The ones that get away- accidental declines of talented candidates

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Accidental declines

You are playing high stakes, all or nothing poker with people all the time, and you don’t even realise it. And it’s this unknown unknown that really gets damages us, that we never find out about.

There’s only 3 jokes in HR, and this is one of them.  You’ve likely heard this from me before, but if not, it goes like this:

I don’t hire unlucky people, that’s why I throw half the CVs in the bin.

See here for more on how to make smarter hiring choices.

Listen here for how looking for different to what you’d expect can be gold.

Explaining the joke

Actual comedians have this is saying about dissecting a joke; it’s like dissecting a frog- no one laughs, and at the end, the frog is dead.

But let’s dissect this joke, because there is an actual lesson in it.  There are three key points to it.

• In this scenario, the employer is making an arbitrary choice, a decision to discard. The criteria is flippant, spurious, without any grounds of justification.  It’s just as unjustified as discarding everyone who’s phone number ends in an odd number, or whose middle name starts with a letter between A and M in the alphabet. 

• It’s a criterion that gives us a good pile, and a bad pile. Applying this test gives us people we can categorise as good or bad, suitable or not suitable.

• It’s a definitive action.  It’s a strong call, a bold call- you can imagine a firm, confident, assertive type saying this, with grin on his face but a look of certainty in his eye. This person knows what he is doing and is doing it.

• It’s a HR joke.  It doesn’t work if a painter says it, does it?  Theoretically anyone could be the person who does this, but the implication or statement that it’s an HR person with this policy adds to the joke, and when you take that bit out, you take away from the joke.  It’s not as funny.

See here for the bigger recruitment picture.

Listen here for how people’s past should, or should not be, set aside.

What are we parodying here?

This joke works best as a parody of HR. it resonates (albeit it bitterly) with everyone who has ever applied for a joke they know they could do, and do easily, only to be rejected automatically.  This joke gives voice to all of our underlying frustration and suspicion that some nameless HR person has discarded us for some technicality, some irrelevant, some pernicious, or just careless reason, and blown our best chance at a better future.

See here and here for how interviews aren’t perfect either.

But we don’t (do we?)

I know what you’re saying, not me, must be everyone else.  But perhaps you’re saying that a little TOO quickly.   Let’s be clear- there are some very good reasons we can’t make everyone happy:

• We can’t read every word in every CV/resume in depth, searching for meaning.

• We can’t give everyone the job.

• It’s not about can you do the job, but it’s about who’s the most likely to succeed.

So yes, we can all agree that candidates feelings of frustration and disappointment can be sored felt, but we haven’t done them an injustice.

Listen here for some different ways of assessing people.

Unless…

Lets go back to the joke.  Luck is not a fair test, but it has the same appearance of a fair test- we get a good pile, a bad pile, and we are one step closer to whittling our 54 candidates down to the 4 we will interview.  We can say no, we need to say no, but we need to set fair tests.  There’s lots of ways we could set unfair test, but here’s one (of many) to start.

See here for more on why we make bad recruitment choices.

Salary questions

I know you do this, and if you don’t, I would actually say that you should.  ‘What are you salary expectations’ is an important thing to know.  But it shouldn’t be a qualifing question.  Let me expand, but first some key concepts:

• Disqualifying questions are questions that result in auto declines.  If someone doesn’t have the legal right to work, and you’re not prepared to offer without that, that’s an auto decline, that a question that can disqualify or not.

• Suitability.  Once we have gone through all of the disqualifying aspects, recruitment is all about suitability- how well will they do?  How strong and relevant is their experience, qualifications, attributes etc?  

See here for discussion on some suitability tests that could be true, but probably can’t be used.

What the pay question is also asking

But this question of ‘what are your salary expectations’ is also asking- how much would you like us to pay you?  It’s also unavoidably the first part in the negotiation process. That’s more complicated that the simple binary of suitable or not suitable.  Now you have a complex game theory situation of bargaining parties manuevering around a deal. 

See here for more on negotiating the deal.

See here for how new people get better pay.

Here’s my point

You’ve probably worked this out, but here’s my point: how much you earn is a valid question to screen on; if they need too much, that disqualifies them, because there’s little point going through the process if they want more than we can give.

But ‘how much you want’, is not a fair question for suitability. If you’re giving that person a score, giving them a weighting, taking any marks off their evalutaion for what is also their bargaining strategy, you run the risk of throwing out good candidates for bad reasons.

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