Top 5 books on recruitment strategies for HR professionals

Recruitment is a huge aspect of HR that involves forecasting human resource needs, planning an effective recruitment strategy, developing a comprehensive job analysis and description, procuring and screening candidate resumes, interviewing candidates and extending formal offers of employment. The full recruitment cycle can be intimidating, even to seasoned HR professionals.

1. Love’em or Lose’em: Getting Good People to Stay by Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans

Given that training costs makes it more expensive to hire new employees than to retain old ones, it is unsurprising for HR to aim towards strong engagement levels to prevent recruits from quitting. 26 A to Z strategies on means of engaging and retaining talents are presented in this book. Shockingly, the book asserts that every employee who quits can cost the company up to 200% of their annual salary to replace. This is definitely something to bear in mind when determining the budget allocation for recruitment.

2. Smart Staffing: How to Hire, Reward and Keep Top Employees for Your Growing Company by Wayne Outlaw

Outlaw proposes a lean and understandable guide to hiring and retaining talents in small businesses or entrepreneurial organizations. HR professionals who are handling staffing duties can see the overview of their efforts with this book. As a good primer on the entire work flow ranging from writing job advertisements to identifying good matches, this book is useful for HR professionals on all levels. With proven tools and things to note throughout the hiring process, you can find out how to make offers to candidates with a range of specific skills such as sales, customer service, and more. Basics such as important legal and tax forms, sample blank forms, sample interview and reference questions, handy checklists are all available. This is a definite page turner.

3. Social Media Recruitment: How to Successfully Integrate Social Media into Recruitment Strategy by Andy Headworth

Social media is increasingly becoming a more prominent recruitment channel. To stay updated with the evolving outlook, recruiting professionals are likely to make end-to-end social media recruitment strategies a key staple. The chapters are easily digestible, and teaches you how to implement an appropriate strategy, measuring returns on investment, HR policies and procedures required, big data analysis, incorporating technology in the recruitment process and more. If you are keen to have a sneak peak on how the HR landscape will morph in the future with social media at its forefront, or how social media can even play an integral role in internal collaboration and communication, this is the book to read.

4. The 7 Intuitive Laws of Employee Loyalty: Fascinating Truths About What It Takes to Create Truly Loyal and Engaged Employees by Heather R. Younger

Hiring managers should not neglect employee loyalty in mind during the recruitment process. A company’s bottom line is tied directly to HR. Employee loyalty, engagement and satisfaction are all crucial factors not to be dismissed by the company. Younger provides compelling evidence on why employee retention is important. Instead of being distracted with daily tasks, key fundamentals to empower employee allegiance and happiness should be prioritized.

Get implementable suggestions that can help you as a HR professional transform your leadership mindset, curate a healthy culture, differentiate employee experience and more. All these will help to attract talent, which will make the hiring process much more targeted and effective.

5. The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age by Reid Hoffman

This guide focuses on the trend of job hopping with minimal stigma attached in recent years. In order for both the employee and the employer to trust each other and work towards a common goal, both sides need to commit mutual investment and benefit. Instead of avoiding the elephant in the room, realistic conversations on loyalty should be in place instead. The alliance begins with managers acknowledging that good employees are likely to leave, and employees communicating their career aspirations with honesty. Demographic changes as well as global expansion and connectivity has drastically transformed employee attitudes. With this at the center of HR’s talent management strategy, recruitment and retention will be a breeze.

6. (BONUS!) Why Employees Don’t Do What They’re Supposed To and What You Can Do About It by Ferdinand Fournies

While this is not entirely about recruitment strategies, this book taps on a consolidated experience from 25, 000 managers surveyed that everyone can learn from. Fournies provides a list of proven methods to resolve top 10 situations in which employees do not perform ideally, including a detailed analysis of the causes and strategies to prevent recurrence in future. Employees may not know why, how or what to do. They may not agree with your methods, or think that something else is more important. In this case, Fournies suggests to get agreement that a problem exists, mutually discuss alternative solutions and agree upon a resolution, follow up to ensure that steps are done and to reinforce achievement. This results-oriented guidebook also talks about outsourcing, temporary workers, flexible time, telecommuting, technology, stress, and more. Recruiters can look forward to learning more about people-management skills as well. This book is all the more relevant today since the competition to attract and keep good employees is fiercer than ever.

To be productive and get work done efficiently, hiring effectively right from the start is important. If you have time after giving all six books above a shot, try reading Knock ’em Dead Hiring the Best by Martin Yate as well as Hire with Your Head by Lou Adler. Depending on your recruitment focus, you can also search for books on headhunting or executive search. Treat reading as a means of self-upgrade or a form of flexible training. Good luck!

(By Vanessa Ng)

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