Our best recruiting books 2024 list compiles our 19 favourite books for recruiters and talent acquisition professionals to read this year.
When I started my career in recruitment in 2005, there wasn’t much content out there for recruiters beyond a few classic sales books and a handful of blogs. It was about learning by doing, figuring it out for yourself, and overcoming rejection. While these are still essential to becoming a recruiter, there are some great books that can help shortcut some of the painful experiences most of us go through.
Here’s a compilation of the books I have found most valuable for recruiters to read, organized by the different areas in which recruiters spend their days.
Geoff Newman’s book provides a comprehensive guide to recruitment, helping businesses avoid unnecessary hiring with his Six Tests of Recruitment framework. It offers practical strategies to attract better applicants using proven channels and methods, ensuring quality candidates for every role.
Newman also emphasizes the importance of structured interviews, job simulations, and tools like the Delphi Technique to select the best candidate and avoid costly hiring mistakes. Tailored to businesses of all sizes, the book combines actionable insights with ethical recruitment practices for long-term success.
Over the past two or three years, the term “talent intelligence” has been thrown around without a clear understanding of its true meaning. That’s why I highly appreciate Toby Culshaw’s book, “Talent Intelligence: Use Business and People Data to Drive Organizational Performance,” which was published last year. The book delves into a comprehensive exploration of intelligence, explains the pivotal role of analytics in building a talent intelligence model, and emphasizes the crucial need for any recruiting function to cultivate TI capability.
Culshaw goes further into detail on how to establish a talent intelligence function and presents numerous case studies to illustrate his points. I strongly recommend getting your hands on a copy of this book to gain valuable insights.
The publication of “Digital Talent: Find, Recruit and Retain the People Your Business Needs in a World of Digital Transformation” by Matt Alder and Mervyn Dinnen has made a noteworthy impact on our professional field. As a respected podcaster and blogger, Matt Alder, along with Mervyn Dinnen, provides valuable insights into HR practices, employee development, and the profound influence of technology on all aspects of our work. Their book is highly recommended for anyone seeking a comprehensive understanding of these topics.
Dive into a refreshing read with “Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World” by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross. They explore finding and engaging creative, entrepreneurial candidates sought after by startups. While their ideas are unconventional and thought-provoking, their limited recruitment experience shows. Nonetheless, the book offers hidden gems and a unique perspective from both academic and practical viewpoints.
Unleash the power of “Thriving on Overload: The 5 Powers for Success in a World of Exponential Information” by Ross Dawson, an esteemed futurist hailing from Australia. Dawson guides us through the overwhelming realm of information overload, providing practical strategies to cope with the data deluge. Discover the secrets of purpose, effective information framing and filtering, and the art of synthesis. With each chapter accompanied by a worksheet or reference guide, this enlightening and useful book is a must-read for those seeking clarity in a world of information chaos.
This book covers how to leverage the Law of Familiarity to reduce prospecting friction and avoid rejection, how to use social selling to build relationships with prospects, a more effective script for cold calling and how to get more replies with cold emails. All of which a recruiter needs in her arsenal.
Today it’s harder than ever to get a candidate’s attention, so if you’re looking to inject some creative thinking into your recruiting efforts and take them to new heights in the process, then this book is for you. Like many books on this list it’s not a recruitment book, but one with principles which when applied to your craft will make you stand out.
In the age of employee reviews delivering a great candidate experience is critical in sourcing the best and keeping a reputation as a top employer. Using the 10 principles in Matt Wilkinson’s book about customer experience and applying them to the candidate experience will leave you in the top 1% of companies when it comes to candidate experience.
The landscape of recruiting is changing at a rapid pace. Different methods are needed to reach talent, and social media is a key channel. This book is great for anyone looking to overcome the fear and doubts they have regarding using social media for recruitment.
A staggering 46% of new hires fail in the first 18 months and out of these 89% are down to attitude and culture fit. Whereas skills levels can be changed through training, attitude is hard to shift. Hiring for Attitude combines valuable insights with relatable examples on how to assess someone’s attitude alongside their skills and experience.
Although the phrase “A-Player” makes me cringe, if we run with it for a second then this best-seller does propose to help ask the right interview questions to dramatically improve your ability to quickly distinguish an A Player from a B or C candidate. If you follow the steps outlined in this book they propose a 90% hiring success rate vs an industry standard of just 50%.
Recruitment doesn’t really have any celebrities, but if it did, Lou would be the Brad Pitt or George Clooney of recruiting (if you know what I mean). In Hire with Your Head Lou introduces the concept of “Performance-based hiring” which is hiring based on what the candidate needs to do to be successful in the job, versus relying on what the candidate has in terms of their qualifications. He argues that this approach is likely to attract top candidates, provide better hires, and contribute to reduced turnover over in the long term.
Made into a film starring Brad Pitt (not Lou Adler) and Jonah Hill, Moneyball follows the story of the Oakland A’s and their data driven approach to player selection. Sabermetrics, or moneyball, is the practice of crunching data in an effort to build a stronger and smarter team. This method holds that the skill of individuals aren’t what makes or breaks a team; in the long run, the goal is to make sure that each necessary skill is accounted for. The team will work like a clock, with each cog serving its own purpose (no matter how hopeless they may be at another area). Effective in recruitment? Possibly. Controversial? Definitely.
Written by Stanford professor Robert Sutton, the theme of this book is that bullying behaviour in the workplace worsens morale and productivity. A rule is suggested to screen out the toxic staff with the no asshole rule. To be honest, this isn’t one I’ve read but THAT title *clap clap clap emoji*
With increasing awareness that recruitment is becoming more like marketing than ever and standing out to attract the best talent is becoming more difficult. In Thinking Fast And Slow, Kahneman gives a deeper understanding of what drives human decision-making, which employers can use to get a real advantage in attracting and delighting the best talent.
By investing in this book, you’ll learn the stages of a sales call, a breakdown of classic closing techniques and their effectiveness, the right way to obtain commitment from buyers, how to uncover and develop needs, the SPIN framework (Situation, Problem, Implication and Needs-Payoff), and handling objections.
Influence explains the psychology of why people say “yes” and how to apply these understandings. Authored by Dr. Robert Cialdini, a seminal expert in the field of influence and persuasion, his thirty-five years of rigorous, evidence-based research along with a three-year program of study on what moves people to change behavior has resulted in this highly acclaimed book. Perfect for people in recruitment roles looking to persuade people to take job offers or attend interviews.
I first read How to Win Friends and Influence People around 10 years ago and it’s had a huge impact on me. A lot of what Carnegie proposes doesn’t seem all that profound, and can even seem like common sense. Simple things like “Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.”, “Smile”, “Become genuinely interested in other people.” and “Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.” Applying these principles in our interactions with people yields a better result for all concerned. Highly recommended!
We are all susceptible to biases that can lead us to make bad decisions that make us poorer, less healthy and less happy. And, as Thaler and Sunstein show, no choice is ever presented to us in a neutral way. By knowing how people think, we can make it easier for them to choose what is best for them, their families and society. Using dozens of eye-opening examples the authors demonstrate how to nudge us in the right directions, without restricting our freedom of choice. As recruiters we often make it too difficult for candidates to behave in the ways we’d like them too. Applying the principles discussed in ‘Nudge’ to your recruitment process should make things a little easier.
From the visionary head of Google’s innovative People Operations comes a groundbreaking inquiry into the philosophy of work and a blueprint for attracting the best talent to your business and ensuring that they succeed.
I loved this book. It correctly identifies the trends in emerging ‘exponential’ organisations (companies who can grow 10 times in an exponential way without the need to grow their assets in a linear way. Different from traditional companies growing X% per year) that can make companies and entire industries obsolete. It will prompt you to think about how to structure your organisation for rapid growth and hopefully inspire you to think of new ways to hire at scale.
A book that sings to your heart. Laloux’s take on organisational development was simply ground-breaking. His passionate beliefs in “soulful workplaces” full of authenticity, community, passion, and purpose are being prompted by “a new shift in consciousness” is infectious. Reading will provide you with plenty of hope that some day soon all businesses will become more than performance-optimised, mood-hoovering cubicle farms.
What are the jobs of the future? How many will there be? And who will have them? In Rise of the Robots, Ford details what machine intelligence and robotics can accomplish, and implores employers, scholars, and policymakers alike to face the implications. Are we facing a bleak dystopian future? After reading this, you’ll be smashing all your IOT devices and encouraging your friends to do the same…
Super easy to read (you’ll rattle through it in a 2-hour flight) but hugely engaging Rework shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in business. Rework talks about building a product and running a business, from inception to hiring and release, with a writing style that is as terse and no-nonsense as you can get. Funny, too.
What are you reading? Leave me a comment with your favourite recruitment books. 😉
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