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

~ (Author), Regan Dunnick (Illustrator), Kit Hinrichs (Designer) "Over the past twenty-five years, I've been invited by the presidents of companies, large and small, public and private, to help evaluate and select their..." (more)
Key Phrases: passionate candidate, hiring smart, finalist candidates, San Francisco, New York, Pan Pacific (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

While there are many books that help select the best people, my top pick is HIRING SMART by Pierre Mornell. -- Publishers Weekly, July 28, 2003 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description

People are the most valuable asset in today’s fiercely competitive workplace. In HIRING SMART, now available in paperback for the first time, Dr. Mornell delineates 45 simple strategies for "people reading"—observing a candidate’s behavior and predicting what they’ll be like in the workplace—that virtually guarantee hiring the best possible candidate for any job.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Ten Speed Press (October 7, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1580085148
• ISBN-13: 978-1580085144
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #369,790 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars an incisive, engaging business book -- not to be missed, June 9, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: 45 Effective Ways for Hiring Smart! : How to Predict Winners and Losers in the Incredibly Expensive People-Reading Game (Hardcover)

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.

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good for people who do a few critical hires, January 19, 2005

By	David A. Spellman "Code Slingin' Cowboy" (Texas) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

37 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars 45 Tips and Tricks, but no method, July 23, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: 45 Effective Ways for Hiring Smart! : How to Predict Winners and Losers in the Incredibly Expensive People-Reading Game (Hardcover)

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.