Hiring the right person is like looking for a spouse for your child or looking for a replacement for the team member you just lost in a special forces unit. Leave no stone unturned to get the right person.
By Debasish Roy
CEO, Royalle Corporation
What do good couples do, to select a good spouse for their child? They leave no stone unturned. They check if the potential bride or groom is a good person with kind, generous habits. They check if they are mentally and emotionally stable. They check if they are from a financially stable family and what not.
Next.
What do stupid, illiterate and myopic people do to select a spouse for their child? They ensure that the family their child is marrying into has lots of money and nothing else. The potential spouse could be unstable, emotionally vacuous and intellectually challenged but just a lot of liquid and illiquid assets turns them on.
The same goes for hiring for a company.
A good CEO, along with the CHRO, will go through every application painstakingly or at least discuss the applications thoroughly taking out time for this activity. That CEO and that CHRO will check for red flags, which are not evident in the CV or even mentioned directly or obliquely either in writing or verbally by the candidate. Some people may term these perceived red flags as bias or generalizations but that’s what it is. It’s experience. People who do not listen to instinct honed through experience are liable to live (not fall into) messy potholes all their life.
For any company, the right hires at any level are important. Any company, which resorts to short cuts in hiring such as:
1) Using AI to skim through the applications.
2) Using software to only look for catchwords.
3) Rejecting applications depending on the number of pages of CVs.
4) Trying to hire the cheapest resource possible being the only lookout.
5) Hiring somebody to prove they are oh so generous and are willing to give them a chance, despite bad experiences with similar people within their own company or in other companies.
Is likely to end up as a massive mess in a space of five to eight years.
If the CEO or founder depends on learnings from his or her MBA course and considers every short cut to be a mark of efficiency, then zip-zap-zoom hiring will be wrongly labelled under efficiency too.
Hire in less time, no harm if the mismatch in expectations and delivery creates friction in every project and meeting.
Call the candidate on the phone; make them feel cared for and wanted. Try to understand their needs.
Don’t fire off stupid questions such as, “Why do you want to join us.” Or “Why do you think we should hire you?”
The correct answers to the above questions are:
“Why do you want to join us?”
“I want to join your company because I am looking for a better job.”
OR
“Why do you think we should hire you?”
“That’s your job to find out. Isn’t it?”
In companies with little vision, it usually happens like this:
When the profitability or reserve surplus account or venture capital funding is HIGH, start hiring anybody and everybody, with no checks and filters through the hiring manager and the HR manager. Boast to the world how many you are hiring in such little time. When the profitability and funds start sagging, start firing left, right and centre. It’s all about the ego of the founder and not about the business.
There is little effort to take time and communicate with the potential hire and then take them on board.
This has to change if any company wishes to create something big and something beautiful and not just seek an early and large exit.
Hiring from a particular region / university / community or avoiding them
Experienced CEOs, CHROs use their experience to check for failsafes – a system or plan that comes into operation in the event of something going wrong or that is in place to prevent such an occurrence, when hiring. A CEO may choose not to hire from a certain region because 95 per cent of the people he or she had hired from that region turned out to be burdens on the complete work flow.
Is this bias? Is this shaming a region? Is this not being a equal opportunity employer?
Yes, to all those questions. However, that CEO or CHRO is completely within his/her rights as a business head to avoid pitfall hires, when his or her experience to not touch fire and get singed again, just in the name of being politically correct. Not needed. Not to be defended. A business head will practice his or her art of being a good manager. No need to explain that stance.
An expression that he or she avoids that region, area, university or community is factual and is not a description of the state or region. There may be thousands of national award winners in that state but that does not change the fact that they are, as a rule not effective in a particular kind of job or role.
The following analogy may be stretching it a bit but it is somehow similar to Hollywood directors decide to cast an African American jesus or an African American James Bond. Not a good fit. Nothing to do with equality or shaming. Get it?
So, then what about the acceptance of an Afro American as a President of the United States for two consecutive terms in real life and an Indo American as a Vice President in the White House? Well, that is where they fit the role. In case of a black James Bond and a black Jesus, they didn’t. If hired, they would have been misfits owing to reasons which are categorized as cognitive bias but are correctly placed.
Take the occupation of the common man’s (and woman’s) mind recall regarding the founding figure of Christianity. Jesus of Nazareth, born in Jerusalem the saint, was Arab but Jesus the marketing narrative pushed by the Catholic Church in Vatican City over eight hundred years, was Italian and white. So, is calling Jesus white or even brown (Middle East) racist? Figure it out.
