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Years of experience
and hundreds of interviews may no doubt improve
the reliability of gut feeling, but most hiring
managers would be hard pressed to prove in
court that their “gut” exceeded the validity
and reliability of today’s 5th and now 6th
Generation assessments. Let’s join this Hiring Manager
being questioned on the stand about his gut
feeling:
Attorney: Mr.
Hiring Manager, what you are telling me is that the purple
hair, bolt through the nose, and tattered jeans did not affect
your decision to hire and later fire this Young Gen-X? So Mr. Hiring Manager,
what are the criteria you use to hire and promote good
employees in your company?
Hiring Manager:
Sir, we look for hard-working, honest, dependable individuals
who don’t have to be told every little thing they’re supposed
to do and then do what they are told.
Attorney: Mr.
Hiring Manager, let me confirm this. You are looking for
hard-working, honest, dependable individuals who take the
initiative and follow directions and your rules and
procedures.
Hiring Manager: Yes
sir.
Attorney: How do
you determine if someone like Mr. Young Gen-X has initiative,
is honest and dependable?
Hiring Manager:
I’ve been doing this job for years and I get this
feeling. After all
these years and working with so many people, I’ve learned to
trust my gut.
Attorney: And your
“gut” has been how successful?
Hiring Manager:
Lately it’s been more difficult to find enough qualified
people.
Attorney: You
didn’t answer my question.
Hiring Manager: It
hasn’t been as good as it was but we're doing a lot better
than our competitors. I just had this feeling Mr. Young Gen-X
wouldn’t work out.
Attorney: So you’re
telling us that you knew from the start that this new hire
wouldn’t work out.
Hiring Manager: Not
exactly. We needed help and I thought I’d give him a
shot.
Attorney:
And?
Hiring Manager: He
just didn’t fit in.
Attorney: Now
you’re telling me that you knew from the start he wouldn’t
work out and wouldn’t fit in but you hired him anyway. This doesn’t sound like a
sound business practice from a manager who claims to have
reliable decision making capabilities.
Hiring Manager:
We’re a pretty conservative company and a lot of the older
employees couldn’t understand why we would hire someone who
had purple hair and a bolt through their nose.
Attorney: Did this
employee ever cause any trouble?
Hiring Manager:
No
Attorney: Was he
ever late or didn’t show up?
Hiring Manager:
No
Attorney: Did he
ever not follow directions?
Hiring Manager:
That's just it. He
sometimes just did things without asking.
Attorney: And
that’s a problem?
Hiring Manager:
Yes, we have rules and procedures around here and he just
didn’t follow them.
Attorney: You did
tell me earlier that you were looking for individuals who were
hard-working, honest, and dependable who don’t have to be told
every little thing that they’re supposed to do.
Hiring Manager:
Yes.
Attorney: I’m
confused. Your
problem with Mr. Young Gen-X is that he sometimes took the
initiative to do things before he was asked. But what you told me was that you
were looking for in a good employee was someone who
didn't have to be told what to do every time. Was Mr.
Young Gen-X instructed in the things needed to be done
and then did he do it differently than instructed?
Hiring Manager: Not
exactly
Attorney: Not
exactly to which – he didn’t follow the rules and procedures
or he wasn’t instructed?
Hiring Manager: A
little of both I guess. We’re really a small
company so we didn’t have job descriptions until we started to
have problems with turnover and younger workers like
this. And no one really wanted to train these new young
employees anyway. They figured it was a
waste of time because they’d probably quit anyway.
Attorney: Do you
now have job descriptions?
Hiring Manager: We
just hired someone to help us write them.
Attorney: So you
still don’t have the rules of your company and
responsibilities of the job documented.
Hiring Manager:
We’re working on it.
Attorney: So you
hired this kid with purple hair and a bolt in his nose. He
showed up everyday and on time. You expected him to
follow your rules and procedures despite that his hair color
and attire indicated a bit of an independent streak. You then expected him
to follow these rules anyway but the rules are nowhere to be
found. And when he did
take the initiative to do his job, you fired him for not
following the rules that he was never told. So Mr. Hiring
Manager, what is it that Mr. Young Gen-X didn`t do that
you hired him to do. If he did do something wrong, how would
he know if he never received instructions?
It seems to me like
you found the employee you were looking for but you and your
other employees couldn’t differentiate between the skills
necessary to do the job and personal traits that have nothing
to do with the job. Your gut feeling got in the way of seeing
that you had a qualified person and your so-called "good and
loyal long-term employees" sabotaged the efforts of a
hard-working, honest and dependable employee.
Verdict:
Guilty!!
In today’s litigious
society and talent-poor labor market, hiring-managers
who claim that their gut feelings and personal
opinions about job candidate potential are
just as reliable as 5th and 6th
Generation assessments present a tremendous
liability to the future productivity and profitability
of their organizations. What poses an even more
potentially devastating risk for negligent
hiring, wrongful discharge and just plain-old-bad-hiring
decisions are the number of
individuals who have been given the
responsibility for screening, hiring, and
promoting employees that lack the training
and experience to do this job well. Many of
these managers responsible for retaining and
rewarding employees are set in their ways
and do everything possible to keep things
staying the way they used to be.
Want to read more? Ira W. writes a monthly column for the
Business 2 Business Magazine.
Click here to read about Churn-Over:
How One Company Said "NO" to De-motivated
Candidates.
Click here to
share your comments and stories.
CriteriaOne is the blueprint that
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share of the best talent in the labor market.
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