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Title: Hiring and Keeping the Best People by Harvard Business School Press ISBN: 157851875X Publisher: Harvard Business School Press Pub. Date: 02 January, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5
Rating: 5
Summary: Essential Information and Invaluable Advice
Comment: This one of the volumes in the new Harvard Business School Essentials Series. Each offers authoritative answers to the most important questions concerning its specific subject. The material in this book is drawn from a variety of sources which include a Peter Cappelli article on market-driven retention in the Harvard Business Review and various other articles published in Harvard Management Review Update as well as the hiring module found in Harvard ManageMentor®, an online service. Each volume is indeed "a highly practical resource for readers with all levels of experience."
Peter Cappelli served as subject advisor to Richard Luecke, writer of this and other books in the Harvard Business School Essentials Series and author or developer of more than 30 other books as well as several dozen articles. As Luecke notes in the Introduction, Bradford Smith completed a study of 54 U.S. companies and learned that the average managerial "mis-hire" costs a company 24 times the individual's base compensation. How can that be possible? "Smith points to all the usual suspects" (the mis-hire's compensation and cost of maintenance, the initial hiring costs, severance expenses, the costs associated hiring and training a replacement," etc.) but the biggest cost...is the cost of the mistakes, failures, and missed opportunities that result from having the wrong person in a management position over several years."
The material in this volume is carefully organized within seven chapters, followed by three appendices which provide a sample job description and targeted interview questions as well as discussion of various "legal landmines" in hiring. Each chapter is introduced by a list of "Key Topics" to be covered in it and concludes with a brief Summary. For example, in Chapter 5, the essential strategies for "Keeping the Best" reflect why retention matters and why it is now so challenging, the special challenges of a diverse work force, and why people stay -- and why they leave. Examples are provided of two companies which successfully retain their best employees (e.g. Southwest Airlines and SAS) and then the reader is provided with several "tips" on managing retention.
Throughout this book, several check-lists are included. One of the most informative is Figure 3-3 ("What Managers Are Looking For") which lists the attributes rated by executives who participated in a survey conducted by McKinsey & Company in 2000. Here are the five rated highest: Interesting, challenging work (59%), Company is well-managed (48%), Work I feel passionate about (45%), Good relations with my boss (43%), and two tied for fifth place (39%): I like the culture and values, and, Recognized, rewarded for my individual contribution.
Ken Blanchard once observed that feedback is "the breakfast food of champions" and I agree. An excellent indication of that is the exit interview which many companies do not conduct and few of those who do do it well. In the final chapter, "When All Else Fails," the reader is provided with some excellent advice which includes but is not limited to exit interviews. Ernst & Young is cited as a company which made a special effort "to re-recruit excellent employees who had defected to now-defunct dot-com companies. It even set up a national Alumni Relations Office to manage this important aspect of its human resource business." (Readers wishing to know more about those initiatives are directed to "Alumni Relations During a Downturn," Daily Deal, 27 September 2001.) In this final chapter, several specific suggestions are offered to help increase the number and quality of re-hires. Obtain feedback which reveals the root causes of defections and then eliminate those causes. This information can be obtained during exit interviews and by direct investigation.
Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to read Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman's First, Break All the Rules and Coffman and Gabriel Gonzalez-Molina's subsequently published Follow This Path. In the former, the authors introduce the Gallup Organization's "Q12"; in the latter, the authors examine it in much greater depth. Briefly, "Q12" consists of a series of questions (yes, 12 of them) which elicit from respondents information needed to attract, focus, align, and thereby keep the most talented employees.
Buckingham and Coffman obtained performance data from 2,500 companies and punched in the opinion data from 105,000 employees. "This is what we found. First, we saw that those employees who responded more positively to the twelve questions also worked in business units with higher levels of productivity, profit, retention, and customer satisfaction. This demonstrated, for the first time, the link between employee opinion and business unit performance, across many different companies. Second, the meta-analysis revealed that employees rated the questions differently depending on which unit they worked for rather than which company. This meant that, for the most part, these twelve opinions were being formed by the employee's immediate manager rather than by the policies or procedures of the overall company."
I also recommend Bruce Tulgan's Winning the Talent Wars, David Sears's Successful Talent Strategies, and The War for Talent co-authored by Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones, and Beth Axelrod.
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Title: Managing Change and Transition by Harvard Business School Press ISBN: 1578518741 Publisher: Harvard Business School Press Pub. Date: 02 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Finance for Managers (Harvard Business Essentials) by Harvard Business School Press ISBN: 1578518768 Publisher: Harvard Business School Press Pub. Date: January, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations by John P. Kotter, Dan S. Cohen ISBN: 1578512549 Publisher: Harvard Business School Press Pub. Date: 01 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Set-Up-to-Fail Syndrome: How Good Managers Cause Great People to Fail by Jean-Francois Manzoni, Jean-Louis Barsoux ISBN: 0875849490 Publisher: Harvard Business School Press Pub. Date: October, 2002 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: Working the Room: How to Move People to Action through Audience-Centered Speaking by Nick Morgan ISBN: 1578518199 Publisher: Harvard Business School Press Pub. Date: 02 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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