How to Hire
The Essential Guide to Recruit & Retain the Right People
How to Hire is an action-oriented business guide with strategies for attracting, hiring, and retaining top talent.
Written for business owners, Clint Smith’s informative business guide concerns hiring the right people and building a growth culture.
Smith, who built and ran a software company and oversaw its hiring processes, shares the mistakes that he made early on, including not defining his company’s values well, as well as the things that he got right, such as naming growth opportunities to help retain his current employees. Based on his experiences, he recommends creating a collaborative work culture; he says that doing so ultimately contributed to his own company’s growth.
With a topical arrangement covering company culture, recruitment, and employee retention in turn, this book recognizes that a company’s values are critical when it comes to building relationships with its employees—and to retaining those employees. It suggests orchestrating hiring processes so that they also reflect these values, with recommendations for conducting interviews that will help to identify candidates who will contribute to exceptional teams. Employee performance evaluations are also covered, enabling deeper, continued considerations of employees’ abilities, fits within their teams, and motivations. Succinct reflection questions are included to help cultivate this multistep improvement process; they go deeper on topics like reviewing applications, hiring based on potential versus experience, and why a career page should include a company’s story. These questions are well spaced out, arriving at the end of each section and complementing the flow of the book’s discussions.
Smith’s work includes some eye-opening insights. He discusses the value of approaching recruitment as if it’s a process akin to selling a product, the inverse relationship between control and growth, and factoring an applicant’s character into an evaluation of their suitability to the company. Even familiar topics (as on qualifying applicants and reducing a company’s hiring costs) are refreshed thanks to Smith’s individualized, experience-based advice.
Additionally, the book’s recommendations are conversant with contemporary trends impacting hiring and retention processes. As such, they ably address subjects like remote work and new emphases on positive working cultures: prospective employees, the book notes, are becoming more selective about the companies that they choose to work for. It recommends adaptability and methods for engaging one’s workforce, sharing useful advice that applies even within changing economic climates.
How to Hire is an action-oriented business guide with strategies for attracting, hiring, and retaining top talent.
Reviewed by
Edith Wairimu
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
