A strong, substantive argument for redefining how companies recruit employees.
Two branding experts suggest how companies can attract the most appropriate employees.
Adams and Marshall put forth a bold strategy for smarter hiring: They recommend “leaning into the harsh realities of your organization, being open to proactively going out of your way to deter people from joining your organization, and even provoking some existing employees to rethink their career options.” Toward that end, they urge employers to craft “a meaningful employee value proposition (EVP) based on a mutual value exchange that we call the Give and Get.” That strategy may feel unsettling to corporate conventionalists, but the authors argue convincingly that an authentic EVP can work as a filter “to weed out people who are unsuitable,” and their book is essentially a guide to doing that. The authors begin by explaining the “Give and Get” framework and lucidly discussing what makes employees happy, including working for a “purpose-led” company. Then comes a recipe for building a “Give and Get” proposition founded on five ingredients, such as the “vulnerability” and “relevant strength” of the organization, each described in detail. To create an EVP, the authors suggest a process that includes doing both internal research into the company’s attributes and employee opinions and external research that can help with developing a marketplace “persona,” defined as “an archetypal representation of each audience segment.” Adams, the co-author of Getting Goosebumps (2018), and debut author Marshall provide extensive guidance, including steps and checklists, for doing that research. Especially engaging is their discussion of using storytelling to highlight brand attributes; the authors cover the “essential building blocks” for a solid employer brand story and suggest techniques to improve corporate storytelling. Also useful is a list of items that make up the “employer brand tool kit,” such as “branded swag” for events. Adams and Marshall offer a clear, well-conceived, and comprehensive plan for implementing their “Give and Get” methodology; the real question is whether corporate managers will share their enthusiasm for innovative change.
A strong, substantive argument for redefining how companies recruit employees.Pub Date: March 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0706-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houndstooth Press
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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