Recruit or DieIf your company recruits new hires by going to college campuses, you need to read Recruit or Die, no matter how good you think you are at recruiting. If you have a formal recruiting program or even if you just attend job fairs looking for good new employees, this will still be a valuable book for you. The good advice begins in the Introduction, where the authors ask and answer the question: "Why Microsoft, McKinsey and Goldman Sachs?" They point out that all three of these favorite places for graduates to seek employment have a great brand. But other companies do, too. What sets these three apart from the pack is what they do. The authors identify four things. They won't settle for anyone other than exactly the recruits they want. That's strategy. Tactically, the authors tell you that contact is king, that you should sell your people first and your company second and that courtesy and class go a long way. The authors suggest that if you follow the kind of diligent process that the recruiting stars follow, you'll get great results. I think they're right. Years ago, when police departments suddenly found themselves facing massive retirements with few recruits showing up at the door, I designed recruiting programs for police departments. Almost everything I learned that's positive is here plus a ton of details that I wish I'd known at the time. You can cut your recruiting learning curve by reading Recruit or Die and applying its lessons. You'll learn to think, for example, about your company and the jobs you're offering from three perspectives. You'll ask yourself what the differences are between what you have, what recruits think you have, and what recruits want. That set of distinctions, alone, can help you sharpen your offerings and your process. Again and again you're reminded to build on your strengths. You're reminded to meet the questions and needs of the people you want to recruit. That's all good, but there are some things I wish were different. There's too much emphasis on "talent" as "people who've done well in school." Sometimes the young person who's dramatically improved performance late in school is a better choice for your company. One Fortune 200 company used that as part of its target recruit profile for years. There's also way too much emphasis on big schools, big companies and the east and west coasts. Scan the schools whose students are quoted in the book and you're hard pressed to find any schools in the Midwest or in the South below Chapel Hill. There are virtually no smaller company examples even though the lessons of the book are adaptable to small companies. And there are virtually no small schools represented either. The fact is that the bulk of college graduates will be something other than first-tier brains and come from something other than first-tier schools. They will go to work at companies of all sizes, all over the country. I wish the book reflected that reality better. But even if you're a small company recruiting at a small state school in a Midwestern state, there's a lot of good practical nuts-and-bolts advice in this book. You'll find a wealth of information on the operational details of attending job fairs, effective job postings, following up with recruits. The bottom line is that if you need to recruit, you need to read Recruit or Die. To see what other folks thought of this book, or to purchase it from Amazon, click here.
 This review first appeared in the Three Star Leadership Blog.
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