Do you really want outstanding employees?

What is the best thing you can do for your company as a HR professional? If you guessed “hire the right person the very first time”, you have just won the HR sweepstakes. Now I know that HR professionals aren’t always totally in charge of hiring but you should at least have some influence over the process. That’s why one of the best things you can do is read the book Success for Hire: Simple Strategies to Find and Keep Outstanding Employees.

Other than the fact that the book is written by HRM Today’s own Alexandra Levit, the book gives HR professionals and hiring managers alike ways of recruiting the very best people. Levit writes in a very easy to read tone that is devoid of jargon or rigidity that fills a lot of HR books. That is appreciated, at least by me.

Another thing that is important about this book is that she gives very practical advice and even includes guides and forms to help you to put some of her ideas into practice. This is important, especially if you are new to some of the concepts. So instead of saying “Hey, you really need to check the backgrounds of the people you hire thoroughly”, she gives you a form to use that actually helps you do better background checks.

My three favorite parts of the book are really easy:

1. Analyze before you advertise – Ah, so often forgotten in the heat of losing a critical person. “Hey, get the advertising up and get a new person as quickly as possible.” Wait, did we analyze the job to see if that person is actually going to be doing the same thing as before? Do we know if the person who just left had a problem with the job functions that we should revisit? Is the salary appropriate? Spending a couple hours on this can save days, weeks and even months.
2. Better interviewing strategy – Interviewing is already a fairly unreliable method of identifying great candidates so why do people assume they can go into an interview unstructured? I love the emphasis on thinking ahead about what you want to know and then formulating your questions around that.
3. On-boarding improvements – New hire orientation sucks and everyone knows it. Yet, nobody seems to want to change it. Just awful I tell you! HR people should work on making sure the on-boarding process is smooth and welcoming. If people are rushed in the door to work on their specific project without meeting other people, what sort of impression does that leave?

Two things that I wished the book included:

1. More content about retention – I know the books emphasis is on hiring process and that’s the low hanging fruit. The book spends 2/3s of its time on it too which is appropriate. Keeping outstanding employees is almost as important as hiring right and is (at least in my opinion) much more difficult. It may have been too much for a book that is meant to be read by many levels of an organization but that’s what I would have liked to see.
2. A companion website – I think a really simple companion website would have helped out even more on the implementation side. So for example, those nice forms she included could be in Word format on the companion website along with a short bit on how to utilize and implement it. Right now, if I like the format of one of her forms, I am going to be copying it out of the book.

Overall, this book was really great. If you are just starting in the hiring arena or if you need a refresher, this is a great book to read through.

Also, I am more than happy to read and review books as long as you’ll allow me to be honest. Any book that is sent to me is either passed on to another HR professional or donated to a local job development organization. Feel free to e-mail if interested (lance at hrmtoday dot com).