Interviewing People - Softcover

Most guidebooks to interviewing job candidates get so bogged down in psychobabble about "personality types" and "character profiles" that they have you terrified that you're going to pick an ax murderer accidentally by the time you hire someone. This short-'n'-sweet 72-page guide cuts out the jargon, and shows you how to manage the position-filling process in three key stages: preparing for interviews (writing the job description and ad, deciding how to recruit, assessing résumés, selecting interviewees and arranging interviews, preparing questions, and honing your listening skills), conducting interviews (evaluating an applicant, guiding the interview, reading body language, and opening and closing the right way), and analyzing interviews (recording impressions, making a shortlist and conducting call-back interviews, matching an applicant to a job, and making a final offer). Throughout, boxed tips; sample job descriptions, résumés and formal offers; handy checklists; and easy-to-follow and adaptable flow charts clarify the interviewing process, and bring it to life. Granted, if you're looking for very specific or in-depth guidance, you might find this book too cursory and general in its approach. But, if you're looking for a thumbnail guide to the basics, it'll do just fine.

It's worth mentioning that the book is part of the "Essential Managers" series by reference publisher Dorling-Kindersley--a series comprising 20 itty-bitty books on business and career topics that range from communication, leadership, and decision-making to the management of time, budgets, change, meetings, people, projects, and teams. Combining the talent of the "For Dummies" book series for breaking down a lot of information into bite-sized bits and sidebars with Dorling-Kindersley's signature design style of crisp, classy graphics on a gleaming white backdrop, the books don't represent the cutting edge of business thinking or reflect necessarily any unique individual perspective. Instead, it's as if someone had collated the best general thinking on these 20 topics, and rolled them out into 72 brightly designed and easy-to-read pages--studded along the way with boxed tips, color shots of a multiracial cast of "coworkers" animatedly hashing through the workplace issues of the day, and, on the last few pages of each volume, a self-test of one's skills in the topic at hand. Again, they're not for anyone who's looking for more in-depth or focused help on any of the covered subjects, but they're perfect as a quick general-interest reference; and, let's face it, they're so damn cute, and look so smart in a neat little stack or row, that probably you'll want to buy a whole bunch to give as gifts to your entire staff or department. --Timothy Murphy

Tim Hindle is founder of the London-based business language consultancy, Working Words, which helps international companies to compose material in English and communicate their messages clearly to their intended audiences. A regular business writer, Tim Hindle has been a contributor to The Economist since 1979 and was editor of EuroBusiness from 1994 to 1999. As editorial consultant and author, he has produced a number of titles including Pocket Manager, Pocket MBA and Pocket Finance, and a biography of Asil Nadir, The Sultan of Berkeley Square.