A friend has published another brilliant book to much acclaim.  Selecting the Best: Fostering a Workforce Driven by Values for Lasting Success, (Rock’s Mills Press, April 23, 2025) It’s worth adding it to your collections.

A friend has published another brilliant book to much acclaim.  It’s worth adding it to your collections.

Decades of experience and wisdom in this book.

An Overview of: Selecting the Best: Fostering a Workforce Driven by Values for Lasting Success

David S. Cohen’s Selecting the Best: Fostering a Workforce Driven by Values for Lasting Success argues that hiring should be treated as a business decision with measurable financial implications rather than an administrative task. The book makes a compelling case for structured behavioral interviews as the most effective way to predict job performance, emphasizing the importance of hiring based on company values rather than rigid skill sets or academic credentials.

What sets Cohen’s book apart from other hiring literature is its rejection of one-size-fits-all best practices, favoring a tailored, values-driven approach. While many hiring books advocate for psychometric assessments and hiring based on degrees, years of experience and GPAs, Cohen critiques these methods for their biases and limited predictive validity. Instead, he promotes a rigorous, structured interview process that assesses candidates based on real-world behaviors and alignment with a company’s authentic values. Ultimately, Selecting the Best provides a research-backed, financially sound framework for making more effective and ethical hiring decisions.

The book presents compelling case studies demonstrating the significant financial impact of effective hiring practices. For example, Michelin Canada implemented a structured behavioral competency-based hiring process to address high turnover among entry-level engineers. Before the change, the company faced a 49% turnover rate, costing over $2.6 million in lost talent and rehiring expenses. After adopting a structured interview approach aligned with company values, turnover dropped to just 5%, saving the company millions in replacement costs and improving operational efficiency. Similarly, a structured hiring process at Tastyfood reduced executive turnover from 49% to 10%, directly improving leadership stability and business performance. These examples illustrate that hiring is not merely an HR function but a critical business activity that affects financial performance, innovation, and competitive advantage.

The M&G study highlights the consequences of making values-based hiring decisions and the transformative impact of structured behavioral interviews. The story takes the reader from the inception of the M&G values and the articulation of the value behaviors to the application of hiring their first employees.

The book explains the impact of behavioral interviewing on hiring team members and the longer-term impact of hiring to fit values for motivation, morale, and retention.

Key Points of the Book:

1. Myths in Hiring

2. Best Practices vs. Contextual Adaptation

3. Hiring as a Business Decision

4. The Importance of Structured Behavioral Interviews

5. Debunking the Myth of Hiring for Culture Fit

6. Critique of Psychometric Testing

7. Financial Impact of Poor Hiring Decisions

8. The Reality of Hiring A-Players

9. Beyond Degrees and GPAs

10. Social Media & Hiring

How This Book Differs from Other

An Overview of: Selecting the Best: Fostering a Workforce Driven by Values for Lasting Success Compared to other books on behavioral interviewing and hiring, Cohen’s work challenges widely accepted practices such as hiring only top performers or relying heavily on psychometric testing. Many hiring books emphasize best practices, but Cohen argues that hiring strategies must be customized to fit each organization’s unique needs. He also strongly emphasizes hiring for values rather than traditional notions of culture fit, which differs from conventional perspectives that often link cultural fit to personality and background similarities.

Contradictions with Other Hiring Books:

• Many hiring books emphasize “best practices,” while Cohen argues that hiring should be customized rather than based on generic templates.

• Some books, such as those by John Sullivan, promote hiring only A-players, whereas Cohen highlights the downsides of this approach, such as team dysfunction and cost inefficiencies.

• The book contradicts works that strongly advocate for psychometric testing by arguing that such assessments can be misleading and discriminatory.

• While some literature discourages hiring for culture fit due to diversity concerns, Cohen reframes culture fit as alignment with values rather than personality or background.

Selecting the Best: Fostering a Workforce Driven by Values for Lasting Success, (Rock’s Mills Press, April 23, 2025)
The Talent Edge: A Behavioral Approach to Hiring, Developing, and Keeping Top Performers (John Wiley and Sons, August 2001)
Inside the Box: Leading With Corporate Values to Drive Sustained Business Success (Jossey-Bass September 2006)