Wrong Hires Can Lead to Dire Quagmires

Wrong Hires Can Lead to Dire Quagmires:

“One Third of People Decisions Turn out Right”

--- Peter Drucker

       

The current situation is worse than it was in Peter Ducker’s time. ‘A bad apple spoils the barrel’ goes a saying. The implication is obvious - that most companies often select bad apples and then complain that lower morale and unsatisfactory financial results are due to other reasons. Though they blame the external environment, the bad apples are the real reason leading to such a quagmire.

 

Recruiters do their best, but the faults lie in the methods, processes and tools that they use. The widely used series of interview methods are mainly responsible for bad apples getting in. Interviewers at all levels have biases and prejudices as well as pet theories and formulas. If you think this is an overgeneralization, think again in the light of this story with a moral.

A priest with an immaculate dress, poise and demeanour was in a train compartment. Just before the train started a middle-aged man with shabby clothes, dishevelled hair, a liquor bottle and an old newspaper in hand walked in and sat next to the priest. Both were quiet for a long time, reading newspapers. After a while the shabbily dressed man said:

          

“Excuse me, Sir, could you tell me what causes  rheumatoid arthritis?”

 

“What else but junk food, drinking liquor, unhygienic habits, an empty mind. Since how long have you been suffering?”

 

“Who me? No Sir, I have no diseases. This paper says that the Bishop has it.”

 

This anecdote is an example of the several underlying biases that are at play. But biases due to the corporate hierarchical organizations have an even greater impact.

Besides biases, interviews can lead to bad choices due to psychological reasons. According to Jungian theory, none of us is an individual. Each one of us has two personality modes - (1) Persona and (2) Anima. Persona is the social self or a mask and anima is the real self.

 

All except the saintly few wear a mask and change it to suit the occasion. Normally, in interviews one mask talks to another mask. That is why Fernandez Araoz, a globally-known expert, with rich experience of over 20,000 executive interviews, says that “an interview is a conversation between two liars”, each trying to impress the other with half-truths if not total lies. There are coaching and training classes and self-help aids to help interviewees.

 

Just consider this case. A candidate said that when an interviewer asked him,“where do you see yourself five years from now”, he wanted to reply with, “John, in the current chaotic conditions, do you know where your company and you would be in five years from now?” But in keeping with the interview etiquettes and to get the job, the interviewee said, “I would be the CEO of a subsidiary producing an entirely new revolutionary product based on my own patent.” He was afraid about how he would carry the story forward if asked for details. But no further questions were asked. Perhaps the interviewer was scared of exposing his ignorance of the super-duper product the young man had in mind.

     

USA Companies spend about $20 billion on recruitment

 

The basic simple method to know each other through open and frank conversations is further complicated by outsourcing the selection to head hunters. In fact, the present age is marked by the ancient ‘hunter-gatherer’ phenomenon. Recruiters hunting for heads and candidates gathering jobs. They have a few in hand even as they are interviewing for a third one.

 

To justify the sky-high fees, the multi-stage process is sometimes carried out at different locales and several tools are used. According to the Society for Human Resources Management, companies in the USA fill 66 million jobs a year spending $20 billion annually. It is estimated that global spending on recruitment is far higher.

 

The results of all these efforts and amount spent are not very encouraging. With respect to the renowned heads of two giant global Indian companies, it must be remembered that after searching all over the world using elaborate recruitment processes, they selected candidates with rich experiences and reputation for CEO posts. Both left mid-way with a lot of adverse publicity and acrimony. 

 

A study has revealed that until the Silicon Valley revolution, 90% of the jobs were filled by recruiting from schools and colleges and mainly through internal promotions. For decades, quite a few Indo-American companies followed this method, instead of the ‘hire and fire’ one, and recorded phenomenal progress with top ranking in their industry and bagged several awards. There was no interruption of operations due to internal conflicts. 

 

An officer of an Indo-American company was delegated to brief the press for its silver jubilee celebrations. After the briefing, an eminent columnist said that while all this was positive, he wanted to talk to someone from the workers’ union. When asked whether the whole committee or any specific office bearer, he said ‘the youngest member’ hoping that a hot-headed youngster would provide a spicy story in the write-up. When the columnist asked the youngest unionist, “What is your feeling about the company”, the young man replied, “I am proud of the company”. The journalist asked, “Why?” The youngster replied that he was in love with a girl but her parents opposed it and the matter was treated as closed. But, when he got a job in this company, the girl’s parents themselves came with a proposal and they got married. The scribe was stunned and asked no other questions.

 

Wizard managers understand that to achieve a meeting of two or more strangers’ minds is a tough task. The human mind has been described as ‘unfathomable, mysterious and devious’. An organization is an organism. And, just like a human body’s ‘rejection response’ to a transplant of an external organ, say a heart, the new recruit particularly, in case of a lateral entry at a senior-level, will face resistance. It is the skilful induction process that can help achieve integration over time. Wizard managers remain as focused on ensuring successful integration of their external hires as they were on getting them on board.