One of the most important things for any entrepreneur or leader is to recruit, develop, and retain the best possible team.

Recruiting

  • Practical Thoughts Recruiting and Interviewing. In this article, I outline our approach to recruiting. The steps we go through, what we look after, and how we test for that.
  • Smart, Geoff: Who: The A Method for Hiring. Before reading this book, I often found it meaningless to go through people’s resumes. It didn’t tell me much about them – candidates usually prepare well for this and give a polished answer with a lot of colour on the success stories, but limited inside into what actually happened. Smart has a few tips on different approaches that have helped tremendously.
  • Thank You Note From Your Future Self. In this post, I highlight some of the challenges in recruiting for high-growth companies. You need people faster than you can identify specific roles and that leads to a number of challenges. If you don’t solve these, you will not grow as fast as you otherwise could.
  • Buckingham: Now, Discover Your Strengths. As can be seen in my recruiting guide above, we use a platform built on the StrengthsFinder framework. Buckingham’s book describes many of these talents very well.

Building a setup for recruiting and development

  • Hoffman: The Alliance. This is a fantastic book about the relationship you must develop to the team around you. People no longer join a company and stay there until they retire. The relationship should reflect this “new” reality.
  • Paul English: Hiring Religion (PaulEnglish.com). This article highlights a number of the key traits of organizations that are geared for recruiting. Excellent read.
  • Ran Charan: The Leadership Pipeline. A great framework for the development of talents from individual contributors to CEOs. The framework explains well the different developmental jumps talents must make along the way.