Friday, October 31, 2014

The Most Useless Question

It should come as no surprise to my readers (assuming I have readers) that I’ve been through enough job interviews to have formed a complete set of opinions about interviewers – or their Human Resources departments, at least – based on the standard questions they ask the applicants. I’m not going to deny that standard questions are important, or that most companies have a list of them – it is difficult to compare the answers a set of applicants give you if you don’t ask them all the same questions, and who’s even mentioned the accusations of bigotry (because you asked some applicants different questions than others!) yet? But there are good questions and bad questions, and some are worse than others…

First of all, any question that has been considered an industry standard for decades is probably a bad idea. Enter the question “What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?” into Google, just to take the obvious example, and you will get 2,110,000 hits (as of this writing), including hundreds (probably thousands) of possible replies for that question and detailed instructions on how to use them, when to use them, how to tell which one your interviewer would most like to see, when to be modest, when to be honest, when to try turning the weakness into another strength, and when to simply lie through your teeth. If you look in the right places online, you should be able to find the fifty or so most asked interview questions, and complete explanations of how each one works and how to answer it, in a matter of minutes. And there’s no real motivation for any job applicant not to do exactly that…

Unlike a factual question, this sort of inquiry calls for a personal opinion, and while lying about the facts can be a crime under some conditions (e.g. perjury), being conceited, arrogant or delusional in your opinions about yourself generally isn’t. Even worse, though, are the questions that have virtually no chance of providing you with any useful information or insights even if they are answered candidly. In her column on the Forbes website, Maureen Henderson make a strong case for the “Most Useless Job Interview Question There Is” being that evergreen favorite, “Where do you see yourself in the next 5/10/20 years?” As Ms. Henderson correctly notes, most people couldn’t answer that question if they wanted to, given the literally unknowable nature of events that haven’t happened yet. Moreover, the average person would be thinking about more than just what job they’re going to have in five years; if they answered the question honestly they’d probably be telling you about their personal life, family, plans for retirement, or many other things that have no bearing on whether or not they would make a good addition to your staff…

Now, I don’t mean to imply that screening applicants and identifying the best choices for specific jobs is easy, or that the questions that will help you make that determination are obvious and easy to formulate. But depending on how dynamic your industry happens to be, it may not be possible to say with any confidence what positions will even exist in five or ten years, let alone whether any particular candidate would be qualified to do them. Which means that even if your applicant tries to answer this question honestly, and even if they manage to limit the answer to things that directly relate to your company and their prospective job, the answer they give you is still likely to be meaningless…

In the long run, you’re probably better off putting together technical questions about job issues, problems the applicant might have to solve on their new job, conflicts they were able to resolve on their last job, or details about their professional knowledge and training. You could have them tell you about some accomplishment of which they are proud, the circumstances that lead them into their current career path, their favorite school subjects or on-the-job training programs, or their personal/professional preferences in computers, equipment, cell phones, consumer electronics, cars, airlines, hotels, restaurants, clothing brands, retail stores, furniture, decorations, family pets, retirement planning strategies, or anything else that might give you some insight into what they would be like to work with and whether or not they would be useful to the company going forward…

You might not anything useful out of these questions, either. But at least you’re less likely to get some generic (and useless) response that some HR expert wrote down and posted on to the Internet ages ago…

Thursday, October 30, 2014

It All Becomes Clear Now

Some time ago a video went around the Internet of a FedEx delivery driver throwing an expensive computer monitor over a seven-foot security gate, marking the package as “delivered,” and driving off. A few weeks later a second video showed us another FedEx driver stealing a package left by another service off of a doorstep while making a later delivery. This was rapidly followed by a blizzard of additional videos, some real and some staged, in which people in FedEx uniforms (real and home-made) did a variety of wince-inducing things that the company would probably like to believe never actually happen, before something else popped up and the world’s collective attention moved on. At the time, I was baffled by the minority of these videos that were eventually verified as real; it seemed fantastical that even a very large company could possibly experience that much bad behavior in that short a span of time. Little did I know that many of the people involved didn’t actually work for the company…

You can pick up the story from the Bloomberg site if it hasn’t been taken down, but apparently ever since FedEx bought Roadway Package Systems in 1998 and developed it into the FedEx Ground subsidiary, they’ve been classifying all of the delivery drivers as independent contractors, not employees. As a result, the company does not pay for overtime, health or retirement benefits, or even the drivers’ Social Security contributions; they actually deduct money from the drivers’ paychecks to cover the use of the delivery trucks and the cost of the uniforms that these personnel are required to wear. According to some of the lawsuits that have popped up about this, the company is, in fact, taking as much as sixty percent of the “wages” paid to these personnel, turning what would otherwise be good jobs into ones that barely pay…

It remains to be seen how the various legal actions will turn out; U.S. Circuit Courts in Indiana and D.C. have sided with the company, but the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that the FedEx Ground drivers are employees (and entitled to all of the same rights as any other employee) in a decision handed down just this past August. Now the Kansas State Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the drivers (as of October 3rd), and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has rejected FedEx Ground’s claims, finding that the drivers are in fact employees. This issue is still a long way from being resolved, and so far the company is still fighting, but the momentum seems to be with the drivers. As a former management consultant and analyst, I can’t help wondering if anyone has pointed out to the company that this whole policy was idiotic in the first place…

FedEx Ground drivers are the company’s front line customer service personnel; in many cases they are the only human contact customers will have with the firm. If those employees are conscientious, helpful, and treat both the customer and their packages well, it reflects well on the company and makes people more inclined to use the service again. If those employees are grumpy, surly, disgruntled, resentful, or angry with their employer, they are likely to do things like throwing packages of delicate electronics over fences, leaving packages in garbage cans, or even (in extreme cases) leaving the shipments at any random address along their route rather than delivering them. And while it would facile to blame the company for all of the bad behavior of its personnel, this system is creating the perception that the company does not care about its delivery personnel, and will cheerfully rip them off for more than half of what they are allegedly making in the first place…

None of this excuses the bad behavior (and outright criminal offenses) being committed by the “independent contractor” driver personnel, of course. But it does offer some explanation for those nagging questions about how an otherwise highly successful company ends up with that many miserable excuses for employees…

Saturday, October 25, 2014

Protection from What?

By now most of you will be familiar with the automobile company that calls itself Tesla Motors; some of you may also be familiar with its products, which are considered to be some of the most advanced electric vehicles in the world. What you may not have realized is that in addition to changing the way cars are designed, built, marketed, and refueled, Tesla Motors has also changed the way cars are sold, operating almost entirely online. There are display locations (the company calls them “Galleries”) in a number of states where you can examine a Tesla vehicle, and the company is working on how to arrange test drives, but nothing quite like the traditional franchised car dealerships used by all of the other companies that sell cars in the United States. As it stands, you can go online, choose all of the options you want in your Tesla product, including color scheme, place your order, and have the car delivered to your door

Compared to the traditional method of selling a car, this new approach has a number of advantages – the largest of which is cost. Tesla isn’t collecting franchise fees from its dealers, which must have some impact on their bottom line, but from a sales standpoint the company does not have the overhead a dealership experiences, either in payroll or physical plant; they also don’t have the dealer’s mark-up to consider. Tesla’s primary products to date have all be relatively expensive, but they’ve been able to offer them for sale at a lower price than any vehicle made for equivalent cost while still maintaining a greater margin than most of their competitors. You might expect the people who own the traditional car dealerships to see this as a direct threat to their business model, control of the market, and way of life, and to take any action necessary to stop Tesla’s sales operations. You would not be disappointed in that expectation…

You can pick up the story on the Bloomberg News site if you want to, but what they’re talking about is a bill that has already been passed by the Legislature here in Michigan, and is currently being reviewed by the Governor’s office, that will ban sales of Tesla products (or any other automobile sold using any channel other than a franchised dealership) within the state. Given that Michigan is home to all three of the major U.S. automakers, this legislation comes at the surprise of absolutely nobody. What I find surprising about it is the grounds the automobile companies and their governmental pawns are using to ban Tesla’s sales operations. “States are fully within their rights to protect consumers by choosing the way cars are sold and serviced,” said Charles Cyrill, a spokesman for The National Automobile Dealers Association, in an email to Bloomberg. He goes on to claim that without competition between dealers to keep the price down, there is nothing stopping the manufacturer from raising their prices…

As so often happens, I’m left wondering if the National Automobile Dealers Association is made up entirely of credulous idiots, or if they think the general public is so constituted. Dealerships do not usually compete with each other on price, because they are working from the same MSRP set by the manufacturer, and because they are working within protected territories guaranteed by their franchise agreements. But even if they did, the primary force holding down the price of a new car isn’t competition with other dealers; it’s the availability of equivalent products. If any giver carmaker raises their price above what the public is willing to pay for their product, all of their customers will just move to a more reasonably-priced alternative. That’s how a free-market economy works – at least, when it’s not being manipulated by powerful business interests through political influence…

Forcing Tesla to work through traditional dealerships would have no impact on the invoice price of the car – what it costs to buy one from the factory – it will only impact the price the customer has to pay for one, since the price differential is the dealerships’ only source of income. It has some benefit for the public, in the sense of creating jobs for franchise owners and car salespeople, but none whatsoever for the customers. In fact, the only real winners in this scenario are all of the other automobile dealerships and their franchising companies, who will have an easier time competing with Tesla on price if their newest competitor is forced to incur the same price structure under which everyone else labors…

How anyone manages to state with a straight face that such a bill represents anything other than blatant protectionism for the companies supporting the lobby group is beyond me, but perhaps that’s why Mr. Cyril chose to put this howler in an email instead of actually saying it in person. And while I’m sure we can all appreciate the U.S. auto industry’s efforts to protect consumers from more efficient direct sales channels, I highly doubt if anything this heavy-handed is going to help their public image – or keep Tesla from taking away still more of their market share…