Hiring the Best and the Brightest: A Roadmap to MBA Recruiting

by Sherrie Gong Taguchi

This text offers a strategic approach to building a successful MBA hiring programme or revitalizing an old one. This comprehensive, practical guide takes a look at how some of the best comapnies do it... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814406351
• ISBN13: 9780814406359
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: AMACOM/American Management Association
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Comprehensive Guide Fills a Gap

As this review is written, America is still in a recession. Layoffs abound. Hiring is down or frozen at most companies. Employers who recruited on college campuses have cancelled the offers made to graduating students. Employers have hunkered down for a tight period that may last a few months or, as some pessimists forecast, for years.While campus recruiting is down dramatically, wise employers will still visit top colleges and universities looking for the best and the brightest. If they're just going to hire a few people, it makes sense to go for the cream of the crop. The question becomes just how to do this kind of specialized recruiting in an employment market that was highly competitive, then became quiet, but that will pick up again. Hiring top MBAs-and other highly desirable candidates-is now a strategic issue. To maintain a competitive advantage now and later when the pace picks up again, it's essential to gain the knowledge and insight that fosters high performance and stunning results. There hasn't been much written about this specialized field. Now there's a book that will teach you how. Whether you're a neophyte at this kind of recruiting or an old hand, you will learn from Taguchi.Some things change; some remain the same. Taguchi presents a wide range of accepted protocols that have not-and will not-change. All of these elements are important for recruiters to fully understand if they are to gain the needed cooperation and support of the career professionals at their targeted schools. One thing that is changing is that "compensation may have won out in the past, but nowadays it takes a whole lot more to attract and keep top talent." This is a job that must be done well, since so much is riding on your success. Reading this book, I learned that there are four phases to MBA recruiting: up-front preparation, pre-recruitment, interviews, and second rounds and offers. Cutting corners won't work; each of these phases must be handled carefully. Each of these phases is explained for the reader in chapters 3, 4, 5, and 7. Chapter 6? Page after page of lessons learned by 15 experienced recruiters, a treasure in itself. This author has done her homework. The chapter on Best Practices and Worst Mistakes brings out more lessons to learn from. Chapter 10 is by far the largest: School Profiles of the Top Twenty Picks. For each school, the book presents an overview of the MBA program and what degrees are granted. On campus recruiting at that institution is explained, with advice, followed by a school-specific list of dos and don'ts. Other recruiting options and key go-to people are included. While this is incredibly valuable information that will save recruiters a considerable amount of time, the personal resources could become outdated quickly. Hint: use this information now!Other helpful chapters cover advice for established companies and for start-ups. The chapter on recruiting on the fly may be particularly valuable if you simply don't have time

How to run a dynamic MBA recruiting program

Sherrie Gong Taguchi's Hiring The Best And The Brightest provides instructions on MBA recruiting methods. Managers are advised not to just look for top new MBA talent, but to run a dynamic MBA recruiting program. This tells how the most successful companies find and develop MBA talents.

A gem of practical wisdom

Ms. Taguchi has clearly done her homework and come up with a practical and thought provoking gem. What comes through clearly is that she knows her stuff, having experienced MBA recruiting from multiple angles including corporate HR and MBA career management director at Stanford. I approached this book with modest expectations. As an MBA with years of experience in the career development and HR fields, and having hired MBAs as CEO of my own software company, I didn't expect to learn much that was new from this book. I was more interested in the book as something to refer others to. Ms. Taguchi's intelligence and pragmatic expertise jumps off the page from the very beginning and fills the book with many practical ideas that even the most experienced in the field would find thought provoking.The book is nicely organized and does not assume anything about it reader. It is brilliant in covering all the basics in recruiting with precision and insight to appeal to both long time recruiters and new team managers. It first covers the four major phases of MBA recruiting, from preparation, to pre-recruiting, interviews, second rounds, and offers. An extremely useful section is best practices and worst mistakes. As I was reading them I couldn't help but catch many of the mistakes I had made myself and wonder how much time and money I would have saved if I had read this book at the time I was running my company. I could see how the powerful lessons of this section could become a classic foundation for training recruiting and hiring managers.Ms. Taguchi then proceeds to cover profiles of top 20 schools. I checked my own school for curiosity and discovered she had nailed it on the head. The information is quite specific on each school, including top 3 Dos and Don'ts for that school. A particularly brilliant section of this book is the chapters covering the specific perspective of established as opposed to smaller companies. The strengths and weaknesses of each are analyzed from the perspective of the cultural upheaval that recruiting has undergone in the post-dot-com period. This analysis should help the reader in coming up with an effective positioning, pitch, and strategy that would appeal to the psychology of today's skittish MBA. An entire chapter is dedicated to helping you leverage your own website and other commercial sites for recruiting. It is a very comprehensive and thorough section. The final chapter reminds us all of how important it is to spend some effort in retaining the great talent which we have gone through such length to hire. This is a critical lesson which is too often ignored, relegating retention to others in the company. Ms. Taguchi wisely implies that as recruiting and hiring managers we would be in the best position to ensure that our efforts result in a more lasting impact in our companies. Her advice, once again, is quite practical.In short, my hat is off to Ms. Taguchi for a job well done. This is without a do

Hiring The Best

This book is full of great ideas on recruiting. However, it is much more than that. I was pleasantly surprised by the depth of valuable HR info and the people issues; so important for managers. I will use it as I recruit employees and associates for my Practice. Enduring stuff for those who want to manage and mentor others.I will also recommend this book to friends and family as a tool for them to help understand the hiring process as they seek to advance their career.

Hiring the Best and the Brightest : Review

I’m new to HR and work with lots of start up and big companies. I heard about 'Hiring the Best' from a senior HR mentor. This book is a fantastic reference for me. I'll put the ideas into action. The model job, descriptions, interviewing techniques and training ideas, the short 'course' on compensation packages, and best e-cruiting web sites are a goldmine of info