If some of the companies who list with us actually hired the kind of people they say they want in their job descriptions, they'd be mighty unhappy. Take the big companies that describe the kind of people they want as "self-motivated self-starters." Many of those companies wouldn't have the faintest notion of how to handle a self-motivated self-starter. And if they happened by mistake to hire one, he'd probably be out on his ear within six months.
Even when the criteria for selection are carefully defined and clearly relevant, organizations have difficulty determining which candidates measure up best against these criteria. At least half of the published advertisements for managerial and professional positions include "excellent written and oral communication skills" as a criterion for selection and success. Yet, few companies routinely ask for writing samples or require candidates to write something while visiting the site.
The truth is that most organizations make decisions regarding human resources in strikingly unsystematic ways. A Wall Street Journal article from January of 1991, for example, reported on high-tech companies issuing pink slips to engineers in one department while hunting desperately for engineers in another. The same article cited the case of a large insurance company laying off thousands of seasoned managers while having difficulty finding enough budget analysts. Situations like these suggest that organizations often do a poor job of anticipating personnel needs, of finding people to meet them, and of providing current employees with the training and motivation needed to maintain productivity in rapidly changing economic circumstances.
What's more, interviews, which play a large part in most hiring decisions, introduce a vast arena for the operation of biases. In the labor market, a bias is any preference for one candidate over another based on characteristics that bear little or no relation to job performance. Sexual and gender biases, racial biases, ethnic biases, socioeconomic biases, biases against people who are overweight, biases against people who are short. . . the list seems endless because just about any difference between two people can serve as a motive for bias.
When personal interviews figure prominently in hiring decisions, personal biases also figure prominently. For example, few people would claim that height is a good predictor of managerial and professional performance. Yet, because our culture values tallness, the taller of two candidates is more likely to be chosen when interviews are a critical factor in hiring decisions. Unfortunately, the tallness bias-like many other biases-usually enters the decision-making process without the decision maker being aware of its operation. Because biases often operate below the level of awareness, their influence on decisions generally remains concealed until large numbers of decisions are analyzed using sophisticated statistical techniques.
The realities of hiring procedures in most organizations may seem troubling, but if you understand them, you will have a great advantage over more naive searchers because you can use your knowledge to formulate a search strategy that reflects reality, not wishful thinking. Your job hunt will be most successful-and least damaging to your self-esteem-if based on the following insights:
- Chance and bias play large roles in hiring decisions.
- Little is known about the requirements for competent performance in managerial and professional positions.
- Even when reasonable criteria for evaluating candidates have been identified, measuring candidates against them remains a subjective process influenced by a variety of cultural, organizational, and personal factors.
- A candidate can influence only a fraction of the variables involved in any given hiring decision.
- Relatively few jobs are widely posted or advertised, so getting a good job usually requires talking to the right people at the right times, which in turn means talking to many people many times.
- Your chances of getting a good job increase substantially if you use a variety of information sources to locate opportunities, rather than relying only on postings, advertisements, headhunters, or agencies.
- Your chances of finding good work soon are not very high if you simply ship off your credentials to a hundred or so likely places and wait for one or more of them to discover a potential fit between your abilities and its personnel needs.
