Hire With Your Head: Using Performance-Based Hiring to Build Great Teams, Third Edition

A superior system for hiring superior people

Any organization is only as strong as its weakest link, and just a few poor performers can adversely affect your entire company. Though there's no foolproof method for hiring the right people, there is a system for minimizing mistakes and consistently recruiting better, more successful candidates.

This up-to-date and fully revised edition of the bestselling Hire With Your Head presents a proven system for hiring superior people, individually or in groups. Written by veteran headhunter Lou Adler, this powerful resource—widely acclaimed by managers and human resources pros—gives you the tools to sidestep potentially costly mistakes by making better judgments on who fits the bill and who doesn't.

Though most managers understand the importance of hiring wisely, many don't know how to do it. In the end, they often choose prospective employees based on gut reactions. While this strategy sometimes works, more often it leaves managers with ineffectual or unmotivated employees who drag the organization down. Decisions based on emotions, biases, personalities, or stereotypes often reveal themselves as bad decisions in hindsight. The key to dodging this pitfall is to train yourself to base all of your hiring decisions on reason, not emotion.

Hire With Your Head introduces you to the Performance-based Hiring system, a methodology designed in response to the needs of top recruits and based on how they actually look for and accept offers. This unique, step-based system involves:

• Writing compelling job descriptions that emphasize the opportunities and challenges, not just the skills and qualifications required
• Focusing every aspect of your sourcing—job descriptions, Web copy, phone calls, and all communications—on attracting top people
• Using the interview process to both assess competency and entice the candidate with a rewarding career opportunity
• Integrating each step in the hiring process, combining recruiting, interviewing, negotiating, and closing into one smooth process

Hire With Your Head shows you how to focus on candidate performance rather than your own impulses—and it shows you how to use these techniques to recruit and hire individuals or groups with consistency and success.

Fully updated to cover all the recent developments in online hiring and other new technologies—and packed with fresh case studies from leading companies—Hire With Your Head is more practical than ever. Full of invaluable tips and helpful exercises, as well as useful checklists and revealing benchmarks, it's the indispensable, hands-on guide every manager needs to hire the right person every time.

About the Author

Lou Adler is founder and President of The Adler Group, a training and consulting firm based in Southern California. He is a noted recruiting industry expert, national speaker, and columnist for a number of major recruiting sites, including HR.com, ERExchange.com, Kennedy Information, and Workforce Management magazine.