Employers are continually concerned about competing with each other to hire and hold the best employees they can find. Sometimes this competition becomes a frenzy, since the best people-qualified, experienced-are in high demand. It's essential, to compete well, to become an Employer of Choice. Ahlrichs, in her preface, observes that employers of choice "know that their 'choice' status is a significant achievement attained through consistent application of comprehensive strategies and tactics, as well as top-bottom organizational responsibility for retention.

This book is divided into three important sections: the big picture, recruiting, and retention. In Part One, How Employers of Choice are Winning the Talent Wars, the three chapters focus on Learning from Employers of Choice, Employer of Choice Foundation Strategies, and Building and Communicating a Top Employer Reputation. These writings present a good overview and insight into how Employers of Choice are operating. The orientation is to understand what these companies are doing, rather than a how-to approach. There is a lot to learn here.

The second part, Creative Strategies for Recruiting Top Talent, offers the readers four chapters, starting with How Employers of Choice are Redesigning Recruitment. The next chapter, Only You Will Do, has a little more instructional tone, but still primarily takes a third person view. This chapter concludes with a helpful Orientation Checklist. Chapter 6, Surfing for Recruiting Results Online does provide a healthy amount of how-to. While this field is changing almost daily, there is a lot of value here for the reader. Plenty of website domains are included. The last chapter in this section, Finding New Hires in Unlikely Places, is filled with good ideas. Here I felt a lot more of the how-to I was looking for.

The third section is entitled Comprehensive Strategies for Retaining Top Performers. Here the chapters are titled Understanding Why Employees Leave; Managing and Leading for Retention; Retrain, Develop, and Profit; and New Compensation and Benefits Strategies. There is a lot of value in these chapters-lots of ideas and perspectives. An exit interview guide will be helpful to those companies that have not taken advantage of this tool. The author seems to really hit her stride in providing ideas for readers in this section. The same holds for her conclusion, Becoming an Employer of Choice.

The book is well-written, filled with valuable information for the reader. The solid chapters are supplemented with a good resource guide and an index. I'd recommend this book for company owners, senior executives, and human resource professionals. As an ethical reviewer, I must share with you that I am co-author of "How to Become an Employer of Choice," a competing title in the same field. With that perspective, I would be quite comfortable recommending my clients read "Competing for Talent" as a supplement to my book.

An easily understood, quickly assimilated read. I read the entire 200-page book at one sitting, and shared ideas with the co-owners of my company right away. Usually, business management textbooks are full of jargon. Competing for talent is in plain english, and can be applied immediately.

This book offers "heads up" competitive intelligence that will work for any company or organization that wants to attract and retain a high quality workforce. I have seen bits and pieces of this information as we have worked with our own corporate culture. Having "Competing for Talent" in my hands five years ago would have saved us a great deal of research.

If you are looking for a great informative handbook to keep available at your desk in the office, I recommend How 9 Handbook. This is by far an excellent handbook to have. How 9 handbook gives you information on grammar usage, memos, reports, and business documents. The numbers listed on the front of the book, helps in finding the material you need easily. Clark & Clark hit a home run with this book. Also, if you need a little refresher course to enhance your skills, I recommend the How 9 Workbook. Try them both for yourself!! Every office worker should have one.

This book was required reading for a college course; however, had I found the book on my own I would have felt I struck gold! How 9 is the tool to keep right on your desk...allowing you to either learn or refresh skills from grammer and punctuation to proper format of an email correspondence or business letter.

I bought this book with a little bit of apprehension. As I don't know much about telecommunications I thought it was going to be too hard a reading. It came out pretty good. I can say that after reading it I got a good broad picture of most of the subjects treated.
Maybe the only inconvenience is that on its own it isn't enough to give a full understanding of the whole thing. I am already thinking of buying another book to further my knowledge. It also starts stright ahead with terms and names that will be clarified only later on in the book. Still I think it is a wonderfull book for the first step.

This book provided an excellent overview of the very broad range of telecommunications topics, including history, telephone technologies, data technologies, protocols, and standards; from twisted-pair copper through fiber-optic, cellular, and satellite. It is a very quick read and a great introduction to anyone new to telecommunications. Its coverage is very good considering the broad range of topics covered.

It does not, however, provide much depth on any one technology. Most topics, such as ATM, SONET, etc., are covered in one to four pages each. It was significantly less than I was looking for, but I am still impressed with how well Ms. Dodd covered such a broad range of topics. Anyone with a high school education, no telecom experience, and the motivation to do it, could read and learn from this book.

The Essential Guide to Telecommunications is probably one of the most well written and useful telecom books you will find..

Annabel Z. Dodd does a great job in capturing a snapshot of the current telecom industry, in all of its different flavors. You will find technical overviews of numerous telecom technologies and transport methods. These include business telephone systems, circuit switching, local and long distance networks, cable, wireless, cellular and PCS, paging, Voice Over IP, satellites, broadband services, DSL, T-1's, ISDN, ATM, and much, much more.

Dodd's writing is understandable and enjoyable to read. Even those with little or no technical knowledge should be able to understand the text. The author seems to assume that the reader has only a minimal amount of technical knowledge, but does know something about the telecom industry in general. This is the perfect book for telecom salespeople who want to learn more about the products and services they are selling, or for those who just want to keep up-to-date on the latest in telecom technology.

This book not only gives you explanations of how various telecom technologies work, but compares them side-by-side from both technical and practical (business) points of view.

Where and when does using a wireless network make sense? What type of fiber offers the most capacity? How many T-1's are in a T-3? You will find the answer to all of these questions and more in The Essential Guide to Telecommunications. I highly recommend it.