A high school guidance counselor could write a better job hunting book then this! Dr. Mornell has so little to say he resorted to using a huge 14 pt type font so he could fill up 187 pages. His best answer for the standard "What are your five-year goals?" is " You can evaluate my work in three, six, or twelve months - and if it's excellent, we can decided how to best use my talents within the company." In my opinion this answer is vague and shows the job candidate has no ambition, no incentive to take ownership of his career, no plan and no sense of direction. If you are serious about finding a job, order "Knock 'em Dead 2001" by Martin Yale and get serious answers from a pro on really tough interview questions.

from my review of this book as one of the top 5 of 2000 in mbajungle.com: "Mornell's book is decidedly hands-on, full of advice for today's job hunter. The manager looking for great employees will also find this book a godsend during any candidate search. My favorite tip: Call a prospective employee's reference when you know he won't be there, and leave a voice-mail message asking the reference to call back only if the candidate is outstanding. If the employee is indeed above par, says Mornell, the majority of people will respond in a flash."

Dr. Pierre Mornell's book fed me valuable information about the hiring process. The book's easy writing and engaging design is made for a new internet-era. I loved the options I had: I could either breeze through the book and pick out pull-quotes and scan graphics or really curl up and read detailed ancetdotes and issues regarding the hiring "game". Writing was witty and entertaining, Mornell made it easy to absorb critical information in choosing a long lasting job.

I recommend Del Still's High Impact Hiring. It presents a method for behavior-based interviewing and candidate assessment. Dr. Mornell's book emphasizes a series of techniques and situations where you basically infer a candidate's suitability by your own interpretation. Certainly not based on fact. Behavior-based interviewing is based on asking and querying a candidate's past performance and description of how she did her job, and drilling down to gather facts and data, rather than infering qualities about the candidate based on responses to tests. In any case, every author of these books starts by describing the high cost of a hiring mistake. But that doesn't mean that what necessarily follows will prevent you from making a mistake. A book like this is entertaining and full of anecdotes, but does not provide a well-thought of method for avoiding mistakes.

The thing I like about the book is that it mentions several unconventional techniques. Unconventional techniques work better than conventional techniques since the candidate does not have a packaged response. My experience in interviewing and hiring scores of candidates is that conventional questions like 'What are your weaknesses?' usually tell you very little except good interview preparation.

The thing I disliked was that most of the methods employed do not appear to have been validated for a large enough sample. Rather the author seems to mention some anecdotes and use them as proofs. If I have some method that sounds good and works most of the time but that 'most' is only 55% it's reckless to use that method because it's little better than a crapshoot. It can eliminate lots of excellent candidates. However if 'most' is 95% of the time then that method is clearly very sound.

As a hiring manager I have myself developed all kinds of unconventional techniques but I have statistically validated them by using a large enough sample.

In the course of the year, many business books pass across my desk, and HIRING SMART is one of the most memorable of 1998/1999. With skill and wit, Dr. Mornell transforms the seemingly dry topic of hiring into a primer on how to read people and, in the process, invest in your company's most valuable resource-- its people. His thesis -- that a mistake in hiring can exact a toll on a company not necessarily apparent in the short run, but potentially devastating in the long run -- is developed through examples culled from his years as a hiring consultant to major corporations.Dr. Mornell breaks down the fundamentals of the hiring process into easy-to-grasp stages, and most importantly for those charged with hiring responsibilities, equips the reader with the information needed to immediately implement his 45 techniques. No person involved in the hiring process should be without this resource!

I should add that the last reader's take on the book is a classic example of missing the forest for the trees -- the admittedly unconventional interview questions that he/she mentions appear in the appendix, and, as most critical readers would realize, are meant only to inspire out-of-the-box thinking, and not to be simply regurgitated. Regardless, they make up one-tenth of one percent of the book's content -- dismiss it on such grounds if you like, but you'll be missing out on a book that Tom Peters, Stephen Covey, and George Gendron (Editor-in-Chief of Inc.Magazine) have called the best hiring title on the market.