Hiring, the HR Screen & Barak Obama

Job Title: President of the United States of America
Job Description: As President you will work with your peers around the world to find favorable solutions to existing problems and lead cross-functional teams to reenergize our 300+ million customer base and get them to again believe in the product we’re selling.   The President must also find new ways to reverse negative sales of our product with the other 6 billion customers in existing, non-core markets.

You will have responsibility for a multi-trillion dollar budget but must have an eye on the bottom line to make up for $10 trillion in losses over the past three decades.  As President you will also be expected to retool our infrastructure and business systems, and find new suppliers to maximize ROI as our existing suppliers have been quickly and steadily raising input costs while buying less of our products.
Job Requirements: Must be at least 35 years old and an American citizen.  Knowledge of the Constitution a plus.

This is a big decision and too often we fall back on experience to fill it because that’s the safe choice.  The HR screener would take in resumes and look for people who have experience in government, have sat on the right committees and who have led similarly structured organizations before.  The HR screener can’t get fired for finding an intelligent person with the most experience out there.

Taking one look at Mr. Obama’s resume, the HR screener would acknowledge a great pedigree (magna cum laude at Harvard), experience as a Professor in constitutional law and a few years as a Senator with relevant experience on the Foreign Relations committee and perhaps offer him a job as the Jr. Asst. President.  These are trying times after all.  The cost of failure is high.  “Not enough experience. Next…”

What get overlooked in this election, as well as our hiring practices, are the intangibles.   They don’t often show up on our resumes so we automatically filter out a lot of good people immediately.  The intangibles of those who make it through the screen are loosely assessed during a couple brief, usually unstructured, interviews but our gut is often wrong (and has been as recently as 2000 and 2004, for example) largely because we are naturally inclined to hire people ‘like us.‘

We need better ways to measure applicants.  Depending on the role we need to:

• Assess who they are not just what they’ve done
• Assess how they work not just the results of their work
• And assess how well they fit with our existing team and organization (unless they are completely autonomous or we plan to swap out the entire team around them like we will on January 20th)

This is particularly true when hiring during difficult times.  When inertia is in your favor it’s easy to cover up the mistakes of a bad hire.  Being merely competent is often enough.  We need to change our hiring practices and reevaluate what is most important – merely having the experience to do a job or having the having the prowess to make everyone around the hire better.

I, for one, prefer the latter regardless of whether we’re in good times or bad.  And I’m working on a way to allow everyone to do just that. (More as I develop it…)

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