A recruiter advises readers to change the hiring process for corporate success.
In this debut business book, Lowisz, an experienced recruiter, lists common myths about hiring. He proposes that recruiters adopt a more targeted and personalized method in order to successfully build strong workforces and satisfy both employers and employees. The author argues that despite the development of LinkedIn and online job sites, recruiting has fundamentally changed little since it was developed in the 1940s and often does a poor job of filling employers’ needs. The book’s recommendations include instituting a more holistic approach to evaluating candidates—in Lowisz’s terms, assessing “head, heart, and skills” rather than the traditional appraisal of skills alone—and rethinking how hiring managers determine what they need in a new employee. Other suggestions include forging genuine connections in relevant fields, improving internal data management, and understanding the role of marketing in the recruiting process. Lowisz is clearly knowledgeable about the strengths and weaknesses of corporate recruiting, and the volume is an informative one although the text is fairly short. The work is at its strongest when giving concrete tips, such as examples of questions to ask in interviews and techniques for establishing credibility with communities of potential recruits (“Emphasize that you want to know more about them as a person and the next steps they foresee in their career”). The inclusion of the trademark symbol in the many references to “Results-Based Interviewing™” is excessive, but aside from that annoyance the writing is generally strong. Lowisz does not hesitate to indict his fellow recruiters as needed: “Recruiters are making decisions for people without talking to people, and they’re basing those decisions on the assumption that what matters to the candidate is money and title (extrinsic motivators), not intrinsic motivation”; “Looking at a resume or a LinkedIn profile for a few seconds is not enough.” In addition to this forthright examination of the mechanics of recruiting, the book leaves readers with a fair amount of actionable advice.
A solid, if brief, addition to business bookshelves that makes a compelling case for a new approach to employee recruiting.Pub Date: June 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0173-4
Page Count: 118
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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