7 Books to Start Your Human Resources Library
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Regardless of the stage you are in your career, everyone needs a handful of go-to work resources like books, websites, or resource guides. These are things that provide answers and information, like a dictionary or an atlas. They can help provide clarity and definition.
During my career, I’ve collected a library of work resources to help me sell ideas, maintain consistency, and get unstuck. For example, I’ve used some of my favorite books to calculate the cost-per-hire metric as a justification in selling senior management on changing the amount of an employee referral bonus. Another one served as a checklist of all the things to remember when I was looking for low-cost and no-cost perks to discuss during an employee focus group. And when I was stuck trying to design a training program, a book offered the definition of an A-B-C-D objective to help me refocus.
Whether you’re an HR professional or people manager, having a small HR library could become your go-to place for practical answers and solutions to help during challenges. Following are a few of the books in my work library. One of the reasons I’m listing these books is because they’ve withstood the test of time. So don’t feel that you need to have the latest edition. If you can find a used copy, it should work well.
“Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used” by Peter Block. Don’t let the title trick you into thinking this is a book for external consultants. While external consultants can use it, the book does a great job of developing internal consulting skills, such a key component to getting ideas heard.
“The Collaborative Organization: A Strategic Guide to Solving Your Internal Business Challenges Using Emerging Social and Collaborative Tools” by Jacob Morgan. The amount of work we do using collaboration has been steadily increasing over time. And we don’t spend nearly enough energy talking about what collaboration is – because it’s not always compromise and consensus building.
“Execution: The Disciple of Getting Things Done” by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. Many organizations and individuals are great at thinking up ideas then fail miserably at getting those ideas accomplished. Hence, the focus on execution. Bossidy and Charan’s book is focused on turning concepts into reality.
“Effective Succession Planning: Ensuring Leadership Continuity and Building Talent from Within” by William J. Rothwell. What I love about this book is the details. It’s filled with worksheets, assessments, etc. to get your planning process started. Even if your organization isn’t ready to commit to a full-blown succession plan, this book can help you take your first steps. And it’s there when you’re ready to take the journey further.
“How to Measure Human Resources Management” by Jac Fitz-Enz. This book tells you how to calculate everything HR. Now, that being said…you should not calculate everything. You should calculate what the business is prepared to pay attention to and act on. This book helps organizations calculate the right metrics.
“Predictive Analytics for Human Resources” by Jac Fitz-Enz & John R. Mattox II. If you like the writing style of “How to Measure Human Resource Management”, this book takes the conversation one step further with a discussion of analytics. It’s short – only 163 pages – so it’s not overwhelming.
PLUS! There’s one more book I’d like to add to the list. My latest book is “The SHRM Essential Guide to Talent Management”. I wrote this book to be the “go-to work resource” about talent management that I would want on my bookshelf. It provides key principles, models, definitions, and resources for every phase of the employee life cycle. Inside there’s a QR code so we can continue to provide online resources. I hope you’ll check it out.
We need to have a collection of resources that will help us get the answers we need during our career. When we’re busy, we don’t always have hours to research. Our HR library can give us the answers we need when we need them.
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