Ready to start hiring?
Dealing with hard-to-fill positions? Let us help.

Post Job

6 Must Read Books for Every Recruiter

By Lilly Chesser - Dec. 14, 2016
jobs
Post A Job For Free, Promote It For A Fee

Recruiting does not stay the same. New approaches, techniques, and strategies appear every week to make the work of recruiters even more efficient and effective and provide the most successful employee selection.

The amount of literature is booming as well: on Amazon alone, you’ll find more than 7,000 books and publications related to the recruiting profession alone. This translates into around twenty years at the reading rate of one book per day, so it is not really practical to attempt such challenge.

I thought it might be very useful for you if we picked up the most important ones that have the best pointers. Amazon’s recruitment literature ‘must-reads’, to be precise.

1. Good to Great

There are two primary areas addressed in this great book by Jim C. Collins, an American business consultant and lecturer. He has written a number of other great books for recruiters over the years, including Built to Last, Great by Choice, Beyond Entrepreneurship and How the Mighty Fall. First, the author tries to answer the question of how can a good company that spent a lot of time in the business become great and maintain the status for a long time. Second, the book discusses a number of distinct characteristics that help to implement the transition from good to great successfully and smoothly.

The book represents a research done by the author and his team to show what companies have achieved the enduring greatness and the ones that have not. The characteristics of each company are thoroughly discussed and examined for implications; then, the research turns to businesses that failed during the transition or never attempted it. Specifically, their failures and differences are discussed and compared with the first set of companies.

This book is great because it shows what it takes to make the transition from good to great in terms of recruiting, organizational culture, the role of technology, leadership, and change programs.

2. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

This book was written by Michael Lewis, a well-known financial journalist, and non-fiction writer. Although it might seem that this work is about recruiting in sport, it actually provides quite a few useful insights for every recruiter in any industry.

Essentially, it describes the methods of creating a team that beats top franchises but does not have a single superstar bought for millions of dollars. It has a real implication for the recruiters because finding hidden talent instead of going with the well-established one is a skill possessed by real professionals.

Even if you are not into baseball, this book is a must-read because it shows how a team of motivated men won over champions who were paid up to six times more.

3. 96 Great Interview Questions to Ask Before You Hire

Another great piece by Paul Falcone that is pretty straightforward and effective in providing recruiters with a framework of questions that should be asked of the potential candidate. It does not contain a list of questions, as the title may suggest, but rather presents the reader with an entire philosophy of interviewing that teaches certain interpretation of questions and answers. For example, the book teaches to tie the interviewee’s responses to concrete past actions because this approach can minimize the inclination to exaggerating answers.

This approach has been appraised by many recruiters around the world; for example, Aussiessay managers use it to select the academic and content writers by identifying high-performance job candidates and negotiating job offers to attract winners. Naturally, they do not use all of the questions but rather combine some of them into an interviewing strategy.

This is a must-read because having learned the methods described in the book is guaranteed to help your interview process.

4. Social Media Recruitment

Social media plays a prominent role in modern recruitment because it provides access to millions of potential candidates. It has already been recognized as an important tool for recruiters to attract top talent.

The industry received a significant advantage over the traditional hiring practice when LinkedIn was created because it was the first professional social network with thousands of well-known companies and millions of specialists looking to connect.

The book describes how various firms utilize social media platforms and include them in their recruitment strategies, which is a critical skill for every modern recruiter. It is filled with different case studies and practical tips, so anyone can get a good understanding of what social media means for the industry and how to integrate it successfully.

It even contains instructions on how to create your own social media recruitment strategy. What else do we recruiters need from social media?

5. Hiring For Attitude

Every person has their own attitude when it comes to certain situations. The author of this book, Mark Murphy, proposes to use this knowledge to select the best candidates; specifically, he thinks that strategies that contain attitude-driven questions can be used to identify the candidates whose attitude may ultimately cause a company to fail. Indeed, it is a very useful skill because attitude can influence performance even more than skill, as experts suggested.

Recruitment specialists increasingly view attitude as the predictor of professional success because even the best skills do not really matter if the person is not open to improving or is constantly isolated from their colleagues.

Apparently, that makes sense. Do you think of attitude as a hiring issue?

6. Hire with Your Head

Lou Adler, another prominent writer in the area, shares his thoughts about the changes in the recruitment process and how they should be adopted in order to be thorough and effective. Essentially, the book represents the history of recruitment since the 1990s to the present day and describes the factors and trends that influenced it.

For example, it states that “changing jobs every few years no longer carries the stigma it did in the early 2000s,” which shows how the attitude of recruiters changed towards people who often changed workplaces.

The book can serve as a great tutoring source for both new and experienced recruiters because it introduces the reader to the area and enhances the knowledge by learning from the mistakes of recruiters and identifies the best practices.

Hire with your Head is a great resource if you like to get a more in-depth analysis of recruiting practices.

Recruiting is an art of understanding and reading people who you meet for the first time in your life but have to determine whether they are a good fit for a business.

There are a lot of great books out there to help recruiters and these six are among the best.

They represent both the latest knowledge and classics, thus giving a complete picture of the complex process of recruitment. Some of them are quite lengthy and some are short to meet your reading time demands.

Clearly, it requires a lot of talent and skill to be successful in this field, so having this knowledge at your disposal can be a great advantage for both new and experienced recruiters.

Author

Lilly Chesser

Find Your Next Hire Out Of Over 5 Million Candidates

Get connected with quality candidates whose resumes on Zippia best fit your job description.

Ready To Start Hiring?

Related posts

Find Your Next Hire Out Of Over 5 Million Candidates

Get connected with quality candidates whose resumes on Zippia best fit your job description.