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Hire With Your Head: Using POWER Hiring to Build Great Teams

by Lou Adler
John Wiley & Sons, 2nd Edition, 352 pages, $20.97

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Some managers have as much regard for hiring people as candidates have for being interviewed. That is, they'd rather skip the process altogether. Hire With Your Head contains great tools to get managers to recognize what hiring (and being interviewed) really is: a golden opportunity to shine.

According to Adler, “No matter how much things change, talent is the number one asset in every organization.” Years of hiring experience have confirmed for him that hiring great talent is the key to a manager’s progression. The problem is too many managers employ a system designed to fill jobs instead of one to hire superior people.

“Our Core Assessment series is proven to have a close link to how people will perform on the job,” says an AppleOne Account Executive. “It’s not designed just to validate, but to accurately forecast success in the workplace.”

Hire With Your Head offers a systematic approach to performance-based hiring with step-by-step processes for getting the right new-hire. The book asserts that “The best candidate rarely gets the job—the best interviewee does. The best candidates have traits that can’t easily be filtered: potential, self-motivation, leadership, tenacity, and vision.”

Adler explores these five steps to effective hiring:

1.Target The Best-create careers, not jobs

2.Be Proactive

3.Clearly Understand Performance Needs of The Job-define success, not skills

4.Control The Impact of First Impressions-emotional biases are not the number one source of hiring errors

5.Measure Job Competency, Not Interviewing Skills

Often, hiring managers have confidence in their ability to quickly spot and hire the right individual for a position. Adler cautions against accepting this as the best way to hire. Instead, he recommends delaying the hiring decision for 30 minutes after talking to a candidate. “Wall Street Journal’s National Business Employment Weekly stated that 70% of the hiring decision is made on first impressions,” he writes. Our biases, emotions, and prejudices team with the impact of first impressions to distract many interviewers from the candidate’s ability and motivation to do the job.

Hire With Your Head’s levelheaded recommendations are invaluable for anyone in charge of a hiring decisions. One good piece of advice is to use the same criteria for external hiring as you do for internal moves. The internal move is more accurate because we know the person’s past performance, attitude, and work habits. Examining these aspects should be the focus when interviewing a potential hire.

Adler supplies ample tables and lists to support his principles and cut down on the number of “surprises” hiring managers will experience once employees begin working. Navigating the hiring waters does not have to be fraught with bad judgment and peril. Hire With Your Head is a great compass for any hiring manager to have.