Recommended Books

This essential business book provides a simple and practical solution to every manager's top problem: unsuccessful hiring. The authors' methods for hiring are broken down into easy-to-follow steps that guarantee hiring success.

In this landmark book, Geoff Smart and Randy Street provide a simple, practical, and effective solution to what The Economist calls "the single biggest problem in business today": unsuccessful hiring. The average hiring mistake costs a company $1.5 million or more a year and countless wasted hours. This statistic becomes even more startling when you consider that the typical hiring success rate of managers is only 50 percent.

Effectively managing personnel--as well as one's own behavior--is an extraordinarily complex task that, not surprisingly, has been the subject of countless books touting what each claims is the true path to success. That said, Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton's Now, Discover Your Strengths does indeed propose a unique approach: focusing on enhancing people's strengths rather than eliminating their weaknesses. Following up on the coauthors' popular previous book, First, Break All the Rules, it fully describes 34 positive personality themes the two have formulated (such as Achiever, Developer, Learner, and Maximizer) and explains how to build a "strengths-based organization" by capitalizing on the fact that such traits are already present among those within it.

The key to building a superior company, an increasing number of observers now agree, is the ongoing ability to recruit and retain superior personnel. In Topgrading, industrial psychologist and global consultant Bradford Smart expands upon this idea by examining in great detail exactly how today's premier organizations have assembled such top-level employees, and then showing precisely how others can do it, too. "Simply put, topgrading is the practice of packing the team with A players and clearing out the C players," Smart writes. "'A players' is defined as the top 10 percent of talent available at all salary levels--best of class. With this radical definition, you are not a topgrader until your team consists of all A players. Period." Essentially a best-practices manual for developing this outstanding personnel pool, the book is based on more than 4,000 interviews and case studies conducted by Smart at major corporations like General Electric as well as fast-growing high-tech companies and small family-owned firms. He further bolsters its effectiveness by including his extensive "Chronological In-Depth Structured Interview Guide," along with other assessment tools and hands-on strategies for assembling an ideal work team.

Hiring the best candidates is a complex process - much more complex than many people will admit. There are so many details. The slip of any one could cause a lost candidate or the hiring of a wrong candidate. Lou Alder is a well-known recruiting guru, and it took him a whole well-written, succinct book to explore just the concept of hiring the best (a small subset of all hiring).

Colosi Associates likes his points and advice, because anyone who hires can benefit just by incorporating even one or two his ideas. He is impactful. Here are some great point he makes:

"The best candidates aren't the best interviewees. So using interviewing skills is a terrible way to judge competency.

"The best people (the top 10% to 15%) don't use the same criteria to explore jobs as the rest. So typical advertising and screening methods were targeting the wrong pool of candidates..." His point: "traditional" sourcing methods don't uncover these candidates.

And our favorite,

The best candidates didn't typically have all of the skills, experiences, and education described in the job description. They are made up of traits that can't be easily filtered - potential, self-motivation, leadership, tenacity, vision. So if a company advertises and filters totally on skills, the best are often inadvertently excluded..."