly why we built Topgrading Enhanced Questions.

The candidate completes the Career History Interview Guide. The Scaling Up A Players Job Scorecard, Performance Profile, and A Player Agreement define what success looks like. TEQ analyzes that information and produces questions specific to the candidate and the role. The panel hears the same evidence, evaluates it together, and continues improving its shared A Player calibration.

The result isn’t simply more questions.

It’s better questions.

Better questions produce better interviews. Better interviews produce better hiring decisions. And better hiring decisions build stronger A Player organizations.

See the Topgrading Enhanced Questions (TEQ) in Action

Is your team still interviewing from résumés, improvising questions, and comparing candidates largely through individual judgment?

We can help you implement a more disciplined A Player hiring process using Topgrading, the Scaling Up A Players performance tools, panel interviewing, and Topgrading Enhanced Questions.

Schedule a conversation with A Player Advantage to see how Topgrading combined with TEQ can help your leadership team conduct stronger interviews, improve its A Player calibration, and hire more A Players with confidence.