A recruiter’s book list: Keeping skills and knowledge up to date

Keeping on top of your game with the latest thinking

Continual Professional Development (CPD) is of course an essential element of continuing success for people in many jobs. For practitioners of recruitment, updating the knowledge and skills that support your core skills is a bit like eating your own dogfood – there is a need to practice what you preach.

There are a couple of usual ways to do this:

• Participating in organised CPD programs that may use group sessions, one-2-one tuition and remote methods to provide a structured approach to updating skills and knowledge
• Conducting independent activity to stay on top of the latest thinking by reading books including general business ‘bibles’, that inform on wider skills as well as recruitment

Of course, the former is suited to those who prefer directed learning, taught by a tutor. However, the nature of recruitment is really geared to those who are self-starters, so the latter really fits with the mindset of many.

Structured programs may have to be organised and run over a period of time, meaning that there may be periods when skills lag behind. Researching your own CPD materials is something that recruiters can do on a continual basis, ensuring they always remain up to date.

Here, culled from around the internet, we have provided a reading list of books to help recruiters like you stay on top of your game. We have included some ‘golden oldies’, some best sellers from more recent years, and some contemporary reads.

The list is organised into key topics that help address the issues of modern recruitment. In the wake of the pandemic, there is an enormous focus on mental health and well-being you may find the psychology section especially useful.

Interpersonal and business skills

• How to Win Friends and Influence People
  The title is much adopted term in popular culture core advice on human interaction is still fully applicable today as it was in 1936 – quite simply one of the bestselling books of all time!
• Teams Unleashed
  For team leaders or team participants, this book shows how to get group working done most effectively.
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, Jim Collins
  Why some companies are able to ascend to the next level while for others it remains unreachable.

Equality, race, gender & disability issues

• Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race
  Helps to gain a greater understanding and tackle embedded racism.
• The Diversity Bonus
  Explores the reasoning behind the assertion that diversity is part of the recipe for making businesses more successful.
• The Fix: How to Overcome the Invisible Barriers Holding Women Back
  Tackling the invisible gender barriers and bias that exist in almost every workplace.

Psychology

• The Happiness Trap
  The use of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to free yourself from depression, anxiety and insecurity, and build a rich and meaningful life.
• The Chimp Paradox
  Simple techniques to help control emotional impulses leading to success at work and a more harmonious home life.

Recruitment, technology and social media

• Mastering the Hire
  12 strategies to assist in hiring perfect employees.
• Social Media Recruitment: How to Successfully Integrate Social Media into Recruitment Strategy
  Everything you wanted to know about using social media in recruiting but didn’t know how to ask!
• The Robot-Proof Recruiter: A Survival Guide for Recruitment and Sourcing Professionals
  You could read this as a survival guide in the face of the onslaught of technology. It’s better to it see in the context that it helps recruiters to maximise their value by concentrating on the recruitment skills that technology cannot do or to which it isn’t suited.
• Recruiting in the Age of Googlization
  Understanding people analytics and using data to optimize your recruitment.

Recruitment tech that complements the recruiter skill set from ETZ

Technology is complementary to the skills and expertise of recruitment agency staff. Maximise the value of your people by using ETZ timesheet, invoicing and payment system to free up you agency back office staff to do more important things.

To find out more about how we simplify the complexity of RecTech for agencies like yours, call us on 0800 311 2266 or book a demo.