Why is it that
talent is difficult to find? We always hear that there is always a shortage of
good talent. This comment is like talking about the economy, inflation or weather!
This is the only area, where no license is required to pass a judgement.
We want to be
specific, but aim to create everything generic. This mentality gets ingrained
right from school days. If you want to teach history of India, you tend to
cover everything from Mohenjo-daro to Modern India. Everything has to be
crammed. If you do not remember some portions, and unfortunately if you get
questions from that section, you will be judged as “No good". The emphasis
is mostly on testing what you do
not know, rather than what you know. Let us now shift to the corporate
scene.
It begins from the
"Job Description & Skills". Someone in the past must have written
a verbose piece about the job and subsequently generations have copied and
modified from a historical piece. Why so? Let's take a standard line that can
be seen in most job descriptions: “Must have good communication skills” - Is
this not to be taken for granted? Will any applicant concede that he has poor
communication skills? What is meant here is that, the potential incumbent must
be able to effectively communicate
his thoughts & ideas. However what are mostly assessed is the accent and
style and a judgement passed on the incumbent. Most of the statements in – a typical
job description are - generally vague (“Cover Your Ass” types) and not
objective and measurable. Another example of a job description could be : “The
incumbent will be responsible for all sales for the state of Karnataka”. What should
the interviewer assess here ? He would have to get himself convinced, if the
incumbent has covered a similar territory and handled similar type of customers.
What was the incumbent’s person contribution and achievements? What metrics did
the incumbent use to show that he had done a good job. Did he do anything
creative in this role or was it just a supervisory role. Many sales guys have good gift of the garb, so
the interviewer must ensure that he is able to see through.
The next step is
the interview process. In the guise of involving the "team” in the hiring
process, and to ensure that there is acceptability of the incumbent, the number
of interviewers invariably is large. The interviewers nominated have, in many
instances, just a little more experience than the interviewee. What happens is
the inexperienced (experience in the assessment process) interviewer, instead
spends time in trying to impress the candidate, with a display of his own
knowledge in his limited areas. For this, he would pose questions from his
domain of strength. If the quality of answers does not match with his
knowledge, the candidate is judged as not suitable. How will the interviewer
ask something that he himself does not know? After all, the interviewer has also learnt
many things, in course of his work. So this is like the Johari window – (I know, you do not know quadrant - the
facade) From my experience over the last
25 years and more, I have seen that 95 % of the organizations do not have a proper framework for assessment.
Even though the interviewing process is classified as Technical interview / HR
interview, these are mostly skewed. Hardly any one understands the concept of “Fitment”.
Assessment of fitment can be done only at the level of a Business Manager or
higher.
Since doing a
post-mortem for rejection is seldom done and not worth doing, it is safer from
the interviewer's perspective to “fail" a candidate rather than “pass".
The fear of the interviewer is that if an incompetent candidate is judged
as “good" the interviewer would have to morally and even maybe personally accept
the blame for the wrong selection. Why should he take the risk? Will a junior
interviewer have the maturity to hire or acknowledge someone who is smarter
than himself? So the result will always be to hire someone less competent
and thus a giant builds a team of pygmies. After all in today's fast
changing environment, where the "average engagement span" of an
employee in a company is just about 3 years, how can the impact on contribution
be assessed?
In Public sectors
/ government organization, how many times does a junior officer have a say in
the selection process? Never - and the result is far lower attrition. Most of
the employees in a public sector are generally competent and fundamentally
strong (skill wise), but then the problem of performance (in most cases) is not
on account of the individual ability, but the working environment.
Conclusion:
Always hire for Attitude, Sincerity and Core Values. Check out the
motivation level of the candidate. What is it that he is really looking for? You
have to go behind the veil to see the driving factor. There will always be a
mismatch between what the candidate says and what the candidate really wants to
do. What is really frustrating the candidate in his current role? For the
initial hires, please have multiple meetings in different settings. The 2nd
or the 3rd meeting will uncover a lot of things, which would have
gone unnoticed in the earlier meetings. Now days, because of traffic and
internet, face to face meetings are reduced and some are telephonic. Please understand
that you will miss out the body language if there are no face to face meetings.
As a thumb rule, at least the first 25 employees must be met and screened thoroughly.
If you get this right, skill can always be built and anyway, one needs to
re-skill on a regular basis to meet the market needs. Attitude is very
important. There are people who work only for money or monetary rewards; some
require a lot of ego massage. In the start-up phase stay clear of hiring such
people. Their ethos attitude percolates in the system and integrates with the
DNA of the company, which is the foundation of company culture. No doubt, not
hiring may delay the company in their product launches or take off phase, but
it is worth it. Focusing only on performance at this stage might look
rational, but is the seed for tempting the founders to bend the rules or
negotiate on values. Once these are negotiated, you will lose the moral high
ground to preach to employees- especially during all hands meetings.
-0-
(A slightly different version was published
in Yourstory.in, with a focus on hiring for start-ups)
I liked it.
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