This must-read for business leaders provides a fresh perspective on transforming the hiring process.
If a company wants to win “the talent war,” it should take a cue from the military’s special operations recruiting process, according to this debut business book.
When it comes to finding—and molding—the best talent, few organizations are more effective than the United States special operations forces. Those who become Navy SEALs or Army Rangers have gone through a rigorous, battle-tested assessment process to identify high performers who “share a common set of attributes” (including drive, resiliency, and humility) that position them for success. In their laser-focused work, Sarraille, a former Marine and Navy SEAL; Randle, a one-time Army officer; and Cotton, a senior management consultant, draw on their diverse experiences to make a persuasive case for why companies large and small should rethink outdated, ineffective hiring practices and embrace an approach similar to that used by the special operations forces. When hiring managers narrowly focus on hard skills or fail to look beyond the basic facts of a candidate’s resume, they may not see talent that is hiding in plain sight, the authors argue. And when they don’t nurture talent where it already exists, they risk losing it to competing organizations. In three sections, the authors clearly outline what most businesses get wrong about hiring (and what special operations forces get right); explain how to create a “talent acquisition plan” to engage and retain the best people; and offer guidance on the nuts-and-bolts of recruiting. One innovative idea: temporarily take “A-players” away from their regular duties and put them on “the front line of the talent war.” Nonmilitary folks will learn plenty about special operation forces’ surprising approach to candidate selection, where the focus is less on brawn and more on brains and character. While the authors readily admit that no company can (or should) re-create the SEALs’ infamous “Hell Week,” they draw on their experiences as consultants to show how other tests can identify candidates most likely to drive a business forward. A mix of war stories and insider military information separates this effort from the average business book. But there’s no shortage of practical, actionable advice in these pages, whether readers are CEOs or midlevel managers tasked with filling empty positions.
This must-read for business leaders provides a fresh perspective on transforming the hiring process.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5445-1557-1
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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