On Recruiting 1: Problematic Premise

I won't say I've never touched recruiting, but basically since I first transitioned from a sponge like student into a dollar earning worker my mind has honed in on the artless-science of recruiting as a likely key to almost everything.

Even earlier. In my final years of high-school my father a highly paid executive faced increasing job-insecurity. Not because the company was going bust or anything, but because he was being networked out of the company. Of course I only have his testimony, and from that I can deduce that he made some bad career moves and from him I suspect I inherited my non-victim mentality. It was more that his experiences, relayed to me by my mum introduced me to the possibility that organizations can nourish cancer and starve organs. Furthermore, what was scary for all of us, was that losing this job, my father could become unemployable - I believe the saying is something like "one moment a rooster the next a feather duster" in contrast consider the wisdom of the Blood Hound Gang lyrics: "old hands would rather put out than be put out to the pasture."

It was that fear that first struck me as a way the labour market and subsequently society might be broken - recruiters were like "should we look at this old guy? He might be good? nah fuck it just hire a fresh guy."

Anyway, the premise.

The premise I would have you accept is this, near truism:

If something is in the wrong hands, we need to examine the recruitment method.

So we can take this all the way up to "the world" being in the wrong hands, down to "hall monitor" possibly lower.

It applies to any responsibility delegated, beyond that this very often applies to relationships as in, whose hands we put our heart in. That's the "something", what about "wrong hands"?

Okay, if a) someone isn't doing their job/fulfilling their responsibility. Then wrong hands.

Also b) if someone isn't doing their job as well as someone willing and available could. Then wrong hands.

c) if someone uses their role parasitically (corruption). Then wrong hands.

Likely a sufficient but not exhaustive list going from mere opportunity cost to costly mistake. 

In a Total Quality Management (TQM) training session, we were asked to define what we thought TQM meant and I offered 'approaching perfection' which the trainer liked because 'perfection' or any ideal is something that likely cannot be achieved, but approached asymptotically. 

To borrow an analogy of Coleman Hughes, we may not even want to achieve the ideal - like we want to stop murders, and the measures taken by a society to go from 10,000 murders a year to 1,000 murders a year might be measures the society can live with, but to go from 1,000 murders to 0 murders requires measures nobody wants to live with.

Anyway, often the US election system is held aloft as an example of how not to do recruiting, but I want to hold it in a positive light. I'm going off my memory of events lived through though, so this example may prove (is likely to prove) entirely fictitious. The 2016 Democratic Party Primaries put the Democratic Presidential Candidacy into the wrong hands. Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate. I'm not asserting that the primary was rigged or stolen (it could be, may have been) but rather what I'd emphasize is that in the absence of accessing the counterfactual, Bernie Sanders was likely a better candidate to put up against Trump. My very unscientific feeling was, at the time and now, that the democratic party missed the signals that the US public were tired of the status quo - a natural and predictable response to Obama campaigning on hope and change, basically maintaining the status quo.

Whatever else, I recall Hillary having a commanding lead very early in the primaries. Her pledged delegates vastly outnumbered the next best candidate even before Super Tuesday. It appeared a fait accompli. Drilling down, you could see that her lead consisted almost entirely of super-delegates. Like the super-delegates of California, one of the last and largest states to conduct their primary had already pledged to Clinton.

It's my experience of layman psychology, that people are suckers for fait accomplis. Confident people make up their minds fastest and if their initial responses are publicised you can move from wisdom of the crowd to stupidity of the crowd. I assert People frequently don't vote for who they want, but for who they expect to win, and in the US system if it appears someone has an insurmountable lead, why vote at all? The super-delegates created an artificial signal to lay primary voters that Clinton was way more popular than she was. Party insiders were basically saying we don't care what you think, we've already picked your candidate.

It's my very limited and un-fact-checked understanding that the Democrats kind of agreed, possibly Hillary herself, that she shouldn't have been put up as a candidate particularly against an existential threat to democracy like Trump. It was very myopic, hubristic, narcissistic. So there were some rule or norm changes...okay I fact checked this and it was actual reforms implemented to bind 2/3rds of any states super-delegates to the results of the primary.

Now, former Sanders campaign staffer Briahna Joy Gray I've heard claim the party establishment still found ways to quash the Sanders campaign in 2019, namely by having all the moderate candidates drop out to not split the Biden vote on super Tuesday. It's plausible, but so too is a narrative that Sanders' moment had passed, the US was tired of trying something different and yearning for a status quo, like a devotee of Coca Cola that regretted ordering Squirt. It's 2023, Biden's first term is halfway over and I still appreciate not having to hear about the US president taking a shit every day. Biden certainly delivered the mental tranquillity I craved after Trump, as someone who has never been a resident of the US.

But basically, the democrats revision of their recruiting process after it failed them in 2016 is what should be happening with any recruiting process, pretty much all the time.

Alas, I've worked too much, furthermore I've been a customer of way more organisations. Jobs are in the wrong hands all over the fucking place. To the extent that my partner shared a clip of a doctor talking to Rick Ruben about how one neurosurgeon he knows thinks Med-School textbooks are only 50% accurate and I thought "Hey that's pretty good." My anchoring bias has such guesstimates under 20%.

Today and tomorrow, there will be managers waking up, stressed by what to do with an incompetent employee. Offer them a package, terminate them and then settle on a payout, performance manage them out? Sure, that will treat a symptom of a failed recruiting process. A failure to screen.

The more pertinent question I assert is: How did we hire incompetence?

And then we cast a long sideways glance at our HR department. Frequently, the organizations least competent department.

Where I can wrap up part one with a teaser for parts 2, 3, 4...however many. We can look at processes where people post job ads with job descriptions that don't describe the job the person will actually be doing, and describe qualifications that aren't necessary, and use software to screen applicant resumes for keywords that neither predict nor apply. That do not fact check resumes or applications, especially if hiring someone referred by an existing employee, even a problem or incompetent existing employee. Calling referees who foist bad staff onto new employers via glowing recommendations with little to no consequence to themselves. Managers who skip the first rounds of interviews for candidates that will potentially work for them, delegating that process to HR. Relying on proxys for competence like academic transcripts, work experience or even educational institutions...using junk personality science like Myers-Briggs or its derivatives. Group interviews. Lunch interviews. Cronyism. Nepotism. 

I'm confident everything I've listed above exists. A large share of my confidence is that I've seen it., experienced it, first hand, second hand and third hand.

I feel I've also witnessed that a common response to a shithouse hire is focused on the specific, rather than the general. This shitty employee is the problem, we move too quickly to "what to do about x?" rather than, and I feel the question has to be phrased thus "how did we hire someone like x?"