A while ago I ran a training program on hiring practice for senior managers of a large PSU here in Bangalore.
One of the role plays involved interviewing skills and therein interviewing a recruit. The interviewee so chosen was a youngster who seemed to be full of vim and pleased as a punch. In fact his behavior bordered on the cocky. The prospective candidate did extremely well in navigating the technical questions that were thrown at him by the panel.
At the end of the interview round, much to my surprise, the unanimous verdict was that that particular candidate would not make the list of selected candidates as he was 'arrogant'. I responded by saying that the candidate looked confident and not arrogant and that the organizations needed confident people who were technically very sound and that the candidate should be chosen. The panel was not very convinced.
What's the point here? An issue that most lends bias to a recruiting process is lack of confidence or self esteem in recruiters.Recruiters with low self esteem abhor confident candidates and will not select them. Unfortunate but very true.
How does one mitigate this rather unfortunate state of affairs? A route may be to have a panel of interviewers, where hopefully biases will cancel themselves out and more importantly training recruiters to recognize and deal with biases.
Hiring a poor candidate is bad, rejecting a great one is even worse and in a competitive world, organizations recognize that this is workplace harakiri. While many do recognize that hiring is a very important HR activity, few spend enough of money in training their recruiters and developing staffing metrics which would give an early warning of poor practice.
I explore the last frontier..............humans!
Sunday, March 10, 2013
What's hiring got to do with self esteem?
A while ago I ran a training program on hiring practice for senior managers of a large PSU here in Bangalore.
One of the role plays involved interviewing skills and therein interviewing a recruit. The interviewee so chosen was a youngster who seemed to be full of vim and pleased as a punch. In fact his behavior bordered on the cocky. The prospective candidate did extremely well in navigating the technical questions that were thrown at him by the panel.
At the end of the interview round, much to my surprise, the unanimous verdict was that that particular candidate would not make the list of selected candidates as he was 'arrogant'. I responded by saying that the candidate looked confident and not arrogant and that the organizations needed confident people who were technically very sound and that the candidate should be chosen. The panel was not very convinced.
What's the point here? An issue that most lends bias to a recruiting process is lack of confidence or self esteem in recruiters.Recruiters with low self esteem abhor confident candidates and will not select them. Unfortunate but very true.
How does one mitigate this rather unfortunate state of affairs? A route may be to have a panel of interviewers, where hopefully biases will cancel themselves out and more importantly training recruiters to recognize and deal with biases.
Hiring a poor candidate is bad, rejecting a great one is even worse and in a competitive world, organizations recognize that this is workplace harakiri. While many do recognize that hiring is a very important HR activity, few spend enough of money in training their recruiters and developing staffing metrics which would give an early warning of poor practice.
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1 comment:
Sir, Hats Off! The point that Recruiters with low self confidence tend to misjudge the confidence of a candidate as overconfidence is a disease infecting majority of the Recruiters not just in PSUs but also in Corporates. To my utter shock, I have seen cases where if the candidate has better English communication skills than the Recruiter / Interviewer then too its not taken in good stead. Well all in all, for an efficient and smart candidate its always a challenge to identify the point beyond which his smartness would result in diminishing returns and eventually lead to his rejection. Cheers!
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