Hiring Smart: How to Predict Winners and Losers in the Incredibly Expensive People-Reading Game

Rating:
Summary: Simply a "Must-Read" Tool for Employeers
Review: Hiring Smart is an exceptional "must-read" tool for any hiring manager... and anyone looking for a job. In today's world when hiring poorly can lead to expensive mistakes, it is more important now than ever to get the "right" person in an organization.

Hiring Smart is simply one of the best tools around for hiring employees. It is original and excellent - I cannot recommend it enough.

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Summary: 45 Tips and Tricks, but no method
Review: I recommend Del Still's High Impact Hiring. It presents a method for behavior-based interviewing and candidate assessment. Dr. Mornell's book emphasizes a series of techniques and situations where you basically infer a candidate's suitability by your own interpretation. Certainly not based on fact. Behavior-based interviewing is based on asking and querying a candidate's past performance and description of how she did her job, and drilling down to gather facts and data, rather than infering qualities about the candidate based on responses to tests. In any case, every author of these books starts by describing the high cost of a hiring mistake. But that doesn't mean that what necessarily follows will prevent you from making a mistake. A book like this is entertaining and full of anecdotes, but does not provide a well-thought of method for avoiding mistakes.

Rating:
Summary: Great ideas, sketchy writing
Review: If you're looking for ideas about how to extend, deepen, or accelerate an existing hiring process, this book is full of excellent ideas. The author clearly has considerably experience and if you follow his advice and pick the techniques that best match you and your organization you'll find the book helpful.

However, if you're looking for an introduction to hiring practices or interviewing in general, look elsewhere. The anecdotes are compelling but disconnected--use this as a source book.

Rating:
Summary: an incisive, engaging business book -- not to be missed
Review: In the course of the year, many business books pass across my desk, and HIRING SMART is one of the most memorable of 1998/1999. With skill and wit, Dr. Mornell transforms the seemingly dry topic of hiring into a primer on how to read people and, in the process, invest in your company's most valuable resource-- its people. His thesis -- that a mistake in hiring can exact a toll on a company not necessarily apparent in the short run, but potentially devastating in the long run -- is developed through examples culled from his years as a hiring consultant to major corporations.Dr. Mornell breaks down the fundamentals of the hiring process into easy-to-grasp stages, and most importantly for those charged with hiring responsibilities, equips the reader with the information needed to immediately implement his 45 techniques. No person involved in the hiring process should be without this resource!

I should add that the last reader's take on the book is a classic example of missing the forest for the trees -- the admittedly unconventional interview questions that he/she mentions appear in the appendix, and, as most critical readers would realize, are meant only to inspire out-of-the-box thinking, and not to be simply regurgitated. Regardless, they make up one-tenth of one percent of the book's content -- dismiss it on such grounds if you like, but you'll be missing out on a book that Tom Peters, Stephen Covey, and George Gendron (Editor-in-Chief of Inc.Magazine) have called the best hiring title on the market.

Rating:
Summary: A good read, nothing new, essential for current job seekers
Review: Overall, the book is an easy read, literally (double spaced, 14 pt type?), the anecdotes are interesting and it will make a contribution by helping people think about the hiring process. The book offers 45 "strategies" which are more accurately activities. Most are conventional "#18: Identify strengths and weaknesses"; some are a bit off the beaten path, "#26: Travel with the candidate," and others are dubious, "#31: Use handwriting analysis." All of the "strategies" are practical and mostly useful, but if you're looking for something fundamentally new, it is not in this book.

The author focuses on finding reasons not to hire a candidate, the universal hiring/interview strategy. For example, exclude all candidates without cover letters or with resumes that have a typo or misspelling. (On that basis, the book should be ignored; mine had a typo on page 138 and virtually every page had a glue stain)

The limitation! to the book is its perspective. The book is written for, and from the perspective of an executive hiring from a position of strength. The hiring firm/executive sets the agenda, dictates the terms of the interaction, and commands performance. Only after the decision to extend an offer to a candidate is made is there any concern for their interests. A questionable approach for recruiting the best candidates.

Based on the recent publicity the book has received (Inc. Magazine & Harvard Management Update), anyone who is actively searching for a job should read the book as a defensive strategy. Anyone new to HR recruiting should also find it useful.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting Reading but don't believe everything
Review: The thing I like about the book is that it mentions several unconventional techniques. Unconventional techniques work better than conventional techniques since the candidate does not have a packaged response. My experience in interviewing and hiring scores of candidates is that conventional questions like 'What are your weaknesses?' usually tell you very little except good interview preparation.

The thing I disliked was that most of the methods employed do not appear to have been validated for a large enough sample. Rather the author seems to mention some anecdotes and use them as proofs. If I have some method that sounds good and works most of the time but that 'most' is only 55% it's reckless to use that method because it's little better than a crapshoot. It can eliminate lots of excellent candidates. However if 'most' is 95% of the time then that method is clearly very sound.

As a hiring manager I have myself developed all kinds of unconventional techniques but I have statistically validated them by using a large enough sample.