Customer Reviews

Hiring the Best: Manager's Guide to Effective Interviewing and Recruiting, Fifth Edition

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I use this book both for interviewing techniques and for preparing to be interviewed. Its a great book for interviewing because he presents the pros and cons of different techniques and gives what I consider to be a good framework for identifying quality candidates. Its a great book for preparing to be interviewed because it helps you identify the objectives of interviewers and make a better case. As a hiring manager, you should be able to pass an interview with flying colors, shouldn't you?

Perhaps the most enlightening wisdom I got from the book was the enumeration of the qualities of a good employee:

1. Ability to do the job
2. Willingness to do the job
3. Manageability of the candidate

Most interviews focus on the abilities of the candidates and stop there. Big mistake! Mr. Yate gives you guidance on evaluating the whole candidate, and in general I like and agree with his advice.

Other good ideas are evaluating the cracks in resumes, phone screening, and lunch. Never hire anyone without checking background, verifying employment and education, and seeing if they can carry on a conversation at lunch.

I draw ideas for interviews from several books, but this one is the overall framework that I have worked from. I feel the style is readable, the length is appropriate, and the content is excellent.

This is an extremely well written and very useful book on hiring techniques and methods. The author analyzes all aspects of the hiring process beginning with the different types of resumes and when each type is used; what flags to look for and how to evaluate an applicant's overall resume. Chapter five focuses on short-listing through a `phoner' while the subsequent chapters are devoted to interviewing techniques and the science of asking questions.

The author introduces four different interviewing techniques - Situational; personality profile; stress; and & behavioral - and also gives a very useful and informative analysis of the different types of questions that can be asked in a hiring interview like half-right reflexives; hamburger-helper questions; and question layering. In the following chapters, the author focuses on evaluating the candidate's ability and willingness to do the job as well as manageability. The questions and the author's commentary on what to look for and red flags in an applicant's answer are informative, highly usable, and extremely useful. These are not your 'standard' interview questions (though there are some pretty standard questions included). They are well formulated and clever probes into the applicant's skills, knowledge, personality, and background.

The rest of the book is devoted to functional areas with a chapter devoted to clerical, management, sales, contingency workers and law hires. Again, I found the advice and suggestions relevant and informative. In formulating the hundreds of question suggestions scattered throughout the book, the author has given a lot of thought to the qualities, experiences, and areas of concern that hiring managers and HR people focus on.

Like many small business people, I was a complete bozo at hiring for many years. Fortunately, at some point I woke up to that fact and decided to educate myself. I took classes, read books and did everything I could to become a skilled interviewer. Without question, one of the most helpful tools to escaping Bozoland was this book. Although I am now a freelance business consultant and have no employees of my own, I frequently assist my clients with their own hiring processes, and in so doing I still refer extensively to Martin Yate's excellent book.

If you are looking for a solid foundation of your interview process, take a look at this book. It provides helpful ideas on how to approach your job candidates. Can they do the job, are they willing and can they be managed. It provided lots of helpful questions and processes for a successful hiring process. I have to say, that I am not a professional recruiter just someone that needs to hire and evaluate his new employees.

This book is fabulous. You quickly learn both interviewing skills and interviewing strategies. There are many examples and sample questions which help elaborate on the ideaa presented. It is so helpful that I've ordered three more copies to pass around at work.

Any manager with hiring authority knows that selecting the "right" candidate for any position is a nerve-wracking task. Professional processes can help you screen, interview and review, but the final choice is often as much art as science. Author Martin Yate's basic book can help inexperienced managers hire effectively, although this useful primer on interviewing and hiring is a little wordy. Yates provides great detail about key steps, such as when to schedule a phone interview, what to ask and how to conduct an interview. He even provides numerous sample questions for each major job category, from entry level to management. Is it a little too basic? Perhaps for some, but we recommend it for new managers who are inexperienced at hiring. Although this book covers the fundamentals of hiring, it can't guarantee that you'll make the right choice every time. Then again, that book probably hasn't been written.

I first read this book 10+ years ago. The advice has gotten better with age. Hiring is not complicated. It takes some discipline and focus. Yate boils it down to 3 questions, restated in the most direct terms:

1. Can you do the minimum requirements of this position? (behavioral interviewing techniques follow naturally)
2. Are you highly self-motivated? (more behavioral interviewing ... give me another specific example ... )
3. Are you manageable? Do you willingly pursue the manager/firm's goals? (more behavioral interviewing ... with some sharper questions and pointed follow-up to trigger honest reactions and discussion)

This approach greatly reduces the risk of "hiring errors", especially if you require a team of interviewees to agree that a candidate passes all three tests. The chosen candidate may not be an ideal highflyer, but they will be able to do the job, be low maintenance for their manager and not derail the work of others.

This approach forces hiring managers and HR to agree upon essential qualifications up front, it scripts interviews for consistency, it reduces the allure of only hiring people just like me, it eliminates ethereal discussions about future growth potential, it neutralizes the sparkling personality advantage, it creates some tension and variety that yields more honest answers AND it sets the clear tone for managing the candidate once hired.

This approach also allows you to evaluate internal transfers in a fair way and give priority to them even if external candidates seem to be slightly "more qualified" or to provide internal candidates with clear feedback on what they could do to become more qualified for a position when you have to turn them down.

At the end of an interview, I have even posed these questions to candidates one at a time to give them a final chance to convince the interview team of their qualifications. The very best candidates really shine when the questions are asked directly. They are talented, motivated team-players and can speak to these qualities. The pretenders make faces and sputter!

In the current 10-15% unemployment market, this approach is especially valuable, since it focuses two-thirds of the time on the subjective drivers of success: self-motivation and selfless teamwork. "Can you do the job?" has evolved into a search for who can prove best beyond a shadow of a doubt that they have done every bit of this job repeatedly in the past - a very low ROI approach that leads to the future discovery of "hiring failures" and individuals who do not have another promotion left in their repertoire.

I have been using Martin Yate's "Hiring the Best" since the late 1990s. This is an excellent reference book for human resource departments, hiring managers, and, also, for those in-transition. I refer to the book when hiring key employees and I encourage those who work for me to use it for interview preparation.

Yates provides a review of situational, personality profile, stress, and behavioral interviewing approaches; knock-out questions; and over 200 questions that will be useful in assessing ability, willingness, and manageability.

Hiring capable, motivated people is considered to be the most important management task. A poor decision results in a whole host of negative outcomes including lost time,expense,poor morale, and, possibly, irreversible negative outcomes. "Hiring the Best" will serve you well when filling open positions in the private, public, or the social sector.

This book if full of helpful information and is organized in a way that makes it easy to use for reference purposes. Give it a once through and then shelve it for reference purposes. This one is worth having in your management collection.

So few people have solid interviewing skills, which are critical in ensuring that you consistently hire the best people. This book is incredibly useful in helping you move past the "gut" decision. Several chapters are spent on how to ask various questions so that you neither lead the candidate into giving you the answer you want, nor intimidate the candidate at the wrong time. Very helpful in redefining the typical standard questions (which any decent candidate is prepared for) so that you can really get to the substance.

The book's focus on explaining why certain methods and techniques work better is excellent. In particular it has been very useful in teaching and/or re-assuring the interviewers (both veterans and newbies) at my company that they are asking the right questions and making the correct judgement calls. That confidence is a key success differentiator from the usual randomness in interviewing that often leads to a substandard hire.