Consider the impact, on a prospective employee and the organisation, of the traditional method of recruiting someone to do a job, i.e. advertising a vacant post.
Let us say that it is advertised in a local or national newspaper, or on the internet, or in local jobs offices etc. and streams of applications with well-polished CV’s and cover letters stream in.
All the CV’s and letters contain glowing accounts of educational qualifications, previous experience, fascinating hobbies as well as how the person enjoys taking the initiative, being a self-starter, how interested he is in the job as described, the lengths that he will go to in order to do the job, how good a team player he is and how he is a people person.
After trawling through all the CV’s a selection is made and the day of the interview dawns.
The candidates parade themselves in what we used to call their Sunday best to impress the interview panel.
Each candidate is asked a selected number of questions with no deviation and following the process the scores are added up and the person with the highest score is chosen to be offered the job at the end of the day by a (usually exhausted) interview panel.
The next day, or at least within a few days, the chair of the interview board makes contact with the candidates’ previous bosses and other people of importance that he has provided to vouch for his character and back up all the claims he made on his CV and during his interview.
Everything has to be (well, nowadays anyway) recorded in writing in a very open and transparent manner as disappointed candidates can ask for feedback on what points they fell down.
Even after all the above, many personnel and recruitment/selection experts maintain that the process is flawed. Because of these well-known flaws there is a six-month probation period where the candidate can be sacked without notice if he does not fit the bill.
The entire recruitment process can be summed up as follows:
Prospective Employee; (Candidate): “I have to ensure that I please these people that I want to work for, and that I am the person that they want. I will go to any ends to do it – promoting parts of me that I think they want to see while hiding those parts that I feel might be disadvantageous”.
Employer/Interview Board: “I must decide whether or not this person has the necessary competences, while at the same time cutting through all the plamásing [1] and flattery, to try and discover if the person is genuine, and will do the job that we want him to do”.
One can see how the process invites a kind of game-playing!
In the next post I propose an alternative where the interview board is less likely to be fooled.
[1]. Plamás is a word in Gaeilge that means excessive, insincere praise – it is often used in Ireland.