Smart and Street compress ghSMART’s assessment practice into a four-step discipline: write a scorecard defining what the role must accomplish, source candidates continuously, select through structured chronological interviews that walk a career in order, and sell the chosen candidate on joining. The chronological interview is the engine: patterns of actual past performance, asked about specifically, beat impressions formed in an hour of rapport.
The Institute’s reading: an acquisition is a bulk hiring decision nobody treats as one. The buyer inherits a leadership team, must judge which seller claims about people are true, and often must recruit the successor to the founder, and this book’s scorecard-and-chronology method is the working version of what the Kaplan study validated: execution evidence over charm. Use it to structure management diligence before the letter of intent, when access to the team is still a negotiable term.