Recommendation Intoxication How We Became Beguiled by an Unreliable Workplace Habit and What We Can Do About It

From baby boomers to millenials, CEO's to college graduates, few people have secured jobs without seeking letters of recommendation. But recommendations may not be the helpful selection tools they appear to be. In Recommendation Intoxication, author Erin Haggerty takes a provocative tour of real-life workplace stories, news stories and court cases revealing the connections between the recommendation tradition and today's most pressing workplace issues, including the economic recession, Bernard Madoff-style swindles, the explosive popularity of social media and workplace violence. Haggerty reveals the workplace's unhealthy dependency on recommendations, showing how the current recommendation system evolved and demonstrating its weaknesses. She offers a refreshing, if controversial, new model for employee selection without the use of recommendations to save the workplace time and money. "Today's critical issues- how we handle school-yard-style bullying, how we handle sex and power, how we lose thousands to scam artists, how we handle information- come into play in the workplace and emerge in our use of recommendations," Haggerty says. "Recommendation use can be costly, not only for individual people, but for the workplace itself. In a tough economy, it's critical for individuals and businesses to understand where the money is being lost." Business professionals and readers who are simply curious about the sparks that fly when a long-standing tradition collides with contemporary issues will recognize their own stories in the pages of this book. A must read that provides food for thought, insight and motivation for positive change.