John Linton .......apart from everything else.
Our key challenge over the coming year is, undoubtedly, hiring up to 100 new excellent people. This, if it happens, will grow the current level of employees by 40% and most of this hiring will be done in Colombo by very young, and very inexperienced people who have very little commercial experience. I have a life long disdain for "human resources" personnel who, as far as I have observed over a very long time are particularly useless at the one key task that might justify their existence - the selection and successful acquisition of new employees. My observation, over a very long time, is that they completely fail at this simple task and their failure consigns every company that employs such people to achieving less than could be achieved by any other means.
So it was with a fair amount of amusement that I read this article this morning:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204552304577113003705089744.html
Sure it's US data about current US hiring practices but it's interesting enough as an insight in how not to try and hire really good people. Try the test questions at the end and see how you go (would you get a job at some elite US company based on your abilities to correctly answer those questions?). I spend some time each day doing a cryptic crossword and a relatively tough Sudoku - not for fun but to keep my mind 'fit'. I got 1 and 3 correct (because three is simple math and one is looking for the obvious non numeric solution because a numeric solution is not going to be possible and I had seen the answer to five a long time ago). However what such questions tell you about a young person applying for a job is not clear to me.
Buried deep in the middle of the cited article, if you bother to read it, is this:
"The deep, dark secret of human resources is that traditional job interviews don't work very well. In fact, there's been quite a bit of research on the topic. One example is a famous experiment that Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal of Harvard did in 1992, with videotapes of traditional interviews. People who saw 10-second clips of an interview had roughly the same opinion of the interview subject as did the actual interviewer — making a strong case that job interviewers go by first appearances and are fooling themselves into believing they've gleaned additional information from everything that comes after."
I almost 100% agree with this assessment with the only rider being that I believe that you can pretty much decide whether or not to hire someone based on their resume and their High School and Undergraduate transcripts meeting your criteria and simply use the first few seconds of the face to face interview to decide whether you like the candidate or not. This method has always worked for me - but then I have never been in a position where I have been involved in hiring super men/women.
So our challenge is not going to be easy to address - I don't think any of the people who will be responsible for hiring can yet do the '5 second assessment". We do have a 'formula' for assessing resumes and transcripts which tends to avoid most of the obvious mistakes and we do have a brief 'set' of interview questions that are almost fool proof in ensuring that any resume assessment errors are, almost, always eliminated. What are those questions? I wouldn't want to write them here as the 'thought police' are omni-present in our nanny society but they are simple and direct and give a clear observation of any candidate.
So, having read the article can we improve on our hiring processes in Sri Lanka over the coming months?
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PS: Goodbye to a very great man - without whose ideas he "borrowed" Steve Jobs would be unknown:
http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/father-of-palo-alto-research-centre-dies-20111226-1pa55.html