Hire With Your Head ^{2nd Ed.}

A proven system for hiring superior people is exactly what you'll get from this updated and better-than-ever Second Edition of Hire with Your Head. Any organization is only as strong as its weakest link. As such, it's crucial to avoid recruiting people who weaken the chain or adversely affect your organization. Of course, there is no foolproof method for knowing exactly how candidates will work out if you hire them, but there are precautionary methods you can use to eliminate those candidates who definitely won't work out. Written by veteran headhunter Lou Adler, this powerful resource — widely acclaimed by managers and human resources pros — gives you the tools to sidestep potentially costly mistakes by making better judgments on who fits the bill and who doesn't.

Though most managers understand the importance of hiring wisely, many don't know how. In the end they often choose prospective employees based on gut reactions. While this strategy sometimes works, more often it leaves managers with ineffectual or unmotivated employees who drag the organization down. Decisions based on emotions, biases, personalities, or stereotypes often reveal themselves as bad decisions in hindsight. The key to dodging this pitfall is to train yourself to base all your hiring decisions on reason, not emotion.

Hire with Your Head shows you how to focus on candidate performance rather than your own impulses. It covers the fundamentals of sound hiring, including proper interviewing and assessment techniques, and outlines these techniques through Adler’s patented POWER Hiring® process, a method that addresses and solves all the problems and inconsistencies of the hiring process. Based on his extensive experience as both a headhunter and an executive-level manager, this practical and proven approach consists of five steps:

• Performance profiles — define success, not skills
• Objective evaluations — conduct a complete objective assessment with only four questions
• Well-developed sourcing plans — sourcing is marketing, not advertising
• Emotional control — measure performance before personality to remain objective
• Recruiting effectiveness — recruiting is career counseling, not selling

Updated to include new material on using the Internet to hire and recruit, approaching passive candidates, and achieving diversity and maintaining legal compliance in your practices, Hire with Your Head is better than ever. Packed with invaluable tips and helpful exercises, as well as useful checklists and revealing benchmarks, it’s the indispensable, hands-on guide every manager needs to hire the right person every time.

1. The POWER Hiring Approach to Hiring Top Talent
   If you want to hire superior people, use a system that's design to find and hire superior people, not one designed to fill positions
2. Performance profile — Define Success, Not Skills
   Define success, not skills, and get everyone on the hiring team to agree. This is the first step to hiring top talent.
3. Emotional Control
   More errors are made in the first 30 minutes of an interview than any other time. To increase objectivity, you must learn howto overcome the impact of first impressions, personal biases, and perceptions
4. The Basic Four-Question Interview
   If you know what you're looking for, you only need to ask four questions to determine candidate competency and motivation. In fact, good interviewing is more about getting the answers to these four questions than asking clever questions.
5. Work-Type Profiling: Matching Skills and Interests with Job Needs
   The best candidate have 80 percent of the skills, but 120 percent of the motivation. Aligning critical job needs with potential, ability, and interest is how you build outstanding teams.
6. After the First Interview — How to Make Sure You Have a Great Candidate
   The first interview represents 50 percent of the assessment. It's what you do next that will determine if you have a great candidate.
7. The Ten-Factor Candidate Assessment
   A rational way to make a gut decision boils down to combining interests, abilities, behaviors, and competencies to better predict job success.
8. Recruiting, Negotiating, and Closing
   Recruiting is consulting, not selling. The best have needs different from the rest. For the best, it's a strategic decision to balance long- and short-term needs. A transactional approach won't work.
9. Sourcing — How to Find the Best
   Sourcing is marketing, not advertising. The best, whether they're active or passive, don't find jobs in traditional ways. You have to find them the same way they find great jobs.
10. Implementing POWER Hiring
    Hiring one great person is challenging enough. In the process of hiring 10 or 100 great people, don't lose sight of what it takes to hire one great person. It's how you can make hiring top people a repeatable, formal business process.

• Afterword

1. The Legality of the POWER Hiring Protocol
   Robert J. Bekken
2. A Discussion of the Validity of the Structured Interviews Used in the POWER Hiring Process
   Charles A. Handler, PhD
3. Templates
1. The Performance Profile
2. The Four-Question Interview
3. The Basic Eight-Question Interview
4. The Ten-Factor Candidate Assessment
   

A very good book. My wish is only that more headhunters would read it, so I wouldn't have to live through more incompetent interviews anymore.