Tag Archives: recruitment

The Bizarre World of Recruitment

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Help WanterSelect­ing new people or can be a stress­ful exper­i­ence. Many organ­isa­tions main­tain extens­ive pro­ced­ures to try to find the right per­son for the right job or even hire spe­cial­ised con­sult­ants to do the job for them. In inter­views strange ques­tions are asked that no nor­mal per­son would ever dare to ask any­one: “What are your three trade­marks?”, “What are your biggest mis­takes?” or “What is the mean­ing of life” and “What is the air­speed velo­city of a laden swal­low?”. Some even resort to pseudo-scientific per­son­al­ity test­ing to throw some insights into these strangers across the table.

The prob­lem recruit­ers have is that it is a lot easier to not hire someone than to fire them later, which leads to com­plic­ated pro­cesses to reduce this risk. Job inter­views are thus a bizarre envir­on­ment that often bares no resemb­lance to a real pro­fes­sional situ­ation. The fear of tak­ing a risk with a per­son and a lack of self-confidence in their own people skills motiv­ates recruit­ers to resort to pseudo-scientific tools and hid­ing behind bizarre inter­view­ing techniques.

Every com­pany gets the employ­ees they deserve.

Spe­cially in a cus­tomer ser­vice related pos­i­tion a person’s abil­ity to smile and under­stand cus­tom­ers is more import­ant than the res­ults in a per­son­al­ity test or the answer to weird ques­tion­ing. Ask­ing strange ques­tions only motiv­ates the applic­ant to bend the truth. Recruit­ment meth­ods should as much as pos­sible be nor­mal human inter­ac­tion as ulti­mately every com­pany gets the employ­ees they deserve.

What is your strangest job inter­view moment, as a recruiter or applic­ant? Share your thoughts with us in the box below.

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Customer complaints are a gift

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One Monday morn­ing Jeff came to work, pre­par­ing for a new week on the phone and help­ing cus­tom­ers. His day way rudely inter­rup­ted when his man­ager summoned him and scol­ded Jeff about a cus­tomer com­plaint that had come to his atten­tion. Jeff went back to his work sta­tion, angry and dis­en­chanted: “bloody customers!”

The ulti­mate aim of any organ­isa­tion is to cre­ate gains for share­hold­ers by provid­ing value to cus­tom­ers. To be able to achieve this pur­pose it is imper­at­ive that a busi­ness under­stands cus­tom­ers. It is impossible to always keep every single cus­tomer sat­is­fied and com­plaints are an unavoid­able out­come of try­ing to help people.

The cus­tomer is always right about their own per­cep­tion of the value they receive

On the bright side, com­plaints are a source of inform­a­tion that is not always fully appre­ci­ated by man­agers. The cus­tomer is always right about their own per­cep­tion of the value they receive and a com­plaint provides a great insight into how cus­tom­ers per­ceive what you do. In many organ­isa­tions the num­ber of com­plaints is seen as a neg­at­ive indic­ator. When a cus­tomer lodges a formal expres­sion of dis­sat­is­fac­tion, man­agers run around in blind panic and try to found out who is to blame for this neg­at­ive experience.

McDon­alds seem to have grasped this concept of com­plaints and cre­ated this beau­ti­ful pieces of advers­ing. They are not the only fast food com­pany per­form­ing a mea culpa on tele­vi­sion. Also pizza pur­veyor Dom­in­oes recently admit­ted to have changed its recipe after cus­tomer feed­back. Patrick Doyle, pres­id­ent of Dom­in­oes sum­mar­ised their jour­ney suc­cinctly: “You can either use neg­at­ive com­ments to get you down or you can use them to excite and ener­gise you”.

The moral of this story is to embrace cus­tomer com­plaints. A lucid man­ager leaves emo­tions out of the equa­tion and ration­ally ana­lyses every com­plaint and seeks ways to improve the organ­isa­tion without fin­ger point­ing and enabling your staff to help their customers.

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The Cult of Personality

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Analysing Data

The holy grail of human resource man­age­ment is to find the per­fect staff mem­ber. Count­less of books are devoted to the recruit­ment pro­cess and pre­dict­ing per­form­ance based on inter­views, résumés, ref­er­ence checks and psy­cho­met­ric test­ing. At Hypo­thet­icorp we have writ­ten sev­eral art­icles about the mach­in­a­tions of recruit­ment.

Psy­cho­met­ric test­ing, mostly in the form of a self admin­istered per­son­al­ity test are a very pop­u­lar way help recruit­ers find the right per­son for the job. Most pop­u­lar is the Meyers-Brigs Type Indic­ator (MBTI) and mil­lions of hard work­ing pro­fes­sion­als have been branded with labels such as ENTP, INTJ or pos­sibly FCUK.

Unfor­tu­nately these tests are noth­ing more than expens­ive secur­ity blankets for recruit­ers and man­agers that don’t have the cour­age to rely on per­sonal judge­ment and need pseudo sci­ence to defend their decisions. Personality does exist as a phe­nomenon, but there is no easy tech­nique to determ­ine this and pre­dict future beha­viour or work performance.

How­ever, at Hypo­thet­icorp we decided to join the mad­ness and develop our own per­son­al­ity test based on groun­ded the­ory research con­duc­ted over the past four years. Dif­fer­ence is that this test is fully open source. You can read all about the inner work­ings of the FWI on the back­ground page.

So, hop on our vir­tual divan and answer 22 easy ques­tions to find our what your Forer Work­style Invent­ory is.

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Positions Vacant

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Would you like to work on the front lines of con­tem­por­ary management?

Hypo­thet­icorp is hir­ing and we are look­ing for people that don’t fit  the cul­ture of their cur­rent work­place and have dif­fi­culty being aligned with cor­por­ate goals. At Hypo­thet­icorp we believe that the only thing you have to be aligned with is your  own self.

We acknow­ledge that devi­ant beha­viour and tak­ing cal­cu­lated risks is the found­a­tion of  innov­a­tion. We there­fore look for inde­pend­ent crit­ical thinkers who can add  value to Hypotheticorp.

If this was a real recruit­ment add it would have been a very odd one indeed. Most com­pan­ies are look­ing for so called align­ment and match­ing cul­tural val­ues. At Hypo­thet­icorp we believe that this will lead to a severe lack of innovation.

The major cor­por­ate col­lapses and scan­dals of the recent years have caused a tight­en­ing of cor­por­ate gov­ernance and many organ­isa­tions have moved away from open mod­els of lead­er­ship that value self ini­ti­at­ive to more regi­men­ted mod­els of management.

Even though the west­ern world is waging war to spread demo­cracy around the globe, the one aspect that dom­in­ates most people’s lives, their work­places, are ideally mer­ito­cra­cies, but are mostly more like dic­tat­or­ships.  Most organ­isa­tions are man­aged through clear hier­arch­ical lines and people are not very likely to go against the grain.

Research shows that employ­ees do not only remain silent because of a fear of retri­bu­tion, but also because it is per­ceived as a waste of their time. This silence cre­ates psy­cho­lo­gical ten­sion and cog­nit­ive dis­son­ance and even­tu­ally less com­mit­ment with organ­isa­tional goals.1.

Organ­isa­tional devi­ance is, how­ever, a major source of innov­a­tion. Without the free­dom to make mis­takes there can be no learn­ing. The cur­rent wave of tightened cor­por­ate gov­ernance leads to the silen­cing of dis­sent­ing voices and prun­ing of innov­at­ive actions. The ulti­mate con­sequence of this is the impov­er­ish­ment of man­age­ment practices.

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Notes
  1. Detert, James R., Burris, E. R., & Har­rison, D. A. (n.d.). Debunk­ing four myths about employee silence. Har­vard Busi­ness Review, 88(6), 26. [↩]

The Virtues of Nepotism

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Nepot­ism is con­sidered one of the great sins of West­ern cul­ture. As soci­ety has been lev­elled by remov­ing class dis­tinc­tions and shaped to cre­ate a level play­ing field for every­body, regard­less of race, reli­gion, gender. Fam­ily rela­tion­ships are not sup­posed to play a role in any one’s chances of suc­cess. The Wiki­pe­dia defin­i­tion of neo­pot­ism is:

“Favour­it­ism gran­ted to rel­at­ives or friends, without regard to their merit”.

When Ian and I under­took some research in Viet­nam we came across inter­est­ing recruit­ment prac­tices. From our inter­views with local man­agers it became clear that using fam­ily net­works is an accep­ted recruit source for staff.

From our data we formed the hypo­thesis that recruit­ment in coun­tries with a col­lect­ive nature, such as Viet­nam, is primar­ily con­duc­ted through social net­works. This in con­trast with the developed world, with a high level of indi­vidu­al­ism, where, spe­cially in the gov­ern­ment sec­tor, a level play­ing field is cre­ated by pub­licly advert­ising positions.

Although Viet­namese prac­tices smell like the dreaded nepot­ism, some people made clear to us that the fam­ily net­works are used as a primary recruit­ment source, but within that pool of people, the selec­tion is nev­er­the­less based on merit. A train­ing man­ager of a large com­pany told us that they have many teams in which sev­eral gen­er­a­tions of one fam­ily work together and that this cre­ates a great cul­ture and sense of com­mon pur­pose within the organisation.

This sense of com­mon pur­pose is con­sidered a holy grail by most organ­isa­tions in the developed, indi­vidu­al­istic, world. Many activ­it­ies are aimed at ‘align­ing’ people to the com­mon pur­pose of the organ­isa­tion. But given that most busi­nesses are a grab bag of people, work­ing together more by change than by com­mon pur­pose, this has proven to be an illus­ive goal.

Research in Aus­tralia has shown that people recruited through anonym­ous sources such as news­pa­per advert­ise­ments missed almost twice as many days as those recruited through other sources, such as employee refer­rals.1. This under­writes the import­ance of using social net­works as a source of recruitment.

Human beings are inher­ently social beings and we like to spend our time with people we like. Within that we have a def­in­ite bias for people that we are related to. One of the major reas­ons many people don’t enjoy work is not because of the work itself but the people they are forced to social­ise with. Open recruit­ment pro­cesses aimed at cre­at­ing a level play­ing field are prob­lem­atic and many organ­isa­tions use abstract tools, such as per­son­al­ity tests, and ref­er­ence checks, which  have been dis­cussed in Hypo­thet­icorp recently.

Next time when hir­ing people, look around your imme­di­ate and exten­ded social circle and see if there is any­body you would like to work with that can poten­tially do the job. The moral of the story is: nepot­ism is not inher­ently bad, as long as the final selec­tion is based on merit.

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Notes
  1. Breaugh, James A. (1981) Rela­tion­ship between recruit­ing sources and employee per­form­ance, absent­ee­ism, and work atti­tudes. Academy of Man­age­ment Journal 24(1): 142–147. [↩]