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Foreword

by Gerald M. Weinberg

Adapted from the Foreword of Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. See below for copyright notice.

I've been consulting with high-tech firms for half a century, and I sure wish I had this book fifty years ago. I cannot even estimate the number of times I've seen hiring problems that would have been prevented by a manager reading Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds. At least once in every consulting assignment, a manager asks me a question that could be answered by a quick look-up in Johanna Rothman's contents or index. I know, because many times in the past decade, I've recommended Johanna as a hiring consultant to my own clients, and she's never failed to produce phenomenal results.

Hiring mistakes cost high-tech organizations literally billions of dollars each year, plus untold pain and anguish on the part of hiring managers, applicants, and employees. This superbly organized book distills Johanna's many years of experience doing just what its title implies—Hiring the Best. It nicely balances cases drawn from that experience with principles abstracted from dozens or hundreds of cases. Indeed, it would be a poor manager who couldn't pay for his or her own salary by applying these principles to an organization's hiring process.

There's only one thing I can find wrong with this great book: The author underestimates its value. She wrote it as a book for managers who are hiring, but that's too narrow an audience. It excludes several other large groups whose members should be reading it:

  1. Everyone who participates in the hiring process, such as coworkers who are called upon to interview job candidates
  2. Teachers and trainers who prepare students for jobs and need to understand the processes that will be, or should be, used to select them
  3. Any knowledge worker, techie, or nerd who is now, or will be in the future, applying for a job, or even for a promotion in his or her present job

But, in the end, Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds is a book for managers, and any high-tech manager who doesn't read it as a hiring manager may soon be reading it as an out-of-work applicant looking for a new job.

July 2004

Gerald M. Weinberg

Albuquerque, New Mexico

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: This excerpt from Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds [ISBN:0-932633-59-5] appears by permission of Dorset House Publishing. Copyright © 2004 by Johanna Rothman . All rights reserved. See http://www.dorsethouse.com/books/hire.html . The material contained in this file may be shared for noncommercial purposes only, nonexclusively, provided that this Copyright Notice always appears with it. This material may not be combined with advertisements, online or in print, without explicit permission from Dorset House Publishing. For copies of the printed book or for permissions, contact Dorset House Publishing, 1-800-342-6657, 212-620-4053, http://www.dorsethouse.com, info@dorsethouse.com, New: 3143 Broadway, Suite 2B, New York, NY 10027 USA. Additional rights limitations apply, as presented in the Legal Disclaimer posted at http://www.dorsethouse.com/legal.html.

 

 

 
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