A valuable resource for today’s job candidates.
This nonfiction book offers strategies and examples to help readers ace the tough questions during a job interview.
To find employment, today’s job seekers need more than a stellar resume and great references. They also need their future bosses to see them as likable, motivated and a good fit within the company culture. In the latest edition of his debut work, Firestone guides readers in figuring out how to position themselves as ideal candidates during job interviews and how to play up their strengths in ways that hiring managers and human resources departments will appreciate. He gives candidates the perspective from the other side of the interview desk, describing what hiring managers want to know, why they want to know it and how the candidate can effectively deliver that material. He outlines how to create “SOARL stories” (i.e., anecdotes about professional success or learning opportunities, presented in the “Situation / Objective / Action / Results / Learning” format) and instructs readers to practice saying them before their interviews. Firestone also describes “behavioral competencies”—analytical thinking and problem solving, conflict management, initiative and thoroughness, etc.—and encourages readers to discuss their accomplishments in ways that meet these standards. Finally, he lists sample questions for candidates to ask at various stages of the interview process. For the most part, the book is succinct and engaging, providing a wealth of job interview information in an easy-to-follow style. It focuses on preparing the candidate, not spotlighting success stories or making impossible promises. (As Firestone points out in the introduction, “[Y]ou won’t find any BS filler or author ego stories in the following pages.”) Section 2, which lists 40 behavioral competencies in detail, runs the risk of overwhelming readers. Likewise, Section 3 features 63 pages of occasionally rambling sample answers that highlight sales and management issues, which might not apply to all interviewees. The book also ends abruptly, without any final words of wisdom or closure. Despite these drawbacks, the text offers enough useful advice to make the average candidate feel more confident at his or her next interview—provided they practiced their SOARL stories, of course.
A valuable resource for today’s job candidates.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-615-72589-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: Success Patterns LLC
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
