Recruitment Policies and Fallacies
Look at all the organizations and businesses out there who are recruiting, whether through public advertising/canvassing or through internal/external references. There’s a trend that everyone is following, a traditional HR practice.
Specify the educational background – Top 10 B-Schools, must have scored blah blah %
Specify the experience/industry background – Must be from the top FMCG companies with ‘Relevant Experience’
Then the background checking, what was his/her last rating? Was he a STAR performer? Was he average? Or Bad?
Well, to a certain extent, it gives the recruiter a well filtered pool and IDEALLY, a fantastic employee. How frequently does that happen? In the real world? Rarely.
The Top 10 B-Schools, even the Top 200 B-Schools DO NOT guarantee that their products are all winners. That they will all make successful employees and the organization after recruiting them will live happily ever after.
The most loved and cherished organizations may not have leaders who qualify as above but they have built a culture which promotes employee engagement, enhance their productivities and deliver as required. Because of the Leader, whose qualifications and background does not matter, his attitude and work ethics do.
It is a well known psychological truth that Managers do not recruit people better than they themselves, nor can they rate their team better than their own selves. Only good leaders do that. So how would a person’s earlier rating reflect on his/her true capabilities?
Until and unless you are recruiting a purely technical person e.g. an IT programmer, application developer, doctor, engineer, Chef etc. educational background stops mattering after a few years of working.
Your knowledge can be tested, the institute you came out of may not reflect the true level of that knowledge. A sales person cannot sell only one type of product, if he’s good, he’ll be able to sell anything, irrespective of the industry he/she comes from. Same for a customer service person.
On the contrary, such diversity in recruitment policies (and I don’t mean the gender one) provides a fresher perspective, if not fresher ideas. In a new completely different industry, the new joinee looks at things with an uncluttered mind, provides new and different feedback. This can then lead to introspection and maybe radical change leading to process betterment.
To the Organization, this is a much better approach than the traditional blinkered one but primarily the HR department has to be visionary and the operational team has to buy in to that vision.
Already, a few organizations have done this and reaped mixed results. Not because of any flaws in this line of radical approach, but they have not gone the whole hog on it. Maybe from a different industry, but still has to be from Top 50 B-School. Have to accept a reference from a top boss. But it doesn’t work that way, all or nothing.
The best talent from the IIT’s/IIM’s are shunning the corporate world and giving shape to their entrepreneurial or philanthropic dreams. Look at Sachin and Binny Bansal, they didn’t work for Amazon, they built Flipkart!
The world is full of average employees, working in whichever company took them in. They may not have come through the hallowed portals of an IIT or IIM, but they would have handled teams with far more aplomb than is taught in those institutions.
They would have faced situations, not part of any training manual and have survived and learnt from those. Is it not better to utilize these skills and experiences than to look for theoretical excellence born out of handed down traditional practices?
So, what next?
We will never know, till someone treads this new grass and makes a path of his/her own. Someone who will not look at reduced induction or training costs but at adding genuine talent, an average Joe or Jane who is just a graduate and an average reputation but with an wealth of experience he/she will curious to dip into.
Will that happen? Maybe and it should. When will it happen? Soon, most people would have run out of ideas on how to frame that recruitment AD, innovation, if any, has to happen now….
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