John Linton The start of the fifth day of the 'Christmas break' is noticeable for the fact that I feel like I have had a break which is unusual. Perhaps the avalanche of food and deluge of alcohol over the past four days has had a numbing affect on my sensibilities in a more forceful way than in past years. A few hardy souls will return to the Exetel office today to assist the 'skeleton' staff who took no breaks at all over the last few days and dealt with the almost 200 calls yesterday that still come in from residential customers and those who must be available in case a corporate customer encounters a problem - never over the past seven years - but you can't rely on that.
I intend to watch the cricket for most of the day, assuming there is some and it is worth watching while looking at (playing around with) some better ways of hiring people over 2012. It is inevitable that all orgnisations become complacent with their hiring practices no matter how 'elitist' they tend to be. "Our hiring practices must be excellent - look how well the company is doing" covers the reasons for complacency in most instances. Small companies tend to retain this attitude because the founders/directors tend to remain involved in hiring each new person in the company and how can they ever do anything better than they already do? I know I can never do any better than I already do because I am so good at it and I've done it for so long!
Even if that were true, which I know it isn't, as a company grows more people become involved in the hiring process and in our case it is completely impractical for hiring in Sri Lanka to be conducted in the same ways as hiring in Australia. We currently rely on a fairly rigid set of criteria for resumes and transcripts and a set of 'interview questions' for guiding our inexperienced supervisors/managers in selecting personnel. We could say that these processes work very well - they do - but actually measured against what? We tend to keep personnel we hire for far longer than 'average' but that, in itself is not a sensible criteria - for instance in Sri Lanka we pay so much more than other employers (as a base policy) that keeping staff will always be easy - so that cannot be any judgment of hiring the best people.Similarly do we actually 'train' the people we hire to maximise/optimise their abilities and growth potential? Impossible to say with our current internal policies and practices.
Certainly for the past three plus years we have been so inundated with the day to day problems of just 'staying alive' in constantly difficult and constantly changing market places that we have been grateful enough to continue to grow Exetel's revenue month on month/year on year and have had absolutely no time for such things as improving our hiring and training processes....because we believed them to be the very best we could make them and although we have grown in terms of personnel we have only grown quite slowly - at least compared to how we plan to grow in the future. So, it really is going to be necessary to re-define our hiring processes and to teach/show/explain how to do a much better job to the people who will be hiring some 100 new employees over the coming year....
....and then re-educating the people we have already hired (and are already doing very well within the current Exetel) to do better for themselves and for Exetel in the future. I remember when, because I have been around since the late Bronze Age when sales/service/business training was 'revolutionised' by Video Arts who made 'instructional videos' using John Cleese, Hugh Lawrie and Ronnie Barker:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nwg96d8g3I
For several years these videos were used by companies across the English speaking world to teach in a new way the 'boring' aspects of commercial interfaces. Because the approach was different, and the people in the videos were inherently funny, these videos enlivened many a dull company teaching process - although they were mainly appreciated for the straight comedy value. I am not for a moment considering using these terribly dated concepts within Exetel but I am looking for a 'new' approach to 'training' and 'education' that will be more effective than our current processes. One of those approaches, as I previously may have mentioned, is some sort of video.
We need to do this now if we intend to meet our 2012 objectives.
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