Sep 15 2020
With thousands of HR books on the market, it can be difficult to decide on which literature is best suited to help you become a better hiring manager.
To assist, here are our top 10 must-reads to becoming a better hiring manager. Some of these books focus on the talent acquisition or strategy side of HR while some of them focus on creating the best culture for your company. TAs, Recruiters, or any HR professional from organizations of all sizes and types will find value from this list.
Overview of our top 10 books we recommend to become a better Hiring Manager
- Hiring for Attitude: A Revolutionary Approach to Recruiting and Selecting People with Both Tremendous Skills and Superb Attitude
- The Effective Hiring Manager
- The Best Team Wins: Build Your Business Through Predictive Hiring
- Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead
- Talent Fix
- Talent Magnet: How to Attract and Keep the Best People
- The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups
- Recruit Rockstars: The 10 Step Playbook to Find the Winners and Ignite Your Business
- Victory Through Organization: Why the War for Talent Is Failing Your Company and What You Can Do About It
- Hiring Greatness: How to Recruit Your Dream Team and Crush the Competition
Hiring for Attitude: A Revolutionary Approach to Recruiting and Selecting People with Both Tremendous Skills and Superb Attitude by Mark Murphy
By Mark Murphy
Whether you’re hiring new employees, choosing existing employees for a new team, or upgrading your current talent pool, you need people with the right attitude. Attitude is what makes employees give 100 percent effort and turns customers into raving fans. Attitude sets your company apart from the competition.
In Hiring for Attitude, top leadership strategist Mark Murphy shows you:
- The five biggest reasons why new hires fail
- Two quick and easy tests to discover the attitudinal characteristics that you need for your unique culture
- The five-part interview question that gets candidates to reveal the truth about what their last boss really thinks of them
- Where great companies really find their best candidates
- The six words most interviewers add to the end of behavioral interview questions that destroy their effectiveness
The Effective Hiring Manager by Mark Horstman
By Mark Horstman
The Effective Hiring Manager offers an essential guide for managers, team leaders, and HR professionals in organizations large or small. The author’s step-by-step approach makes the strategies easy to implement and help to ensure ongoing success.
Hiring effectively is the single greatest long-term contribution to your organization. The only thing worse than having an open position is filling it with the wrong person. The Effective Hiring Manager offers a proven process for solving these problems and helping teams and organizations thrive.
The Best Team Wins: Build Your Business Through Predictive Hiring by Adam Robinson
By Adam Robinson
Author Adam Robinson gives you a proven, straightforward, and effective method for hiring new employees. He teaches you how to rethink the process of finding, assessing, and hiring the right people. Robinson shows you how to:
- Use a Data-Driven Job Profile to Assess Candidate Risk
- Build a Candidate Scorecard
- Rate the Candidate’s Core Competencies
- Ask the Right Questions to Dig Deeper in Interviews
- Craft an Offer the Candidate Can’t Refuse
Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead by Laszlo Bock
By Laszlo Bock
Work Rules! shows how to strike a balance between creativity and structure, leading to success you can measure in quality of life as well as market share. Read it to build a better company from within rather than from above; read it to reawaken your joy in what you do.
Drawing on the latest research in behavioral economics and a profound grasp of human psychology, Work Rules! also provides teaching examples from a range of industries-including lauded companies that happen to be hideous places to work and little-known companies that achieve spectacular results by valuing and listening to their employees. Bock takes us inside one of history’s most explosively successful businesses to reveal why Google is consistently rated one of the best places to work in the world, distilling 15 years of intensive worker R&D into principles that are easy to put into action, whether you’re a team of one or a team of thousands.
The Talent Fix: A Leader’s Guide to Recruiting Great Talent
By Tim Sackett
Corporate talent acquisition has been failing for decades, but it doesn’t have to. There are simple fixes, organizational designs, and technology that can turn around the success of an organization’s ability to recruit almost overnight.Piece by piece and step by step, with real-world examples and stories about how innovative organizations and top talent acquisition leaders are successfully recruiting today, The Talent Fix presents a proven, practical, and scalable recruiting model for talent acquisition leaders and practitioners and shows how organizations can build and sustain a great talent acquisition function.
Fountain hosted a webinar with Tim titled The New Normal for Hourly Hiring – 5 Strategies TA Leaders Must Consider Moving Forward. He explained what we need to know for the future of hourly hiring, and the positive impact we can make on our organizations in the future. You can watch the recording here.
Talent Magnet: How to Attract and Keep the Best People
By Mark Miller
What Does Top Talent Really Want? More than vision, strategy, creativity, marketing, finance, or even technology, it is ultimately people that determine organizational success. That’s why virtually every organization wants more top talent. But do you know what they’re looking for? It might not be what you think! Talent Magnet will show you how to attract and keep great people.
The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups
By Daniel Coyle
In The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle goes inside some of the world’s most successful organizations—including the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six, IDEO, and the San Antonio Spurs—and reveals what makes them tick. He demystifies the culture-building process by identifying three key skills that generate cohesion and cooperation, and explains how diverse groups learn to function with a single mind. Drawing on examples that range from Internet retailer Zappos to the comedy troupe Upright Citizens Brigade to a daring gang of jewel thieves, Coyle offers specific strategies that trigger learning, spark collaboration, build trust, and drive positive change. Coyle unearths helpful stories of failure that illustrate what not to do, troubleshoots common pitfalls, and shares advice about reforming a toxic culture. Combining leading-edge science, on-the-ground insights from world-class leaders, and practical ideas for action, The Culture Code offers a roadmap for creating an environment where innovation flourishes, problems get solved, and expectations are exceeded.
Culture is not something you are—it’s something you do. The Culture Code puts the power in your hands. No matter the size of your group or your goal, this book can teach you the principles of cultural chemistry that transform individuals into teams that can accomplish amazing things together.
Recruit Rockstars: The 10 Step Playbook to Find the Winners and Ignite Your Business
By Jeff Hyman
Ninety percent of business problems are actually recruiting problems in disguise. If you’re filling your company’s vacant positions with B-players, you’re playing with fire. Instead, hire Rockstars to build an organization with limitless potential. Recruit Rockstars shows you how to find, hire, and keep the best of the best.
Top-tier executive recruiter Jeff Hyman has hired more than three thousand people over the course of his career. Now, he reveals his bulletproof 10-step method for landing the very best talent, based on data instead of gut feel. From sourcing and interviewing to closing and onboarding, you’ll learn how to attract winners like a magnet and avoid the mistakes that result in bad hires.
Assembling a team of driven and innovative Rockstars is the most powerful competitive advantage you can have in today’s ever-changing business world. Recruit Rockstars will help you nail your numbers, impress your investors, and crush your competitors.
Victory Through Organization: Why the War for Talent is Failing Your Company and What You Can Do About It
By Dave Ulrich
Victory Through Organization provides the rationale for shifting your focus from how to help individuals prosper to the organization. Filled with fact-based insights and field-tested strategies, it demonstrates that organizational success isn’t just about the talent you have―it’s about how the collective organization makes the individual talent better. To this end, HR professionals and business leaders will learn:
• How they can ensure that organization creates greater value than the sum of individual talent parts.
• How to create more integrated HR solutions for business results across multiple stakeholders
• How HR departments can better create a comprehensive information advantage
• How HR professionals can master the competencies that have greatest impact on their personal effectiveness, key inside and outside stakeholders, and business results
Victory Through Organization offers tools business leaders and HR professionals need to better respond to emerging opportunities, and it provides expert advice for building HR departments to deliver measurable business value. You will learn how to build organization capabilities, strengthen systems, and empower human capital―for longer lasting success.
Building and retaining a solid, talented workforce is a great thing. Creating the competitive organization that wins is even more important for business results.
Hiring Greatness: How to Recruit Your Dream Team and Crush the Competition
By David E. Perry
The single greatest opportunity that an organization has to improve both performance and culture in one stroke lies in the hiring of a new executive—the right executive. The fresh thinking of a skilled leader has the potential to unleash innovation, empower employees, and generate wealth for the company. Similarly, a bad hire may mortally wound the organization and cause ripple effects throughout the entire economy.
Hiring Greatness contains valuable insider strategies and tactics—previously only known to a handful of America’s wealthiest, elite head-hunters—to attract, recruit, and retain star executives. Authors David E. Perry and Mark J. Haluska have completed more than 1800 search projects across five continents, maintaining a 99.97% success rate, and negotiating more than $380 million in salaries.
