A concise and captivating guide to the many ways an interview can go wrong.
A manual focuses on improving job candidates’ interviewing skills.
“First impressions are critically important in job interviews,” writes Baum in this compact introduction to the subject, “when we have only a short time to make our best impression.” Readers who have ever sat for interviews have probably wondered if they were making one of a number of possible mistakes in subtext or signaling. The author seeks to illustrate some of those errors through a series of fictionalized characters designed to embody what not to do and who not to be. Readers meet “The Interrupter,” who’s always interjecting opinions and reactions, and Baum gives the common-sense warning: “People don’t like to be interrupted.” Readers meet “The Messy Dresser,” who shows up with wrinkled clothes and such, and again, there’s a wise warning: “Whether it is fair or not, people make assumptions about you and your skills based on your appearance.” And there’s “The Nodder,” who nods and mutters “uh-huh” no matter what’s being said, which can lead to mixed signals: “A disconnect between the message your body language sends and the words you use can make one appear to be dishonest or false.” The author adds enormous value to these insightful categories by including in each case a passage of advice for the poor interviewees who may recognize themselves in the descriptions. Baum also delivers tips for interviewers, first analyzing whether or not the trait is a deal-breaker. The author then lays down the hard facts, the “Know When It’s Over” that means the attribute is, in fact, a deal-breaker. Thanks to Baum’s experience as an executive for Capital BlueCross and vivid imagination, these fictional stand-ins cover virtually everything that could go wrong in an interview, from talking too much and name-dropping to being overly familiar or artificially casual. And the tone throughout—sharp but not unsympathetic—will be bracingly useful to interviewers and interviewees alike.
A concise and captivating guide to the many ways an interview can go wrong. (illustrations)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-950459-00-1
Page Count: 66
Publisher: Vision Accomplished, LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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