Read the Room

I’m reluctant to use this title for a single post; if I tried I could probably come up with dozens, if not hundreds, of stories about tone-deaf moves by businesses and their management teams that have made the pandemic era even worse than it already was. Maybe I can start a regular feature on this topic, running every week to cover the most egregious example I can find in the previous seven days. For sheer idiocy, in terms of a move that does not work well under the current atmosphere, it may take a while to top the story of an employee who wrote to the CEO of Trader Joe’s asking for more rigorous anti-COVID procedures at work, and was promptly fired for his trouble, however…

I picked up the story from The Washington Post, but you can also find it on Twitter or any number of aggregation sites. A crew member working for Trader Joe’s at one of their New York locations wrote directly to the company’s CEO, explaining that more stringent measures were needed to protect the store crews, and that only the CEO had sufficient authority to impose them on the entire chain. Most of these were not terribly surprising, as workers everywhere have been asking for better air filtration, more time and supplies to disinfect the store interiors, and more conscientious enforcement of mask requirements. The only really innovative point in the letter was the request for a “three strikes” policy against customers who refuse to wear masks when inside the store…

It seems worth pointing out that employee recommended that the company accommodate customers who can’t wear masks due to medical conditions by using a curbside pick-up – a common measure taken by grocery and pharmacy companies, and one which Trader Joe’s already offers its customers. It also seems worth the mention that the company insists that it fired the employee in our story because of “the disrespect he showed toward our customers,” while telling the employee himself that the requests in his email and his temerity in emailing them indicated that he didn’t understand or practice the company’s “values,” whatever those might be…

What takes this over the line from poor management practice into complete idiocy is that the employee claims to have received stellar annual reviews, praising him for (among other things) his dedication to customer service and excellence in assisting customers – and the company has not disputed any of this as of this to date. Unless those reviews were all disinformation of some kind, it would appear that this employee is actually very respectful of the customers, and the company is actually taking offense at his request. In listing different causes in his termination letter and in their statement to the Post about this situation, effectively lying about the facts of the matter and slamming the employee, the company has not only managed to flush their own credibility, they have also sparked public outcry and calls for a boycott…

Now, I’m not going to suggest that the CEO of any company, let alone a national chain the size of Trader Joe’s, should have to consider and respond to every request received from one of their employees. I am suggesting that, if this story is true, then this matter was handled in possibly the worst fashion possible. It would have been much simpler for one of the CEO’s administrative assistants to reply with the company’s standard “thank you for your suggestion; we will look into it” message, and then ignore the whole thing. If anyone at corporate headquarters is actually mortally offended at the request that senior management “show up for” its employees by granting these requests, in return for the employees risking their safety by showing up for work every day despite the pandemic, they could always find some plausible excuse for firing this employee at some later point. Hopefully without triggering public outrage, giving rise to wrongful termination lawsuits, or making themselves look like a bunch of arrogant, thin-skinned, easily-offended idiots…

Alternately, I suppose, they could actually consider his requests…

Keep the Contract

The other day I was reading an article about why people steal office supplies from work and reflecting that the author was either missing or deliberately avoiding half of the picture. I’m not disputing that the majority of people make personal use of company equipment or supplies; I’m not even disputing that entirely too many people take supplies home or even sell them. And I’m not in a position to dispute that “shrink” of this type accounts for an average loss of 1.4% of a company’s revenue, although I’d want to take a look at those numbers before I committed to anything. But I’m not sure I agree with the corrective actions the author is recommending…

Writing for the website The Conversation, Professor Yannick Griep of the University of Calgary suggests that people consider (usually minor) benefits and potential (often severe) risks of stealing office supplies, at least for the purpose of “getting even” with their employer for wrongs real or imagined, and instead try to take a more constructive approach to solving the underlying problems. I can’t argue with any of that; even very extensive theft of officer supplies is unlikely to compensate you for any major wrongdoing on the part of your employer, and even very trivial theft may cost you your job, your career, or jail time. What I feel that Professor Griep is avoiding here is the company’s side of the situation…

As the Professor correctly notes in the original article, many employees have some amount of grievance stemming from violation of the implied psychological contract between management and their workers. If representatives of the company promised an applicant that there would be flexible working hours, regular raises, or opportunity for advancement, and what the employee ends up with is a dead-end job with no chance for promotion this side of retirement and a 1% cost-of-living adjustment every other year, then the company has broken that implied contract, and many people will feel that they are no longer obligated to keep up their end of the bargain – e.g. showing up on time, doing the work assigned to them, and not walking off with anything that isn’t bolted to the floor. What I think is unrealistic here is expecting the employees to be the ones to take corrective action…

While it would be facile to suggest that all managers are essentially the villains in a 19^th Century melodrama, it is difficult to deny that most companies do want to get as much work done for as little salary as possible – that’s how expenses work in a free-market economy. The problem occurs when the employees have a different idea of what the implied contract includes than the one from which management is working. Even if you are adhering to the letter of everything you have ever promised an employee, if they feel that they are being treated unfairly they are going to act accordingly – and that may not mean appropriately…

This is not to suggest that a manager couldn’t just wait and see what the employees want to bring to their attention regarding promises they feel you haven’t kept but what I’m getting at here is that they shouldn’t have to. Management is an active process, and a key part of any supervising manager’s job is to know his or her people and their expectations of the job and the company. If your people are underperforming, or if the atmosphere around the office appears to be hostile, or if individuals appear to be disaffected or unsatisfied, it is your job to find out why, and to see what you can do to improve the situation. Or, failing that, explain to your employees why you can’t…

I also don’t want to suggest that thieves aren’t a thing, because they most definitely are. Sooner or later you are going to encounter an employee who has been treated well and given everything you promised them who is stealing from the company because of greed, need, or any of the other common motivations for theft. But given that estimates of the percentage of employees who routinely take office supplies without permission runs from 75% to nearly 100% depending on whom you ask, it is probably worth considering what might be motivating your people to take some petty revenge on your company before you start implementing measures to stop them…

Mine

It’s a truism in the Service Sector – at least among management personnel – that it’s always the nice customers with whom you have to be the most careful. Bad customers, whether absurdly entitled, short-tempered, fault-finding, easily offended, bigoted, smug, condescending, mind-numbingly cheap, exceptionally rude, chronically late for everything, out of touch with current pricing, oblivious to health and safety regulations, unafraid of the law, or simply whacked out of their tiny little minds are not going to alter their behavior not matter what we do, and that includes boycotting our business. In fact, some of these oddballs will actually refuse to do business with any company that does not give them things to complain about. In many cases, it is doubtful if you could actually lose these customers if you tried, and there would be little to worry about if you did. They’re not really the problem…

The real problem are those customers who will arrive without fuss, behave politely, follow any clear signage or instructions, pay the appropriate price for the product or service – and leave, never to return, if treated badly by the customer service personnel. In fact, if your company’s customer service personnel are sufficiently incompetent, or if your company’s customer service policies are sufficiently horrendous, you may be quietly hemorrhaging these customers and never know it until the firm starts to go bankrupt…

Now, I’m not suggesting that the customer service function is easy, or that managing personnel who perform that function isn’t a challenge. The truth is that while inventory loss due to customer actions – shoplifting as well as vandalism – does not approach the losses most businesses experience due to employee theft and damage, those actions are much more exasperating to the front-line personnel who have to clean up the resulting mess, and front-line managers who have to deal with both the horrible customers (and outright thieves) and the corrosive effect they have on the employees. It does not take many episodes of being lied to, cheated, insulted, abused, or grossly inconvenienced before the average person will realize that any given visitor may turn out to be completely monstrous and start treating everyone as a potential criminal…

In many cases the “nice” customers are the counterpart of our “loyal” employees – the people who adhere to company policy, do their best to perform their job duties correctly despite the miserable conditions and insulting salaries, and would never dream of stealing. Treating these people as potential thieves and embezzlers makes no more sense than treating all customers as potential shoplifters and vandals. Where this becomes a critical problem is when a loyal employee is trying to adhere to the company policies and rules (standards to which the company is holding them) but in doing so outrages a customer, either because the customer really is a thief or a scam artist, or because they’re a nice customer who resents this treatment. This can, and frequently does, result in a situation where the employees know that if they deviate from company policy they will be fired, but if they comply with company policy and a customer complains about them (either because they’ve been thwarted from taking criminal actions or because they’re honest people who would never resort to criminal actions – the behavior is generally the same) they will be fired anyway…

Faced with this kind of Catch-22 situation, many employees will attempt to balance the need to conform to absolute, arbitrary rules written by people who may be completely out of touch with the realities of front-line customer service and the need to placate difficult, dishonest, or completely sociopathic customers. However, some employees will become disillusioned, engage in counterproductive work behaviors (from loafing to outright theft), or just quit, resulting in many of the problems described in the previous post. After all, being threatened with termination (or actually being terminated) so that a thieving “customer” can successful steal from the company is completely unjust, and utterly violates the implied social contract between the employee and his or her supervisor…

There have been a number of attempts to change this situation, or at least contain the most damaging parts, to both the employees and the customers who would actually be worth having. But that will bring us to Part Three of the story…

The Ethics of Snowflakes

About a week ago there was a story on the Blaze newsletter site about a company that claims to have developed a pre-screening tool they call a “Snowflake Test,” which appears to be more of a survey about the applicant’s political and philosophical leanings than it is about any particular job skills or abilities. Since the company is taking a position that defies liberal beliefs on a number of dimensions, they are using the common convention of deriding everyone who does not agree with them (and who will not, therefore, be able to pass the “test”) as Snowflakes, or occasionally Precious Snowflakes. If, as the company alleges in the article, their key customers are also opposed to liberal/progressive positions this may be an effective means of recruiting people who will be well suited to interacting with such clients. What is less clear is the ethics of using such a survey. I thought it might be interesting to take a closer look…

To begin with, we should probably note that many companies make use of some form of pre-interview screening. In some cases this will regard job skills, but in others the company will be trying to get a feel for how honest the applicant is, how detail-oriented they are, or how careful they are with financial matters, just to name a few. The idea is usually to avoid wasting either the interviewer’s time or that of the applicant, since if the screening tool can identify some factor that would make the candidate unsuitable for the job there is no need to go through with the interview itself. In some cases the screening may convince the applicant that the company or the position is not a good fit, which will also save everyone’s time. This is the first example I can remember seeing that specifically addresses the applicant’s political and social beliefs, however...

Now, we should probably acknowledge that none of the questions that have surfaced so far have asked anything about an applicant’s age, race, gender, physical ability, physical conditions, marital status, religious affiliations, political affiliations, club affiliations, service organizations supported, charities supported, or any other factor that would be officially considered discriminatory under Federal or State laws. Assuming that none of these survey questions are actually illegal – and the lack of lawsuits suggests that this may be the case – then the company is entirely within its rights to use such a survey, and no one really has any standing to complain about them. People who do not have highly positive feelings about the United States are not a protected class, for example, and neither are people who are strongly opposed to gun control. And while a company-wide bias against people with those opinions might lead to a hostile work environment, it’s difficult to see how avoiding such confrontations hurts anyone…

Without a great deal of internal information I can’t tell you if the company would be more effective with a greater diversity of ideas and philosophies than it is with its current roster. Everything we know about strategy formulation suggests that a groupthink mentality – everyone in the company following the same lines of thought without dissent – limits the effectiveness of the firm and may eventually result in its being too rigid to adapt to changing conditions. One could argue that the company’s leadership owes it to all of the various stakeholders to be as effective as possible, but one could also argue that attempting to hire people who will be compatible with the prevailing company culture would be better for both the company and the new hires. All of which leads me to the question:

All else being equal, and assuming that no laws are broken in either case, does the company’s desire for a cohesive corporate culture, based on shared values and opinions held by the employees, outweigh the company’s responsibility to hire the best and most capable employees regardless of their political, social, economic, or personal convictions? 

It's worth thinking about...

 

Finally Out in the Open

I read with great interest an article that appeared on the BBC home page this week regarding open-plan offices. If you’ve never been afflicted with one, the term refers to those arrangements without offices or even cubicles, where everyone’s desks are just sitting out in the middle of the floor. In extreme cases, people aren’t even assigned a specific desk; there’s just a communal work space, and everyone sits wherever they want to. There has been a lot of effort made in recent years to sell the open-plan office as “new” and “innovative,” as a reaction to the common “cubicle farm” arrangement, all of which ignores the fact that open-plan offices were used for decades before the cubicle became common. And, as anyone who has ever had a desk in the middle of the floor can tell you, there’s a very good reason that cubicles did become common…

As it turns out, open-plan offices are based on not one but two common fallacies. The first is simply that people who are sitting together in the shared space will spend their time talking about work-related topics. This can happen, of course, but unfortunately, people aren’t usually that disciplined. This results in a lot of extraneous conversations about whatever the employees happen to be thinking about at the moment, which both wastes time and distracts all of the people around them who are trying to work. Which brings us to the second problem: having people all around you working, talking, and making noise turns out to be really, really distracting…

Modern research on multitasking – some of which is cited in the BBC report – has revealed the very interesting fact that most of us can’t. The average person needs to focus on a single activity in order to have anything like full efficiency; splitting time between two or more activities just makes all of them take longer. This has turned into a perennial problem for college instructors, by the way, because too many of our students believe that they really can write emails, text with their friends, and surf the Internet while also paying attention to lectures. The truth is that, with very rare exceptions, anyone trying to do this will end up with memories of what they were texting about and some of the things they saw online, but not so much about the lecture they were nominally present for…

Now I don’t want to sound as if I am picking on college students in particular. On the contrary, if business leaders with years or decades on the job fall victim to the same fallacy every time they approve of things like the open-plan office concept, what can you expect from undergraduates who have been brought up to believe that they can do everything at once if they try hard enough? The real question, in my mind, is how anybody who has ever tried to get anything done in a noisy environment with multiple people talking and several different people trying to get their attention could possibly believe that having all of their employees sitting around a single table was a good idea in the first place…

Of course, it is possible that since most decisions regarding office furniture and organization are made by managers, who will generally have been given offices with real walls and doors as one of the perks of their position, that no one with the authority to reject the open-plan concept had realized how counter-productive it really was until recently. If this is the case, I think we can expect to see more and more companies going back to cubicle farms as the consequences become clear to those in charge. At least, we can all hope so, right?

The Trouble With Franchises

Actually, there are a lot of problems with a franchised business model, both from the franchisor’s standpoint and also from that of the franchisee. If you have purchased a franchise from someone then by definition you have given them a large sum of money in exchange for the right to open a branch office of their business and contribute to their bottom line. You may not ever see a dime of that money back; you may in fact go bankrupt even before you make your first franchise fee payment, but the company will still get its money. In some cases this might work out very well, such as the McDonald’s franchises, some of which have been estimated as being worth more than the franchise fee in marketing advantages alone. In other cases it might be a nightmare, as it was for the Krispy Kreme franchise holders who were basically used as a revenue source to enrich the personal fortunes of the CEO and his cronies in the early 2000s…

As bad as that is, things are frequently worse on the franchisor side. As attractive as it is to have people paying you to expand your business, the fact remains that every time you sell a franchise you are putting your company’s honor, reputation, and financial future into the hands of someone who you can’t control, who has no reason to like you or protect your company beyond the need to recover their investment. This can lead to improperly maintained locations that give your company an unwanted reputation for slovenly management and unsanitary conditions, public relations disasters that impact the performance of other franchisees miles or time-zones away, or human resources atrocities so absurd that they get you mocked by scruffy bloggers all over the globe…

I picked up the original story from the local television station in Houston, but in case you missed it, there are reports of a Popeye’s franchise demanding that the shift leader in one of their stores pay back the money that was stolen during an armed robbery because it was her fault the registers had enough money in them to be worth stealing. When the woman in question refused, saying that she’d already been robbed at gunpoint and couldn’t have afforded to replace the money anyway, she was fired. This would have been bad enough, but it turns out that the fired employee is a mother of three children who is currently pregnant with a fourth – and now facing unemployment in addition to her other problems…

Now, I don’t know enough about employment conditions in Houston to comment on whether firing someone because your company was robbed of less than $400 makes any financial sense. Typically, we assume that recruitment/replacement costs for supervisory personnel run between one-third and one-half of the first year’s salary, which in this case would mean somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 for a supervisor in the $8 to $10 per hour range; possibly much more than that. Unless there are so many employed first-tier managers in the Houston area that a replacement can literally be found sitting in the restaurant itself, this was already an asinine decision on the part of the business. But once the story got out things became even worse for both the franchisee and the company…

There’s only one Popeye’s location within a fifty-mile radius of my office, and I already don’t go there because I would literally have to drive past dozens of other fast-food restaurants to get there. And I know that our local franchise has absolutely nothing to do with Z&H Foods in Houston, except for the fact that both companies purchased a franchise to make and sell fried chicken and biscuits. But even knowing that, I feel rather more negatively toward Popeye’s in general than I did before I read this story, and even more so since the franchisor in this story is refusing to comment and just dumping all responsibility for this fiasco on the local franchisee. Just imagine how much worse that could get if everyone who sees this story, on the air or on the Internet, has the same reaction…

Still want to go into a franchised business model? I can wait while you think it over…

What’s in a Name?

Some years ago my wife was telling me about some of the amusing – and occasionally embarrassing – email addresses that people had included on their hiring paperwork, and speculating that this would eventually catch up with them over the course of their career. Most of said employees were graduate students at the time, and few of them had much work experience outside of academia. Consequently, most of them had never had occasion to consider if telling your new employer that your email was “HisGoldenLady@whateveritwas.whatever” might have a negative effect on your subsequent career prospects – or, for that matter, on your chances of getting a job in the first place. The problem has always been that given the huge number of email accounts currently in use, and the subjective nature of resume screening at most employers, it has never been completely clear what effect (if any) such email addresses actually have on your career – until now…

The story comes to us from the Daily Mail website, which means we have to take it with at least some amount of salt (the Daily Mail has had an unfortunate habit of not fact-checking its stories, going back to before Internet news sites were a thing), but apparently a team of researchers at a university in Amsterdam have just completed a study where they asked a group of recruiters to read resumes that were identical except for the “applicant’s” email address, and comment on how likely they were to select that individual for an interview. Participants in the study were significantly less likely to consider a given applicant if their email address included “cute” words or terms, multiple underscores, or anything else that seemed inappropriate for a job application. One can only imagine what their reaction might have been to the terms of endearment, double and triple entendre, or outright sexual references you occasionally see college students using as personal emails…

Now, we should probably also note that the study involved a relatively low number of participants, and also found that spelling errors, formatting errors, or even random changes in font would also have severely negative impacts on your chances of getting a job interview. But even accepting that further research to reproduce the results on a much larger scale would be necessary before we could formulate any hard-and-fast rules about email and employability, the fact that this study found any significant results at all is kind of amazing; rather like discovering that a shaggy-dog story you often tell over a few beers at the pub turns out to have solid scientific support. It makes me wonder how many of our other funny stories will turn out to be facts of life in the Internet age – and it brings home to me again that our world is changing in unexpected ways…

There are people my age, and even younger, who still don’t really “believe” in email – only use it when they are unable to avoid doing so, prefer to use voice, fax and even snail-mail whenever possible, and actually seem to believe that the whole thing will go away again if we all ignore it hard enough. This is understandable, of course; there have been those who stubbornly resist every new technology. What is rather more bizarre is that even people who love email and spend most of their time using a computer (including some people who grew up online and should really know better) don’t seem to grasp the inherent vulnerability of information you put online. Anything you write on the Internet will remain available somewhere no matter how hard you try to find it and expunge it, and no matter how romantic your email address seemed when you registered the account, it’s still going to be available to anyone who tries to communicate with you via email…

And none of this even mentions unfortunate email addresses created by work-based systems by combining letters of the user’s first and last names to create something completely obscene – but that is a story for another day…

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…

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 3^rd), 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…

History Lesson

In my last post I mentioned the idea that management is a simple mechanical science – insert this much input here, get that much output there, all things you could do with a basic logic circuit, never mind an actual robot. I am often critical of this behavior pattern, both in this space and in my actual job as a management instructor, but even I have to admit it’s an attractive idea. If all management decisions could be made using basic arithmetic there might be no need for me in either my business or academic professions, but there would also never be another management or policy mistake, all companies would be run perfectly all of the time, and no one would ever have to deal with any of the nonsense masquerading as management that have been a staple of my blog…

Much of this kind of thinking is blamed on one of the first management scientists, whom you may or may not have learned about in school: Frederick Winslow Taylor, founder of the school of thought known as scientific management, or occasionally “Taylorism.” Taylor was the first known researcher to actually study the process of work through scientific observation, and the first to suggest concepts like breaking down work into discrete tasks and training employees to do them the same way every time. It’s probably fair to say that Taylor had as much to do with the development of our modern industrialized culture as Henry Ford or either of the Carnegies. But Taylor was a mechanical engineer, not a psychologist, and much of scientific management breaks down along the exact lines we’ve been discussing for the last couple of weeks…

It wasn’t until the 1950s that the field of Industrial/Organizational Psychology really split off from both psychology and sociology, following the work of pioneers like Herbert Simon, James March, Richard Cyert, and Abraham Maslow. I’m not going to get into those theories in detail – partly because I have already made reference to so many of them in this space, and partly because we’re wandering away from business and off into even softer sciences at this point. I call this to your attention because the idea that all of the many management failures we’ve been seeing in recent years are because we don’t know any better is absolute hogwash…

I had over 300 students over the last academic year, and every one of them could have explained how a policy that rewards stubborn, aggressive and combative behavior and effectively punishes cooperation and courtesy will result in horrible customer service without a moment’s hesitation. Granted, they are exceptional students – they’re Spartans, after all – but this isn’t the only business school around. There are thousands, possibly millions, of people in this country who could easily do the same, and there have been since well before I was born. We have decades of data, hundreds of studies, and quite literally hordes of highly trained people in this field, albeit well-dressed hordes carrying briefcases. Yet still this type of idiocy remains not merely entrenched but unquestioned throughout the world of business…

I don’t actually believe that one passable business teacher and one scruffy blogger can change all of that, even if they do happen to be the same person. I do believe, however, that if I can get even one management professional to avoid making such mistakes, then neither my time as a teacher nor my time as a blogger have been wasted…

I Believe I Said That…

I picked up a link today that led me to a story about Wal-Mart executives calling the Company’s current stocking problem a “$3 billion opportunity.” I call it to your attention because this may be the most amazing piece of spin I have ever seen, and certainly the best I have seen in years. Anyone reading this quote (or the associated headlines) would most likely get the impression that senior management has identified new methods or policies regarding inventory control, inbound logistics, and internal distribution that will increase sales by as much as $3 billion each year (if not more)! Unfortunately, the truth is the executives running the Company have finally realized that if customers can’t find the product they want to purchase because there isn’t any on the shelves, not only will they not purchase it, but they will (eventually) get mad enough to take their business elsewhere. This might still be cheerful news, except the reason for Wal-Mart’s chronic out-of-stock conditions is the lack of personnel available to load more products onto the shelves – and that is the direct result of senior management attempting to squeeze more money out of each store by refusing to hire enough workers or employ them full-time…

You can pick up the original story on Bloomberg News if you want to; it has a lot of backup financial data and some really interesting quotes from some of the managers involved, but the basic story is clear enough. Over the last five years Wal-Mart has opened about 650 new stores, while at the same time their overall number of employees has dropped by about 20,000. Or, to look at it another way, during this period the total number of stores has increased by about 17% but the total number of people working in the stores has dropped by about 2% - a net loss of staffing that approaches one-sixth of the total hours available to keep a store running. As a result, there aren’t enough people to keep the shelves filled, resulting in an estimated $3 billion in lost sales – unless those numbers are net, rather than gross, in which case the company is actually losing $3 billion a year in revenue…

Now, as bad as that is, it’s still only part of the problem. Almost as serious as a lack of personnel is the issue of your available workers performing badly, and one of the key factors that can lower performance is stress – such as that of being yelled at by irate customers who can’t find the products they want, or of having to cover the responsibilities of multiple workers because management won’t hire enough people to get the job done, or not having the proper training to complete tasks because there’s no time to train people because of the artificially inflated work load, and so on. In fact, anything you do that makes working conditions worse will lower morale, making your existing employees less effective, and making your problems even worse. All of your best people will leave to find better jobs (or at least less awful ones) as soon as possible, resulting in positions that automatically select for the worst possible candidate, and the cycle will continue until you have no one available who can actually do the job, which will in turn result in unions forming, billions of dollars of sales being lost, or frequently both…

Readers of this blog (assuming I have readers) will recall that for years now I have been writing that any human resources policy that degrades working conditions will have a direct negative impact on revenue and profitability through lower employee performance, greater turnover, and a corresponding decline in the quality of the work force. I have never written about what would happen if a company’s hiring policies were so absurd that they did not hire enough people to keep their shelves filled because I could not imagine anyone stupid enough to do such a thing. But apparently somebody was, and it would seem that their idiotic staffing policies have gotten bad enough to where they are costing the company more money each year than 3,000 average people would earn in a lifetime…

I can’t speak for any of Wal-Mart’s stockholders, of course, but if the senior management of a company I owned shares in were trying to pass off a $3 billion blunder as an “opportunity” I might just be tempted to go to that year’s General Meeting and start demanding some answers – or hire a lawyer and start demanding that someone be held accountable for this total incompetence. I’ll keep you posted on this story while we wait to see what management does about the situation – and whether or not it helps…

Doing it Right

In yesterday’s post I posed the question: “What, apart from hiring good people without any specific experience, skills or training and finding things for them to do – in effect, hiring people with good minds and growing our own specific personnel – can we possibly do about the current failure of the recruiting and hiring system in America?” Strangely enough, it looks as though the answer might really be: What’s wrong with hiring good, talented people and then arranging the job tasks around what they do well?”

I posted the link to the PBS News site yesterday, but here it is again if you need it. In his post, the PBS commentator notes that creating a job description and then attempting to find applicants to fit it is a lot like creating a product and then looking for a market that wants to buy it – a common mistake that I’ve also criticized in this space. Even if you can produce a completely accurate description of exactly what the applicant will be doing if they are hired – and this is rarely possible except in the most menial and repetitious jobs – there is still no assurance that somebody with previous experience but without talent, high intelligence, a compatible personality or a strong work ethic will perform as well as someone who has never worked before but has all of those positive traits. In fact, the published research suggests that none of the factors commonly referenced in job descriptions or want ads is the key indicator of high performance…

If you read the organizational behavior and human resources research (not that I am suggesting for one moment that anyone ought to read the organizational behavior and human resources research) you will find that the key factors in performance are conscientiousness and generalized cognitive intelligence, commonly abbreviated as the “G-Factor” or simply as “G.” There are going to be some exceptions, of course; someone who does not speak a language will not be able to speak it until they learn how, no matter how conscientious or intelligent they happen to be, and someone without a counseling license cannot (legally) counsel you to do anything about your personal problems. But the vast majority of employers will require that any particular job be done according to their specific standards, and many companies will insist on training (or re-training) new personnel to meet those standards regardless of any previous experience. Or, to put it another way, if you are going to train people to do things your way anyway, doesn’t it make sense to start with the best people?

Managers as a rule tend to assign tasks to whichever of their subordinates is best at that task; anything else would be a sub-optimal use of their resources. As a result, the employee doing any given task may not be the one who was hired to do that task, but rather the one who is the most competent. This concept takes that practice to its logical conclusion: advocating that the company assemble a pool of intelligent, talented, hard-working people and then assign each of them to complete tasks on the basis of ability and suitability rather than arbitrary job title or classification. Naturally, this will require a high degree of flexibility and improvisation on the part of the managers involved, and willingness on the part of the human resources department to put aside simple checklists and formal rating systems and actually consider the specific applicants who are available…

Which explains why, despite the relatively simplicity of the concept, and nearly a century of Management research to back up all of these contentions, there does not appear to be any major company using this method as of Fall 2013. I’m not saying that anyone out there could implement this kind of change by fiat, or by throwing a switch in the system somewhere. What I am advocating here would be a complete revolution in the way companies are staffed and managed, every bit as radical as Scientific Management in its own time. It would require the emergence of an actual profession of mangers, chosen for their ability to match employees with tasks, and resources with requirements, rather than the accident of their birth or the details of their previous work history – and no one in the world is likely to accept that idea without massive resistance. And yet, it’s the first thing we’ve seen to date that might actually give rise to the practice of management the way it should actually be…

Doing it Wrong

For many years now I’ve been railing against human resources practices that make no bloody sense, mostly because I’m a management professional and such things offend me, but also because I’ve seen far too many cases where failure of this fundamental business function has eventually brought down an otherwise sound company. Regular readers of this space (assuming I have readers) have heard me pointing out that no position in any company is there because the owners are wonderful people and want to contribute money to someone for no particular reason – all jobs exist because doing them will either generate money for the organization (through production, sales, research or what have you) or prevent the organization from losing money (through fines, lawsuits, taxes, etc.). All of that is true enough – and this is why working managers so often have issues with the Human Resources department taking too long to get them the replacement personnel they need. But that may still only be the tip of the proverbial iceberg…

If you have ever posted a resume onto Monster, or Career Builder, or even networking sites like Linked-In, you’ve probably already had the experience of getting sent dozens of “opportunities” that have nothing to do with any career path you’ve ever considered, simply because a single keyword in your file matches something in the description. These are frequently harmless accidents made by badly-defined searches, such as when a Program Manager gets sent job listings for an HTML programmer or a Manager of a Java programming project, but increasingly we’re seeing it used fraudulently, to flood users with offers for “opportunities” with commission-only sales jobs, MLM schemes, “purchase-required” management positions, and outright scams (to the extent there is any distinction between those categories). Or worse still, as a means of targeting millions of people with outright SPAM messages about for-profit colleges and training programs no one could possibly want…

Almost as bad, in my opinion, are those occasions when you apply directly for a posted job on a company website and are unable to get the attention of a recruiter because the site is being bombarded by tens of thousands of “applicants” who are simply applying for every posting they find, regardless of whether they have any qualifications whatsoever. Given this huge volume of slush, many HR departments have no choice but to search the applications by keyword, and if their search isn’t quite wide enough (e.g. if you missed the one specific term they are basing all of their searches on when you wrote your resume) they may not be able to find you amid all of the noise…

A post from the Ask the Headhunter column on the PBS News Hour site points out that the situation is being compounded by the fact that most of the time the companies that are looking for new personnel aren’t writing good job descriptions in the first place, or using selection methods that make any bloody sense once they do get applicants in for interview. We already knew that college GPA and scores from GMAT or SAT exams don’t predict job performance, but recent studies indicate that even in-house placement tests, or the puzzle questions so beloved of new-age employers like Google, offer no indication of how well a given applicant will perform if they are actually hired. And even that fails to consider those cases where the new hire ends up doing exactly none of the tasks detailed in description of the job for which they’ve applied…

It would appear that the PBS News commentator has a point when he claims that the recruiting and hiring system in America (and possibly other Western countries) is broken. The real question seems to be what, apart from hiring good people without any specific experience, skills or training and finding things for them to do – in effect, hiring people with good minds and growing our own specific personnel – can we possibly do about this?

(To be Continued…)

The Ethics of Beauty

A while back I brought you the story of a dating website for “beautiful” people only which is now branching out into an employment service, also for candidates who are (or believe themselves to be) of exceptional aesthetic quality. I’m not going to comment on the ethics of hiring someone on the basis of looks over any other consideration because there is no other side to that argument; any company that hires on any basis other than ability (and primarily on cognitive ability, at that) and retains/promotes on any basis other than performance is not likely to succeed – and we’ve got nearly a century worth of Management research to back up that contention. But what about cases where the only feature distinguishing two applicants is their appearance? Do we have an ethical responsibility to make the decision blindly – in this case, literally? It seems worth discussing…

The affirmative argument would appear to be that in almost any field of human enterprise there will be occasions where an attractive person has an advantage over an unattractive one. There are professions where this effect is exaggerated or even central to performance – acting, dancing, modeling, some forms of customer service or sales, travel (tour guides and flight attendants, for example) and so on, but even in purely white-collar business there will be occasions that favor a visually attractive employee. Again, this is supported by the research. If we accept that the role of any manager is to maximize performance and thereby increase profitability, and that the odds of achieving higher performance are better with a good-looking workforce, it seems reasonable that we should attempt to hire one. It could even be argued that we have a fiduciary responsibility to the owners of our company to improve its financial performance, if not in fact an ethical one as well…

The negative argument is somewhat more complex, as being visually unattractive does not yield any particular advantages in and of itself. In a broader sense, however, one could argue that such a hiring policy will almost certainly be viewed as elitist and/or discriminatory by other individuals and groups, since visual attractiveness is usually associated with economic class distinctions. There could also be issues with employees being insulted or even threatened by the idea that they were hired for their looks, and not because the hiring manager also believes that their abilities and skills were at least comparable to any other candidates. Whether this external resentment and internal erosion of confidence would be sufficient to offset the advantages of such a workforce would depend on a large number of variables, of course, but should not simply be ignored…

In reality, of course, it is highly unusual to find any two applicants for any position with identical skills and abilities, let alone experience, personality, networks and connections or other factors to the extent that the only identifiable difference between them is their visual appearance. Most of the time a hiring manager will have the unenviable task of assigning values, or at least priorities, to each of the assets that a given applicant could bring to the job, and trying to determine which of those applicants would be the best fit for their organization. There is also the issue that visual attractiveness is a matter of personal taste, and what appeals to the hiring manager may or may not be the appearance best suited to gaining a competitive advantage in the future circumstances. In fact, even factors such as charisma, leadership ability or management skills may be completely subjective – which is what leads me to today’s question:

Do we, as hiring managers, have an ethical responsibility to make personnel decisions based entirely on the objective skills, abilities as assets an applicant has, leaving aside all aesthetic criteria? Or, to look at it another way, does our responsibility to be fair and impartial in all management decisions require us to ignore a possible source of competitive advantage simply because possession of that resource is beyond the applicant’s control? Basketball teams hire tall players over ones of excellent moral character or with wonderful personalities, to take the obvious example. And certainly no question would exist in cases where a give applicant’s skills and abilities are clearly superior, regardless of his or her appearance. But do we have an ethical responsibility to ignore everything else about an applicant?

It’s worth thinking about…

In the Resource-Based View

Some time ago in this space I brought up the concept known in Management theory as the Resource-Based View of the Firm, or RBV. It’s a staple of strategic-level Management classes which suggests that it is the resources a firm controls – and how well they are utilized by the management team – that determines how successful a given business is going to be. I could tell you that the concept derives from the work of Edith Penrose in 1959 but is more commonly associated with Wernerfeldt in 1984 and Jay Barney’s definitive work in 1991, but if you actually cared about any of that you’d probably be studying it already. A more useful discussion would be how this concept can be of use to your business now. Fortunately, a possible example turned up in yesterday’s post about hiring decisions based on physical appearance…

In the Resource-Based View, any given resource must have four basic characteristics in order give you a sustainable competitive advantage: value, rarity, inimitability and being difficult to substitute for or work around. Needless to say, perhaps, there is considerable disagreement over what “sustainable” means in terms of time frame, as well as how each of these characteristics should be defined, but in general the structure holds up surprisingly well. If a give resource isn’t valuable it probably can’t help you; if it isn’t rare, everyone else will probably have one just like it; if it is easy to imitate you can count on the competition doing just that, and if it is easy to find something else you can substitute for it you can probably assume that people will consider a cheaper or more readily available substitute. What a lot of people seem to forget is that this model can be applied to more than just physical assets…

It would be facile, I think, to deny that in many fields of endeavor there is a definite advantage to being visually attractive. The research is fairly conclusive that people will tend to respond to someone they think of as good-looking in a number of useful ways, many of which are not conscious or even obvious. Most occupations will require the use of various skills in addition, and those that do not involve personal contact will provide minimal opportunities to capitalize on appearance, but in general I believe it is safe to say that an attractive appearance has value. It is also, by definition rare, at least in the sense used in yesterday’s story (e.g. the top 10% of applicants on the basis of appearance only). Whether or not it can be imitated is highly debatable; an individual person’s appearance might be unique, but within any given population you would expect to find multiple attractive people. Substitutability is also highly debatable; there are some advantages that can be achieved another way, but nothing that exactly replaces a good-looking workforce…

In theory, if a given resource can be imitated or a substitute for it can be found, it will only be a matter of time before some competitor does that and your competitive advantage is lost – hence a temporary, rather than sustainable advantage can be gained. With reference to yesterday’s story, the more complex issue here is whether the temporary advantage you might be able to gain by using this service to recruit a more visually attractive workforce is sufficient to offset the disadvantages you will incur by passing up better-qualified but less attractive workers, decreased morale when your employees realize they’ve been hired for their looks, not because you have confidence in their abilities, and the fact that your competition will almost certainly hire the more competent but slightly less attractive workers…

That’s a decision you will have to make, of course, based on your experience, judgment, and knowledge of your industry. And this still does not address the ethics of the situation…

An Ugly Truth, or a Beautiful Lie?

There are times when I’m out wandering around the Web, looking for business news to mock, ridicule or praise, when I come upon a story that makes me wonder if someone is having a joke at my expense – if I am being trolled, to use the current expression. Some of these are fairly obvious (like the genius that was PenguinWarehouse.com), and some are actually disappointing, like the site that claimed to be offering “pirate hunting” cruises off the Horn of Africa (complete with your choice of gun and ammo!). But some just aren’t clear, like the one about the dating web site catering exclusively to visually attractive subscribers…

I’m not going to link to it; even if it’s not actually a scam or a practical joke, I don’t really think they should be encouraged. But you’ve probably seen the story, or heard about it some other news source. Unlike most dating sites, which will generally accept anyone who swears they aren’t a sex offender and lets their membership work out who is attractive enough for whom on their own, beautifulpeople.com claims to screen applicants for aesthetic quality before allowing them to join, and promises to de-list anyone who is found wanting by a significant percentage of their members. How they do this profitably isn’t clear; nor is how they keep people from sending them doctored photographs or re-applying with one if they have been previously voted off…

The story which broke this week and eventually percolated up into the MSN Nowwebsite indicates that this stunt (or joke, if it is one) has now been taken to the next level: the site is now offering a recruitment service as well. Prospective employers who specifically want to hire the most attractive people available to fill an open position can use this service to select applicants for interview based on their appearance. Again, it isn’t clear from the news stories what recourse you would have if the applicants you called in for interview were not as attractive (or skilled) as advertised – or, for that matter, what recourse the applicants would have if someone asks them to come to an interview solely for the purpose of propositioning them…

Whether any of this would actually be legal isn’t clear either. Visually unappealing people are not a protected class under Federal law, and the company behind this site isn’t imposing any standards about what is or is not attractive in the first place. If your interviewees included people from all ethnicities, ages, backgrounds and so on (all of whom happen to be visually attractive) it would be difficult to claim discrimination on any of those bases; it would be even harder to prove if you actually hired a diverse cross-section of demographics. And even if discrimination on the basis of attractiveness was actionable, there really are jobs for which visual appearance is a factor...

A more immediate question would be whether you can get the best employees for any particular position if you are limiting the applicant pool to this extent. The popular image of attractive people being less capable because they get by on their looks is a myth; I’ve met some exceptionally talented good-looking people, and some completely incompetent ugly ones. But if you are only interviewing the top 10% of all applicants based on their appearance, you probably aren’t interviewing the top 10% of all applicants in terms of ability. Unless looking good is their single most important duty there is a non-zero chance that you are deliberately impairing your company’s performance by doing this…

Of course, this whole concept is also questionable from a moral and ethical standpoint, both for the hiring manager who uses this service and for the applicant who posts a resume (and, one assumes, a picture) to this database. But that’s a discussion for another day…

The Ethics of Interviews

Let’s try this one as another hypothetical. Suppose for a moment that you are a hiring manager, attempting to fill a critical position within your organization, and that you have an internal candidate for the job who you feel will be the ideal choice. We will stipulate that there is no ulterior motive involved; the internal candidate isn’t the CEO’s nephew, or your sister’s boyfriend, or the person who gets everyone in your work group the really good prices on cheese curds from the local dairy. We will also stipulate that there is no particular objection to hiring this person on diversity/EOE or other regulatory grounds. Do we have an ethical obligation to publish the opening and accept applications from outside the organization before making a hiring decision?

In the United States there are Federal laws that require us to offer equal opportunity to all applicants, but I refer here to an ethical, rather than legal, obligation to do this. Even assuming that circumstances would allow us to forgo any additional search for candidates and proceed with the hiring of our internal candidate, should we consider external applicants for the position? As usual, the question isn’t as straightforward as you might think…

On the one hand, we have a fiduciary responsibility to the owners of the company (the stockholders, if we are a publicly-held corporation) to spend as little of their money on extraneous matters as possible. If we can avoid the expenses associated with a full-on search for additional applicants we are obligated to do so. At the same time, promotion from within is good for morale, which will increase worker satisfaction, improve productivity, and thereby also improve the performance of the company, to the benefit of the owners and everyone who works there as well. But what if we’re wrong about the internal candidate being the best one available?

By the same token, our responsibility to the owners, the employees, and the other stakeholders requires us to find the best choice for this position, not just the most expedient choice. If there is a better candidate available for the job, and we never become aware of that person because we do not advertise the position, interview other applicants, or do anything beyond simply approving our internal candidate for the job, then we have not truly fulfilled our responsibilities as the management team. But the existence of a better candidate is an unknown (and generally unknowable) possibility, and even if such an individual exists he or she may not apply, or accept the position if it is offered. Meanwhile, we have established that conducting a search for additional applicants will require resources (time and money) that will not be available for other purposes, as well as potentially damaging morale…

Which leads me to the question: Does our responsibility to obtain the best possible employees for any given position supersede our responsibility to contain costs, improve employee morale, and take care of our existing workers? Or does our responsibility to manage the company’s assets and maintain stability and profitability supersede our responsibility to seek out the best resources, human and otherwise, that are available to the company? Or can we simply take refuge in the applicable state or Federal laws, conduct applicant searches and interviews that comply with the regulations placed upon us by our respective nations, and let the proverbial chips fall where they may?

It’s worth thinking about…

The Ethics of Screening

Once again, let me being by assuring everyone that I have no issues, ethical or otherwise, with the constructs that prevent insects from flying into your house, upon which you watch movies, or with which your t-shirts are decorated; the screening I refer to today is the use of test questions asked of job applicants in advance of your interviewing them. This is hardly a new practice; the use of telephone screenings predates the existence of the Internet and most of its current users, and the use of intermediaries to lower the number of applicants you personally have to speak with predates the Industrial Revolution and possibly the rise of human civilization. But given the new technologies being used for these procedures, and the potential for abuse in the Internet era, it seemed worth discussing further…

With the rise of Internet job search services like Monster and Career Builder the traditional task of weeding out the applicant pool has expanded by several orders of magnitude – because so has the size of that pool. Before these systems were available it took time and cost money to apply for a job – there was the cost of typing a cover letter and the expense of printing a copy of your resume on nice paper, not to mention postage to get it there. Consequently, most job seekers were limited in the number of resumes they could send out, and would elect to concentrate their resources on jobs for which they actually qualified. Today, applying for a job is as cheap and simple as pushing a button, and millions of people apparently do this without even bothering to look at the job description…

To counter this, many companies have taken to using automated systems that can use the incoming applications and materials to create a database, which they then mine for applicants who might actually prove suitable for the job. Unfortunately, some of these work better than others, and even very good human resources software is far from perfect, resulting in many applicants who would otherwise be ideal being excluded on the basis of minutiae like formatting and font size, while many others who should never have applied in the first place end up clogging up the works. Clearly there is a saving in salaries to be realized by not having to pay people to dig through this mountain of useless resumes, but if the optimal applicant is not selected for interview (and therefore not hired) there will be a non-zero cost as well…

Then there’s the use of telephone or Internet-based testing. Phone interviews clearly offer an opportunity to use human discretion and judgment when evaluating applicants, but they put hearing-impaired applicants and anyone who particularly dislikes telephone conversations (it’s more common than you might think) at a significant disadvantage. Internet-based assessment tests eliminate the awkwardness of trying to persuade someone who can’t see you (and whom you can’t see) to hire you, but they impart a significant disadvantage to anyone who can’t see well, can’t type well, or does not perform well on standardized tests (computerized or otherwise). In fact, some of the number-sequence and reading-based questions are so disproportionately difficult to some applicants (dyslexics, for example) as to be questionable under the Americans with Disabilities Act…

All of which leads me to ask: do we have an ethical responsibility to give all applicants an equal chance to be selected for interview, and an equal chance to make their case for why they should be hired? If so, does that responsibility over-ride our fiduciary responsibility to our ownership group to contain recruiting costs? Can we ethically use electronic and/or telephone screenings knowing that some worthwhile people will be denied the opportunity to work for us because they will be unjustly screened out? Can we responsibly use such methods knowing that in some cases the best applicants will be incorrectly screened out, resulting in financial loss to our company? Or should we just leave matters up to the hiring managers involved, and let them make the choices they are being employed by the company to make anyway?

It’s worth thinking about…