Elephants Before Unicorns

Emotionally Intelligent HR Strategies to Save Your Company

Caroline Stokes
foreword by Darrell West

How do you hire, onboard, and retain a great team? You start by viewing your company through the EQ lens to discover your organizational obstacles – the elephants standing in the way of your company’s success.

Headhunter and executive coach Caroline Stokes delivers a blend of recruiting and emotional intelligence strategies essential to helping you identify and tackle your elephants and acquire and retain key hires – those unicorns – that will help your company stand out, stay resilient, and drive growth.

Each chapter walks you through an organizational obstacle, gives you easy-to-implement advice, unpacks a key emotional intelligence factor, and offers questions for reflection so you can unlock your team’s ability to hire the best candidates for the job. You’ll also learn how to:

– Take a human-centric approach to your recruiting process
– Create an onboarding process that fits your company culture
– Deliver honest feedback with emotional intelligence and empathy
– Sharpen your negotiating skills so you can focus on what matters most to key hires
– Break your team’s addiction to busy and reclaim your creativity
– Find the root cause of your fake unicorns

Plus, get an inside look at how industry leaders are setting the pace for diversity, inclusion, and support to help you navigate today’s workplace landscape.

About the Author

Caroline Stokes is a human capital entrepreneur and the founder of FORWARD, an executive headhunting and coaching company designed for global innovation leaders. She is the host of The Emotionally Intelligent Recruiter” podcast and learning platform to help recruiters evolve in the AI age. Darrell West is the VP of Brookings and author of The Future of Work “