A personable and practical guidebook to recruiting top talent.
A CEO emphasizes the value of having a quality employee recruitment process in this debut nonfiction book.
While leadership came naturally to Wright, he notes in his book’s preface that he “always wanted to be ‘the recruiter.’” From convincing classmates to join a new playground game he’d created in elementary school to gathering top talent as a student athlete at the University of Illinois, the author has always had a knack for identifying, enlisting, and developing prospects for his cause. Now the CEO and managing partner of Northwestern Mutual Goodwin—one of the nation’s largest financial security firms—Wright shares his successful strategy for attracting and retaining quality employees in this work. His process begins by identifying recruits who are good matches for his industry and specific business culture. (The author asserts that unnecessary turnover “serves clients poorly and hurts the industry’s reputation.”) Wright offers practical advice about screening, onboarding, and mentoring employees, giving readers access to his company’s extensive hiring process, which ensures that recruits have an in-depth understanding of his firm before they’re hired (the text lists hiring questionnaires used by the company). The author focuses on the importance of “building the diversity of our ranks,” refuting the stereotype that “white men from wealthy families are our strongest candidates” and highlighting the contributions of the more than two dozen Black advisers within his firm. While Wright’s decades of experience as a senior executive drive the narrative (which leans heavily on examples from the financial services and insurance industries), his book is relevant to recruiters in all fields. Wright displays an engaging prose style and draws upon his academic background in communications and psychology to give his arguments weight. He’s personable on the page, relating relevant anecdotes from his time as a standout wide receiver in college and from the brief professional football career of his father, John Wright, who played for the Atlanta Falcons and Detroit Lions in the late 1960s. The text is supplemented by an assortment of photographs, charts, and other visual aids.
A personable and practical guidebook to recruiting top talent.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9798887502113
Page Count: 168
Publisher: ForbesBooks
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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