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

Foreword

Since the early 1990s, I’ve been advising business leaders in organizations ranging from JC Penney to JP Morgan Chase on how to leverage talent to meet their business objectives. One piece of advice that is a slam dunk is this: Buy a copy of Lou Adler’s Hire with Your Head for yourself, read it, and then buy copies for every hiring manager, every recruiter, and every human resources professional in your organization. Why? Because this book offers a systematic approach to Performance-based Hiring and that is the most important thing you’ll ever do to build your team.

As much as things change in the business world from week to week and year to year, there is one fact that isn’t going to change: Talent is the number one asset in every organization. That has always been true, but the value of talent is even more important in the changing economy than ever before.

Organizations in every industry are trying to increase productivity and quality and they cannot rely on technology alone to achieve those objectives. As employers cut waste, introduce new technologies, and streamline operations, they put even more pressure on individuals to “add value” on a daily basis. Every operation nowadays must be lean, flexible, and high performance. Every supervisor is under pressure to get more and better work out of fewer people. That means those few people had better be really, really good.

High performance under pressure is what the real new economy is really all about. Technology implementation ...