When we started asking our customers, colleagues, and friends for their book recommendations, we turned up… a lot of disappointment. It turns out that many people feel burned by books about talent and HR.
These typical talent-related books offer a self-help approach similar to any number of lifestyle publications. At best, their advice focuses on how to do better with the tools you’ve been given. There’s surprisingly little information about how talent acquisition and talent management technologies need to evolve to generate timely, usable results. They haven’t been updated since ATS, CRM, and Talent Intelligence Platform technologies hit the market.
So we’ve focused on 10 titles that current professionals can really use. These books offer relevant, up-to-date, practical advice. And not one of our friends had read them all!
10 top books for recruiters and human resources
Who – The A Method for Hiring, by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. The typical hiring success rate for managers is only 50%. Who – The A Method for Hiring builds on 1,300 hours of interview with billionaires and CEOs to reveal how to avoid hiring the wrong person and quickly reach the A players your organization needs to succeed.
Available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble
Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the Human Side of Business, by Rusty Reuff and Hank Stringer. One thing separates your company from the competition: the people who work for you. Talent Force identifies how to hire the right talent, in the right place, and at the right time to maximize the impact of the people who run your business.
Available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble
The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired, by Lou Adler. What does performance-based hiring mean for hiring managers as well as job applicants? Lou Adler, long a legend in the talent acquisition world, delivers common-sense advice to get the people your organization needs through a structured process with consistent, replicable results across your business.
Available on Amazon
Hire with Your Head: Using Performance-Based Hiring to Build Great Teams, by Lou Adler. The classic guide to performance-based hiring is recently updated with case studies and analyses of the Internet’s impact on the hiring process. Adler’s guide explains the foundational thinking underlying much of today’s current hiring practices.
Available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble
First, Break All the Rules, by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. You can’t innovate, disrupt, or grow by doing what everyone else is doing. This book discovers what great managers do differently, and when they know they have to disregard conventional wisdom – including how they hire talent and promote staff.
Available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble
Hire the Best and Avoid the Rest, by Michael Mercer. This book lays out tools and techniques for ethical interviewing, testing, and checking references. An evergeen resource, this book helps hiring managers learn how to use their time and communications with job candidates more effectively to capture the qualities that reveal the right people to hire.
Available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble
Make Your People Before You Make Your Products, by Paul Turner and Danny Kaufman. When your people increasingly are your competitive advantage, managing talent becomes essential. This practice-based philosophy toward hiring details a flexible, dynamic, and inclusive approach to talent management, designed to help organizations move beyond traditional but ineffective linear approaches.
Available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble
Talent Management Handbook, by Lance A. Berger and Dorothy R. Berger. This handbook is an established how-to guide for HR professionals and hiring managers. The new edition builds on the latest developments in hiring and talent acquisition to provide a roadmap based on business culture for a comprehensive approach to talent management.
Available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble
Reinventing Talent Management: How to Maximize Performance in the New Marketplace, by William A. Schiemann. Businesses build equity in their people, just as much as with as their processes, physical plants, products, and services. Reinventing Talent Management explains how to understand and structure talent, using it as a strategic element within the organization rather than treating it as an intangible impossible to convert into measurable action.
Available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble
The Human Capital Edge: 21 People Management Practices Your Company Must Implement (Or Avoid) To Maximize Shareholder Value, by Bruce N. Pfau and Ira T. Kay. Which human capital practices work in the real world? This detailed book, based on research from 25 human capital management practices, shows not just which approaches work regarding talent management but also how they impact the stock price of a company, among other critical measures of corporate success.
Available on Amazon