 | Hiring For Attitude: A Revolutionary Approach To Recruiting And Selecting People With Both Tremendous Skills And Superb Attitude By Mark Murphy Average customer review:  (6 customer reviews) |
Product Description
In a recent groundbreaking study, the training firm Leadership IQ found that 46 percent of all new hires fail within their first 18 months. But here's the real shocker: 89 percent fail for attitudinal reasons-not skills. Most hiring managers are getting it wrong. Of course skills are important, but a particular skill set is about the easiest thing to test in an interview. Although much harder to recognize, attitude should be your number-one focus during the hiring process. Don't suffer from poor chemistry-even one employee with the wrong attitude could cause years of suffering for your other employees and customers. Whether you're hiring new employees, choosing existing employees for a new team, or upgrading your current talent pool, you need people with the right attitude! Attitude is what makes employees give 100 percent effort and turns customers into raving fans. Attitude sets your company apart from the competition.
- Amazon Sales Rank: #77458 in eBooks
- Published on: 2011-11-18
- Released on: 2011-11-18
- Format: Kindle eBook
- Number of items: 1
About the Author
Mark Murphy is the author of the bestsellers Hundred Percenters and HARD Goals. The founder and CEO of Leadership IQ, a top-rated provider of cutting-edge research and leadership training, Mark has personally provided guidance to more than 100,000 leaders from virtually every industry and half the Fortune 500. His public leadership seminars, custom corporate training, and online training programs have yielded remarkable results for companies including Microsoft, IBM, GE, MasterCard, Merck, AstraZeneca, MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Johns Hopkins.
Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
A radical rethink of the hiring process
By John Gibbs
Virtually every one of the standard approaches to selecting the right people for an organization to excel is dead wrong, according to Mark Murphy in this book. Most executives try to hire the most technically competent people, whereas the vast majority of the roughly half of all new hires who fail within 18 months fail for reasons of attitude, not for lack of skill.
The book goes on to provide a range of useful advice on hiring people. An important first step is identifying the unique factors of your organization's culture that determine whether or not a prospective employee is a good cultural fit, and what attitudes a prospective employee needs to possess in order to succeed within that culture. Most people find it very difficult to define such cultural issues, but the author provides a relatively simple way to do so.
Other advice given in the book includes:
* Why standard interview questions do not assess attitude
* How to create interview questions that will reveal whether someone's attitude is right for you
* How to create a set of answer guidelines allowing you to grade a candidate's attitude
* Why most job advertisements are poorly worded, and how you can do better
* The most effective ways of recruiting people who will perform well within the context of your organizational culture
Most people who have experience in recruiting new staff find the process a bit of a lottery; it seems impossible to tell in advance whether a candidate is going to turn into a high performer, and hiring decisions are often based on gut feelings that turn out to be sadly misplaced. After reading this book I am not sure whether the author has provided the complete solution, but I do find his recommendations compelling, and I fully intend to try them out next time I am involved in recruiting.
In my opinion this is an excellent book, with provocative and valuable content in every chapter. If the author is right, then the recruiting practices of the vast majority of businesses are seriously in need of an overhaul. I highly recommend the book to executives, HR professionals and anyone who has responsibility for hiring staff.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.An Interviewing Masterclass
By Steve Amoia
"You'll notice that a lack of skills or technical competence only accounted for 11 percent of new-hire failures. When a new hire was wrong for a company it was due to attitude, not lack of skills... Our study showed that somebody was a bad hire for attitudinal reasons 89 percent of the time." Mark Murphy, page xii.
The author's introductory quote and supporting research may surprise you; however, the candidate trait of "attitude" has rarely been emphasized by hiring authorities or career experts. Until now. This book will show you a much-needed contrarian perspective. You will learn how to make better decisions for yourself, clients or organizations regardless if you are a job candidate or hiring authority. The "soft" skill of attitude has rarely been the focus of hiring decisions over the more "hard" skills such as educational pedigree, actual job experience and technical proficiency. Mr. Murphy paves an important road in this discussion. Especially as the world has become more flat, and job candidates, and those who recruit or hire them, need something extra to flourish in a global economy.
Organized Format with Common-Sense Advice
There is a helpful introduction, seven chapters, a brief conclusion along with a detailed index. This is a relatively short book (209 pages) which keeps you focused on its excellent content. The author's writing style is informative and entertaining. Most of all, he describes common-sense scenarios and provides real-life examples. From an amusing hiring strategy at Southwest Airlines (the Brown Shorts which serve as reference point throughout the book), to a more serious one at LifeGift (a company that recovers organs and tissue for those who need transplants), which demonstrates a proper balance.
An Interviewing Masterclass
One of the most salient features of this book was the emphasis on how to ask questions that elicit beneficial responses. Most of us have been on both sides of the hiring equation, and have endured or were asked the wrong questions of little predictive quality. Many recruiters have not been taught how to ask questions that save their firms/clients from making an expensive hiring mistake. Mr. Murphy teaches you what to ask and what to avoid. More importantly, how to ask open-ended questions that draw out your subject instead of leading ones that produce scripted responses.
You will become a better interviewer after reading this book because the author makes you analyze the purpose behind your questions: "One of the most fundamental tests of the effectiveness of an interview question is the extent to which it helps differentiate between high and low performers. Any interview question that doesn't distinguish between these two groups is the equivalent of giving a college exam on which every student automatically scores an A." Page 43
Notable Quotes
"My company, Leadership IQ, tracked 20,000 new hires over a three-year period. We found that 46 percent of new hires failed in one way or another, 35 percent became middle performers, and only 19 percent went on to become legitimate high performers." Page 12
"Don't ask questions you can't fix." Page 32
"The purpose of an interview isn't to test recitation skills, but rather to accurately reveal how well a person will perform when working for you. 'Tell me about yourself,' 'what are your strengths?' and 'what are your weaknesses?' are worthless, think about the answers you usually get when you ask an applicant a question such as 'So tell me about yourself...' " Page 41
"Behavioral questions are only effective when they prompt a response that reveals the truth about both weaknesses and strengths." Page 44
"Problem-solver personalities simply can't bring themselves to think about a situation as a total failure. They need to keep trying and eventually solve it or at least salvage some useful lesson. And you will generally hear that underlying interpretation in the responses problem solvers provide, just as you'll hear the opposite in the answers from the problem bringers." Page 73
"... The single biggest reason that new hires fail is a lack of coachability." Page 80
"The high performer answers contain roughly 60 percent more first person pronouns (I, me, we) than answers given by low performers... Answers from high performers use 40 percent more past tense than answers from low performers... Low performers answers contain about 25 percent more positive emotions (happy, thrilled, excited) than low performer answers." Pages 127-131
"Most job ads sound more like the instruction manual to a VCR than they do a compelling sales pitch. And that's the problem. The high performers you want all have better opportunities... Most people who are going to notice that ad are the folks you don't want. The people sitting around, reading generic job ads, and responding to any and all with an e-mail blast of their resume." Page 148
"Imagine you're out on a date. Now, let's say you really want to win that date over... How do you think you should start out, by talking about yourself or by talking about your date? Almost everyone answers the question correctly. Of course, you talk about your date. But here's the shocker. In the recruitment world, another place you want to quickly capture the position attention of another person, almost everybody gets it wrong." Page 168
"According to our Global Talent Management Survey, employee referrals are the best source for hiring high performers." Page 177
It's All About Attitude
This book teaches many valuable lessons for hiring authorities, job applicants, recruiters and anyone who wants to elevate their personal or professional brand. As the author concisely ended the book, "It's about how to select for attitude, interview for attitude, recruit for attitude, assess peoples' attitude, and even teach attitude." Page 207
Please Note
A McGraw-Hill representative contacted me and requested a review. I am not obligated to provide a positive analysis and was encouraged to write an objective review.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.With rare exception, attitude determines altitude
By Robert Morris
Long ago, I became convinced that most human limits are self-imposed. This is what Henry Ford had in mind when observing, "Whether you think you can or think you can't, you're probably right." In this volume, Mark Murphy is convinced that attitude usually determines how much a person can increase her or his "altitude" (i.e. how high one can ascend to higher levels of personal growth, professional development, performance improvement). As he explains in the Introduction to this book, "Most new hires do not fail on the job due to a lack of skill. My company, Leadership IQ, tracked 20,000 new hires over a three-year period. Within the first 18 months, 46 percent of them failed (got fired, received poor performance reviews, or were written up). And as bad as that sounds, it's pretty consistent with other studies over the years and thus not too shocking."
He goes on to point out, "What is shocking, though, is why those people failed. We categorized and distilled the top five reasons why new hires failed and found these results [i.e. deficiency]:
1. Coachability (26%)
2. Emotional Intelligence (23%)
3. Motivation (17%)
4. Temperament (15%)
5. Technical Competence (11%)"
Murphy wrote this book primarily to help those who read it "to select the high performers that will fit with and excel in [the reader's] unique culture." He does expect his readers to replace "the traditional, and generally failed approaches to hiring" with what he recommends. That will require them to make various changes ("both mental and physical") as they work their way through the narrative.
There are frequent references to a metaphor, "Brown Shorts," throughout the book whose meaning and significance Murphy explains as "the unique attitudinal characteristics that make your company different from all others. They are a list of the key attitudes that define your best people, but they also describe the characteristics of the people who aren't making it. When you ask your candidates to `wear' your Brown Shorts, you're going to learn a lot from how they respond." All this is explain thoroughly in the book, and I agree with Murphy that Brown Shirts "is a crazy name" but its relevance to his key points is direct and substantial.
I was especially interested in what he has to say about two categories of candidates that he discusses: Bless Their Hearts ("great attitudes but lousy skills"), and Talented Terrors (their exact opposite). Most candidates possess a combination of attributes of both in varying proportions. Murphy explains what desired candidates possess and offers a quick three-part test to assess whether or not sufficient Behavioral Specificity is being obtained during a "Brown Shorts Discovery" interview. In fact, he provides a wealth of information, insights, and recommendations. Whenever doing so, he reiterates two key points: (1) that each culture is unique and (2) that the selection process should therefore seek the best fit of candidate with the given culture.
There is one other portion of Murphy's material that also needs to be noted: Word Pictures, a technique that he thoroughly explains in Chapter 7. Briefly, "it can be used to turn what you learned in Hiring for Attitude into a method for teaching attitude in orientations and onboarding and as a foundation of performance appraisal, coaching discussions, and so much more." Details are best revealed in context. However, I feel comfortable when suggesting that mastering the skills of using Word Pictures effectively will indeed provide the
"revolutionary approach" to which the book's subtitle refers. The potential applications of that approach are almost unlimited.
Although Murphy's focus is primarily on the hiring process, I think the same core values and principles that guide and inform that process should serve as the foundation of an organization's HR policies and procedures. Ultimately, the success of recruiting, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, and talent management/ development depends almost entirely on first understanding - I mean REALLY understanding - one's culture and its unique defining characteristics.
http://astore.amazon.com/amazon-book-books-20/detail/B005NASJRS
| To Get Uninterrupted Daily Article(s) / Review(s) Updates; Kindly Subscribe To This BlogSpot:- http://ZiaullahKhan.Blogspot.com/ Via "RSS Feed" Or " Email Subscription" Or "Knowledge Center Yahoo Group". | ||
| Amazon Magazine Subscriptions | Amazon Books | Amazon Kindle Store |
| Amazon Everyday Low Prices, Sales, Deals, Bargains, Discounts, Best-Sellers, Gifts, Household Consumer Products | ||
No comments:
Post a Comment