Hiring People_ Recruit and Keep the Brightest Stars - Kathy Shwiff [0]
Hiring People
RECRUIT AND KEEP
THE BRIGHTEST STARS
KATHY SHWIFF
Contents
PREFACE
1 STAR SEARCH: ATTRACTING TOP PERFORMERS
Describing the Job
Advertising the Position
Recruiting
Building a Referral Network
Job Fairs
Using Recruiters
Screening and Evaluating Resumes
2 INTERVIEWING
Preliminary Screening
Interviewing 101: The Basics
Checking Out Promising Prospects
The Final Decision
3 WELCOME ABOARD
Crafting Your Offer
Making the Offer
Getting Off to a Good Start
Retaining Employees
When It Doesn’t Work Out
OFF AND RUNNING
SOURCES
RECOMMENDED READING
SEARCHABLE TERMS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Preface
What is the best way to hire a perfect employee? Where is the most cost-effective place to advertise open positions? How do you write an ad that will attract a pool of strong candidates? How can you identify a star performer from a stack of resumes? Will asking interviewees about their past experiences predict their future performance in your company? What interview questions are legally out-of-bounds? How do you craft an appealing offer?
In this book, we distill the wisdom of some of the best minds in the field of human resources to help you hire talented employees with ease. The language is simple and the design colorful to make the information easy to grasp.
Quizzes help you assess your knowledge of the hiring process. Case files show how companies have addressed their own hiring challenges. Sidebars give you a big-picture look at hiring and highlight innovative, out-of-the-box solutions worth considering. Quotes from business leaders will motivate you as you begin looking for the perfect employee. Finally, in case you want to dig deeper into hiring and related management issues, we recommend some of the most important business books available. The authors of these books both influence and reflect today’s thinking about effective hiring practices and related management issues. Understanding the ideas they cover will inspire you as a manager.
Even if you don’t dip into these volumes, the knowledge you gain from studying the pages of this book will equip you to deal firmly, effectively, and insightfully with the hiring challenges you face regularly on the job—to help you improve your company and the lives of the people who support you.
THE EDITORS
STAR SEARCH: ATTRACTING TOP PERFORMERS
* * *
“No organization can do better than the people it has.”
—Peter Drucker,
management guru and author
(1909–2005)
* * *
Filling your ranks with good people has never been more important. That’s because your people represent your company to the public; and they’re the ones who will create your success.
If you can get the right people onto your team, and if you then give them the freedom to think and be creative, they can work magic. Yet good people are in short supply. Although universities and business schools around the world are churning out tens of thousands of MBAs every year, the imminent retirement of a whole generation—the 76 million baby boomers—means a wave of positions will be vacant. The competition for the top talent is already stiff. Within the next ten years, it will become even more intense.
Whether the person you’re hiring is a junior software developer or a senior project manager, a civil engineer or a newsletter editor, a hotel maid or a registered nurse, getting a star performer to notice the position you want to fill, to come in and talk to you, and to choose you over other companies demands increasing skill.
Smart managers need to develop every possible resource. They need to build networks of good people they can tap into when they have jobs to fill. They need to develop skills among interns. They need to raise their firm’s visibility so that people will come to them. They need to discover talent in every corner of their communities, focusing on groups of people who may be underemployed—among them women, many of whom drop out of the workforce at some point in their careers and subsequently