Customer Reviews

Hiring Smart!: How to Predict Winners and Losers in the Incredibly Expensive People-Reading Game

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In the course of the year, many business books pass across my desk, and HIRING SMART is one of the most memorable of 1998/1999. With skill and wit, Dr. Mornell transforms the seemingly dry topic of hiring into a primer on how to read people and, in the process, invest in your company's most valuable resource-- its people. His thesis -- that a mistake in hiring can exact a toll on a company not necessarily apparent in the short run, but potentially devastating in the long run -- is developed through examples culled from his years as a hiring consultant to major corporations.Dr. Mornell breaks down the fundamentals of the hiring process into easy-to-grasp stages, and most importantly for those charged with hiring responsibilities, equips the reader with the information needed to immediately implement his 45 techniques. No person involved in the hiring process should be without this resource!

I should add that the last reader's take on the book is a classic example of missing the forest for the trees -- the admittedly unconventional interview questions that he/she mentions appear in the appendix, and, as most critical readers would realize, are meant only to inspire out-of-the-box thinking, and not to be simply regurgitated. Regardless, they make up one-tenth of one percent of the book's content -- dismiss it on such grounds if you like, but you'll be missing out on a book that Tom Peters, Stephen Covey, and George Gendron (Editor-in-Chief of Inc.Magazine) have called the best hiring title on the market.

I bought this book because it was written by a Psychiatrist and looked like a methodical, psychological approach to hiring. It is a good book, but it has some limitations.

The book is organized temporally by stages of the interview process. There are forty-five topics that present ideas for how to interview candidates at each stage. The book covers all the common interview processes, but also presents creative and original approaches that are intended to reveal personality or character. One example I really like is meeting the spouse. I have asked to go out to dinner with potential bosses and their spouses to see what kind of people they are (and they get to meet my wife, too, which has frankly been to my advantage).

Overall, the strategies presented are good, but many people would say they are too time consuming for use in hiring a lot of people. I would be surprised if a Fortune 500 company used the complete strategy for routine hires. But most of us are not hiring a lot of people, so that is not an excuse for not using good ideas. Hiring key people, such as executives, should be a methodical and careful process. So should hiring just one programmer to add to your six person team.

I have two concerns about the strategies presented. The first is that foreign-born people may respond differently than expected to psychological things. For example, if you ask some people the meaning of the phrase "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones," they will misunderstand the question because it is culturally linked. By the same token, one question in the book abstractly described playing the game Monopoly, but some people would not understand because they know nothing about parlor games. Because of America's rapidly growing multi-culturalism, I am hesitant to employ some of these strategies.

The other danger of being too sophisticated is that we may reach beyond our qualifications to interpret the results. I would be very interested in employing the services of Dr. Mornell to interview an executive candidate since he is an experienced and knowledgeable Psychiatrist. I would be wary of trying to draw too many conclusions myself about the psychological make-up of a candidate. It is also true that a certain amount of finesse and talent is needed or else you will not get meaningful results.

The approach presented in this book is intellectual and requires a great deal of effort. If you are looking for an easy road to hiring great people, I wish you luck, but this book isn't it anyway. If you have the time and determination to implement these ideas, you might get good results with the caveats I pointed out above. I can say that I certainly enjoyed reading the book and got some great ideas from it.

Overall, the book is an easy read, literally (double spaced, 14 pt type?), the anecdotes are interesting and it will make a contribution by helping people think about the hiring process. The book offers 45 "strategies" which are more accurately activities. Most are conventional "#18: Identify strengths and weaknesses"; some are a bit off the beaten path, "#26: Travel with the candidate," and others are dubious, "#31: Use handwriting analysis." All of the "strategies" are practical and mostly useful, but if you're looking for something fundamentally new, it is not in this book.

The author focuses on finding reasons not to hire a candidate, the universal hiring/interview strategy. For example, exclude all candidates without cover letters or with resumes that have a typo or misspelling. (On that basis, the book should be ignored; mine had a typo on page 138 and virtually every page had a glue stain)

The limitation! to the book is its perspective. The book is written for, and from the perspective of an executive hiring from a position of strength. The hiring firm/executive sets the agenda, dictates the terms of the interaction, and commands performance. Only after the decision to extend an offer to a candidate is made is there any concern for their interests. A questionable approach for recruiting the best candidates.

Based on the recent publicity the book has received (Inc. Magazine & Harvard Management Update), anyone who is actively searching for a job should read the book as a defensive strategy. Anyone new to HR recruiting should also find it useful.

I recommend Del Still's High Impact Hiring. It presents a method for behavior-based interviewing and candidate assessment. Dr. Mornell's book emphasizes a series of techniques and situations where you basically infer a candidate's suitability by your own interpretation. Certainly not based on fact. Behavior-based interviewing is based on asking and querying a candidate's past performance and description of how she did her job, and drilling down to gather facts and data, rather than infering qualities about the candidate based on responses to tests. In any case, every author of these books starts by describing the high cost of a hiring mistake. But that doesn't mean that what necessarily follows will prevent you from making a mistake. A book like this is entertaining and full of anecdotes, but does not provide a well-thought of method for avoiding mistakes.

I was disappointed that most of the strategies in the book rely on psyching out the interviewee, using trick questions and a reliance on gut feeling and/or chemistry/fit. For example, Mornell recommends following a candidate to his car, and even getting handwriting analysis done. He even suggests giving the candidate a brain teaser puzzle and throwing them curveballs. For example, "Ask candidates what kind of bumper sticker they have on their car." I mean, the answers to these questions are useless and have nothing to do with whether a candidate can do the job you are presumably interviewing them for. Other strategies such as "meeting the spouse" or asking about their "wild and crazy" personal life can be legally indefensible. Finally asking candidates if they're lucky, or what they would do if they won the lottery is just plain ineffective. What you should be interested in is what has the candidate done in past jobs/situations, the steps they took to accomplish a task, and the results of their actions, not what their favorite book or movie is, or what side of the bed they sleep on. Frankly if I were being interviewed by a person using these strategies, I would get up and walk out. The interviewer is obviously more interested in playing games than assessing my suitability for a real job.

Businesses compete on the basis of their talent today and allcompanies must find ways to hire and retain the best people in theirorganizations. Dr. Mornell's book is filled with sage wisdom on the hiring process that will save managers time and headaches and will remind them of tried and true principles of human bahavior. This is a carefully written book that is also entertaining and easy to read. It will stay with you and you will want to pass it on. I have sent it to many of my clients and friends. Every CEO should read this. John Davis, Harvard Business School

if you do a lot of interviewing and hiring then you know that the customary questioning about past performance just isn't enough. candidates are well versed and ready to "snow" you in that process. if you believe that not all candidates are seeking an honest and good fit with your organization but will do almost anything to get a job, then you need to have tools & techniques to improve your odds of a successful match. I am sure that the information in this book will enhance my ability to avoid mistakes.

This book contains 45 chapters based upon the leading theory of hiring today, that the best predictor of your future is your past. I worry that people will take that to mean, "Once a failure, always a failure. Once a success, always a success." The book is geared towards hiring managers, to get them to observe certain behaviors. Yet what is to stop a jobseeker from reading it in reverse so that he repaints himself and his past to be more qualified than he is?

For instance, one chapter said that to determine the kind of person you're interviewing, walk the candidate to his car. To the candidate it will appear as a nice gesture, but the employer is actually taking mental notes. I find this a little contradictory with the goal of the book of finding out how truthful the candidate is; trust is supposed to be a 2-way street. The assessment is then given that a candidate with a messy car will most likely be messy in everything else he does, including the job. What then is to stop a candidate from renting a very nice car for the day of the interview? Or what if he simply cleans out his car, knowing the prevalence of this "trick"?

I also found the advice of having job references return phone calls very misleading. Mornell says that if references don't return the potential manager's phone calls, it must mean the references don't think the candidate is that great. With today's busy schedules, many people end up being procrastinators! The candidate being hired is not of utmost importance to them; it's not that they're evil, they're just tied up with other matters and put off other tasks, such as returning calls. Why should a potentially great candidate pay for the negligence of others?

It does not seem proper that the candidate should be evaluated on so many things that have nothing do with the job itself. We hear that there's a very tight labor market today and that we also can't afford to hire the wrong person. I'm scared that people who read this book may magnify! any small thing such as a car needing a wash and therefore let the right person, the one who can actually do the job, be overlooked. That too is a very costly mistake.

While the book does have some practical advice, such as asking the candidate to show you a demonstration of what he does, there are several other areas which coincide with wrong conclusions some hiring managers have reached. I'd strongly urge any hiring manager who reads this to remember that every story always has at least 2 interpretations. To Mornell's credit, he does talk about one particular candidate who was viewed differently by both Japanese and American bosses. If you're really wanting to assess your candidates, don't just settle for one version, esp. when some references are known to have executed personal vendettas. That will help you both avoid losing great hires as well as avoid being taken in by a smooth operator.

If you're looking for ideas about how to extend, deepen, or accelerate an existing hiring process, this book is full of excellent ideas. The author clearly has considerably experience and if you follow his advice and pick the techniques that best match you and your organization you'll find the book helpful.

However, if you're looking for an introduction to hiring practices or interviewing in general, look elsewhere. The anecdotes are compelling but disconnected--use this as a source book.

The thing I like about the book is that it mentions several unconventional techniques. Unconventional techniques work better than conventional techniques since the candidate does not have a packaged response. My experience in interviewing and hiring scores of candidates is that conventional questions like 'What are your weaknesses?' usually tell you very little except good interview preparation.

The thing I disliked was that most of the methods employed do not appear to have been validated for a large enough sample. Rather the author seems to mention some anecdotes and use them as proofs. If I have some method that sounds good and works most of the time but that 'most' is only 55% it's reckless to use that method because it's little better than a crapshoot. It can eliminate lots of excellent candidates. However if 'most' is 95% of the time then that method is clearly very sound.

As a hiring manager I have myself developed all kinds of unconventional techniques but I have statistically validated them by using a large enough sample.