When reading the thoughts of my peers in the recruiting profession, I have to admit I become a little surprised at how many have really had a chance to hire people. While aside from a couple of assistants in recruiting groups I have managed, I actually have never hired anyone. Usually that has been the hiring manager’s job.

Recruiters play a vital role in the process that includes:

• Attracting applicants: advertising, networking, job fairs.
• Creating candidates: processing and screening applicants.
• Monitoring or managing the interview process: directly or by way of HR.
• Processing offers: directly or by way of HR.
• Performing background and reference checks: directly or through third-party.
• Third-party vendor management: agencies, job boards, software.
• Help planning the holiday party: just kidding.

But none of the above starts until a hiring manager says, “I need to hire somebody.” Then sometime in the future and a couple of interviews later, the hiring manager comes back to the office and says, “This is the one I want to hire.”

Now, this may seem just a little nitpicking, but whenever the discussion turns to measuring performance or process metrics, the phrase always pops up, “Determine performance by time of hire and quality of hire.”

Neither is in direct control of the recruiter. Creating a methodology of performance measurement in this environment that includes time to hire and quality of hire is the equivalent of taking your driver’s test from the back seat of the car.

As my old pappy used to say, “If you ain’t holding the wheel, you ain’t driving the car.”

(Actually, Dad was from South Boston and would have burned holes in me with his stare if I ever called him “pappy”, but when spinning cornbread, pappy seems more appropriate than dad.)

Now, a good recruiter can enhance a process and make it more efficient through their overall industry knowledge and relationship-building with their hiring managers.

However, consider the following:

• Can a recruiter overcome an inefficient hiring manager? (Hmmmm?maybe this one?no, no?maybe this one?hmmm?no, no?)
• Can a recruiter overcome a bad company reputation? (FOX News Headline, “XYZ Corp. shipped another 2,000 jobs overseas?film at eleven.”)
• Can a recruiter overcome a bad process neither designed nor controlled by them? (?only after the fourth interview, but before the seventh, unless of course this is an accelerated process requiring a signoff from both the resident and department monitor?)
• Can a recruiter require quality and process adherence upward? (”Look here, boss, the policy manual you just threw in the wastebasket clearly states?”)
• Can a recruiter force hiring managers to have a fair and balanced candidate evaluation process? (”I know this one looks good on paper?but my gut tells me?” Good Lord! It’s his gut again!)
• Can a recruiter control third-party vendor relationships with hiring managers? (David, sending you a resume, look it over and call me. By the way, we haven’t played a round of golf in ages?call me.)

(That steering wheel just keeps moving further and further away, doesn’t it?)

Before a company can judge the performance of the recruiting staff, it must first judge their own performance in supporting the recruiting staff. In other words, it is not only a question of the recruiter being worthy of the company, but rather, is the company worthy of the recruiter?

Here are a few examples to consider:

• A job requisition closed 45 days after it opens, with the hiring manager authorizing an offer to the candidate he first interviewed after 15 days. How long did it really take to fill this requisition?
• A candidate is hired with no BA or the prerequisite number of years’ experience outlined in the original job requisition as “preferred” but not required. In theory, it’s not the highest level of quality job matching. But there were four candidates also under consideration with all job requisitions point met and covered. But the candidate hired came from the same hometown as the hiring manager. The final factor considered in the hiring decision was that they were former “Fighting Titans.” Was the quality of the job requisition not achieved due to recruiting?
• The workload of the recruiter required assigning priorities based on the importance of the positions to the company’s stated goals. However, a politically connected manager was able to get their mid-level priority jobs assigned full-priority status. Not all critical staffing was met and the company goals were not 100% achieved. Was this due to the inability of the recruiter to manage tasks?

I obviously loaded the above examples to the extreme to prove a point. Yet in each instance, the recruiter did not achieve his or her full potential due to circumstances they did not control but clearly effected the perception of their performance.

So, if you want to measure a recruiter’s performance, make sure you measure the performance of the process, including the performance of the non-recruiting management staff in following and enforcing stated company policy.

Other Metrics to Consider

• Time to recognize hire. The number of days the resume of the candidate hired was in the hands of the hiring manager.
• Quality of not hired. A comparison of the top five applicants for a particular position plotted on a graph based on skill-matching. The hiring manager is required to stipulate the “no” decision on the four not hired.
• Process override. Anytime a decision is made outside of common practice, policy, or standard process is signed off on by the manager making that decision. For example, not selecting the top ranked candidate in the example above.
• Vendor relationship disclosure. When a vendor-client relationship extends outside the office the hiring manager must disclose all contacts, social engagement, meals, and gifts exchanged to ensure undo influence is not a factor in hiring decisions. (Especially when questions arise from “Quality of Not Hired” which involved a third-party candidate.)
• Recruiter’s review. A recruiter’s review of the performance of a hiring manager based on objective measurements such as response time, availability for meetings and interviews, resume/job requisition matching, follow-up.

If a company doesn’t enforce their own staffing policies and practices and doesn’t require compliance from the non-recruiting staff involved in the process, then the only fault I can find with the recruiting staff is the obviously bad choice they made in employers.

If a company is willing to police their hiring managers to ensure they meet and comply with published staffing practices and policies and implement a disciplinary process for those who fail to comply, then it’s possible to also develop effective metrics and measurements for recruiters.

• Pricing
• Lead-Lag (anticipated procurement request fulfillment timeline)
• Quantities available
• Historically successful suppliers
• Alternative resources
• Alternative products

All too often we accept the role of the supplier without supplies, rather than forecasters accurately predicting issues and equally effective as those with alterative recommendations. We have inherited a plethora of online tools that we readily use to develop reports on what we have done. But rarely do we use these tools to forecast what cannot be done, or indicate what cannot be done easily. Based on the groups you support, develop a traditional “supplies list” comprised of those skills and professional or education profiles most often sought by your business partners. Using your resume search databases, develop an available inventory list that shows how many candidates, at what level, in your immediate geographical search area are currently “in the market,” and further, how many openings are currently available for those skills. For example, there may be a sense of security in knowing that within a 50-mile radius there are 2,347 candidates with on-line accounting experience using your companies tools of choice. However, if there are currently 2,348 posted openings for this skill requirement, what appears to be an abundant supply suddenly becomes less ample. Further research outside your preferred geographical boundaries may show a larger supply less stressed by demand. A good supplier may recommend for future procurement needs that the end user consider either adjusting their demands to accept relocation or “off site” employment in certain areas. The solutions may be rejected, but if your client has access to this information before they commit to a course of action your role in the process has at least predicted alternatives and forecasted supply issues rather than merely seen as incapable of meeting supply requests. Further research with employment support groups at universities and other learning centers can be an effective way of predicting short-term and intermediate supply issues, as well as long-term trends. Contact the learning centers you most often recruit from or appear most often on the resumes of those you hire. Ask them for information on the number of students currently pursuing degrees or certificates in those areas you most often seek in candidates. In addition, ask them about their current placement rates and the number of “openings” they are supporting for other companies. Is the activity up or down? Is the number of enrollments in these areas up or down? Is your supply stream, even if currently adequate, going up or down? Functionaries eagerly develop reports and grand charts on what has already happened. Professionals develop information profiles to predict the future. Realistic Procurement If finding talent is going to be an issue in the future, then it is necessary that you work with your end user in the development of realistic procurement requirements. In the absence of “stainless steel” parts and a subsequent increase in cost, would this not be a good time to engage in a dialogue with the end user on the true importance of stainless steel as opposed to other materials? The job description is that procurement request that we all too often allow ourselves to distance ourselves from in the development stages to guarantee our right to complain about unrealistic demands. It also ensures our right to be viewed as inadequate. It is essential that, having made your hiring managers aware of the sate of the supply stream, you manage the process of ensuring this information is used. Are the critical skill requirements truly critical? What is the list of viable alternatives, and what is the availability of those alternatives as opposed to the skill of choice? Is the difference worth the added effort and increased likelihood of certain difficulty or possible failure? If a certain skill requirement has been the reason for a job search to average 90 days, but the skill can be taught in a 30-day certificate course, is the former still the preferred course of action over hiring without the skill and incorporate training as part of the procurement process? Although we all want to have a positive “can do” image with our end users, the truth is the statement has no value if in fact the traditional outcome has been “sort of done randomly.” Suppliers cannot make parts out of thin air. The raw material either exists or it does not. HR/staffing cannot fill orders for materials that either do not exist or are in demand beyond the supply chain’s ability to manufacture them. But we must be willing to be the predictors of bad news rather than merely accept our role as part of the failure message. Communicating With Suppliers Because of our self-generated image of being too busy today to worry about tomorrow, we usually treat our suppliers with disdain or impatience when we do not need them. We expect the water to pour out of the faucet when we decide to turn it on. If the water does not gush forth, obviously it is due to a poorly motivated supplier. But suppliers have a finite resource with a limited shelf life. Without input from the end users, they will continue to supply those who communicate with them. Lead-lag is a function of communication. A good customer never ceases to broadcast their current need and their forecasted requirements. They constantly provide feedback to their suppliers on their level of satisfaction with the inventory maintenance of the existing supply. Suppliers will respond to input by working their lines of supply to meet the demand of those clients who give them the input they require to remain relevant. Although this effort can and should be done as individual procurement professionals, there is a need for us to consider taking this effort to another level which will be discussed later. Re-Engineering Existing Supplies Every company has an existing inventory of parts and components. As the needs of the company changes, many of these parts become obsolete, or automatically assumed as such. The natural instinct is to “unload” the old parts to make room for newer components ordered. A good supply department also tracks the cost of re-engineering those components, as opposed to writing off the original cost of procurement and replacing them with other components also doomed to one day become an inventory issue. In our field, this re-engineering is a function of training. In the past we have relied on and assumed our hiring managers were already taking this alternative course of action into account when making their procurement decisions. The truth is, sadly, all too often they do not. Equally as sad, we do not recommend they do it, usually out of ignorance.

• What is the greatest “new” skill sought by your hiring managers?
• Where can this skill be taught?
• How long does it take?
• What is the cost?
• Can the supply issues you face be resolved by re-engineering/training?

But all the above actually fall into the category of HR 101 for thinking HR professionals. The time has come for us to stop thinking small, and consider the total issue of supply and demand and learn how to “demand as an industry” and not merely satisfy ourselves with “asking as an employer.” This will be the focus of the final installment in this series. It will require mentally and physically leaving the confines of your cubicle, office, and the “me and my company only” way of thinking and taking your first bold step into the world of business, and impact and influence in that business world. You know, taking action ó like all the other professionals. Have a great day recruiting!

• Glacier awareness. During the ice age, the glaciers spread from their current narrow confines to cover most of the northern hemisphere. During the unusually long winters, the glaciers progress could be measured in miles. However, during the short periods of relative warmth each year, they would recede a fraction of the distance gained. Thus one could say on a bright, sunny day in 12,000 B.C., “See, the ice is receding!” But if that person did not move away from the face of the glacier before the colder seasons returned ó well, keeping food frozen would be the least of their worries. “Inevitable” is not a measure of the time required for an end result to occur, nor is it a guarantee of a constant measured progression toward that outcome. It is merely a statement of that outcome’s eventual transition from “pending” to “arrived.” The current recession is not evidence of a labor shortage reversal. At 3% unemployment in the 1990s, companies scrambled and doubled salaries to meet, barely, staffing goals. At 6% unemployment, many companies feel a false sense of security as pertains to talent acquisition. Can we truly feel secure in the labor pool’s ability to meet future staffing needs with only a three-point separation between feast and famine? As we say in New England, “The glaciers haven’t disappeared; they’ve just gone back to get more rocks.”
• Titanic syndrome. Many of the passengers on the Titanic refused to believe in the possibility that they were in peril. The repeated frantic warnings by the crew actually served to placate many into disbelief, “See, they said we were sinking twenty minutes ago, fifteen minutes ago, ten minutes ago, and then five minutes after that, and yet here we are still afloat! The crew is just panicking.” Many of these disbelievers clung to this form of self-denial right up to the 200-fathom mark. The extended period of warning is not an indication that the warning is inaccurate, nor should repeated warnings serve to dilute the sense of urgency to respond. It could merely prove that that the warning is timely. Its repetition should not serve to lessen the message, but rather as a reminder that the lifeboats are filling up while you are still dressing for dinner.
• The disappearing/reappearing auto industry. During the latter part of the ’70s and early part of the ’80s, the predictions flew that the exodus of American consumers from American-built cars to foreign-built cars would spell the doom of American automotive manufacturing forever. Good-bye autoworkers! Well, 25 years later, the big three are still going strong, and many of the automotive jobs in Europe and Asia have relocated back to the U.S., including many of those jobs making “foreign cars” in the U.S. for American consumption. Is the auto industry the same as it was in the 1950s? No. But do we watch black and white TV, listen to 45s on mono-portable record players, draft teenagers into the Army, or have rotary dial phones? Not all change is bad, it is merely inevitable. You either predict and profit from change, or you watch it march by clinging to the way things used to be and thinking in the frame of reference of the past. The trick is not to make the common error of looking at a symptom and proclaiming it a disease. A fever is a symptom of the flu, not the illness itself. In other words, problems are usually multilayered and interactive. Single source assumptions accompanied by similar solutions are inevitability wrong and always counterproductive.

Agreed, there is always the chance that the predictors of doom and disaster are either flat-out wrong or overstate the consequences of their dire prognostications. Consider, then, what the consequences of a predicted pending disaster are realistically, even if not totally accurately. The question needs to be asked, “Is it realistic to assume that a partial labor shortage will only pose a partial problem for your business partners to achieve their business plan?” For example, should you feel vindicated if you ignored the predictions you would lose all your money in the stock market, in the end only losing 50%? Was your rejection of the prediction truly modified by your ability to say, “See, I told you I wouldn’t lose all my money!” The further erosion of jobs from the American market begs the question: Are they only leaving due to cost issues? Or are other factors such as the shortage of qualified, stable and readily obtained talented labor additional factors contributing to the overall trend? Is the offshore movement of jobs the “fever” or the “flu”? After all, salary is not the only factor of a cost factor. So, my premise remains. We are suffering from a growing labor shortage, temporarily obscured by a recession and offshore job loss. In trying to understand and deal with issues involving HR/staffing, we often suffer from the age-old problem of seeing ourselves as unique and suffering from consequences not to be found in the daily activities and operations of our business partners. After all, we deal exclusively with people, and people present issues not to be found in the non-people functions of business. This is true, to a point. But that does not mean that there does not also exist a sufficient quantity of similarities in our shared efforts to not attempt to gain insight by looking at the labor issue through the eyes of others. It requires being willing to put aside our tendency to use humanistic terms and phrases and be willing to first consider the situation and potential solutions dispassionately. In this instance, I refer to purchasing, our business partners involved in the non-human acquisition process. Purchasing has a mission not unlike that chartered to HR/staffing:

• They must have established supply chains to provide the timely delivery of the traditional finished or raw materials needed to support the production function.
• They must constantly investigate alternative supply methods based on the volatility of existing suppliers and forces of the market.
• They must conduct long-range planning to insure that changes in the company’s need for different materials based on product changes are investigated and in place before needed to ensure an uninterrupted flow of materials as the company alters or changes product lines or services.
• They must have alternative resource planning in place to deal with changes in the cost of supplying the business based on changes in material cost or availability, as one always interacts with the other.
• They must interact with the supply chain at both an immediate and strategic level to ensure suppliers have the feedback needed to improve their ability to meet their customer’s immediate and strategic needs.

To accomplish the above mission, purchasing is traditionally involved in all short-term and long-term product planning meetings. That includes the first meeting where someone in product development/marketing says, “I have an idea for a new product.” It is not possible to predict product cost, and therefore profitability or delivery time, without resolving the following:

• Does the material exist in sufficient quantities to support the effort?
• Will the cost of acquiring the materials impact the ultimate cost of delivery and planned profit of the effort?
• Will the supply chain deliver the material in the needed quantities in the time required to meet production goals?
• Do alternative materials exist that will meet the demand in a more cost effective and more timely delivery schedule provided product development/marketing and production are willing to look at alternative design considerations? (Does the widget have to be stainless steel, or will stainless steel-plated suffice with design modifications?)
• The security of supply chain is equally as critical. It is here today, but will it still be here in the future when we are committed to that supply? And who else will be vying for the abundant or limited material?

If the premise of a potential labor shortage is one worth considering, then the solution exists in looking at it in much the same way our business partners in purchasing have learned to deal with their supply issues for decades, outside the actual purchase order (read: job requisition). That includes:

• Inclusion
• Predicting
• Planning
• Influencing

That is where we will pick up in my next article. Meanwhile, consider the following: Over the last fours weeks the economic forecast has dragged itself slowly and reluctantly to a more favorable outlook. Nothing to celebrate yet, but better than the slow downward trend or standstill of the last 12 quarters. The unemployment rate dipped to 5.75%. Not a big deal, unless you consider the fact that one-twelfth of the safety margin between “feast and famine” disappeared in less than three weeks. Maybe it is not indicative, or maybe it is. But either way, HR/staffing and purchasing both have planning to do, just in case someone asks for a left-handed monkey wrench, engraved, and nobody knows where to find one, who makes them, or a decent alternative. Have a great day purch… er, I mean, recruiting.

• More aggressive recruiting: the moral equivalent of buying a bigger bucket when the well runs dry.
• More efforts to “recruit” from competitors: you know, the other people without enough employees stealing from you.
• Expanded H1-B visa allowances: because nothing says you care more than recruiting people you can treat poorly. And nothing works better in motivating a workforce than the veiled threat of deportation.
• Greater efforts to market opportunity: just in case that diminishing resource has the time to see your ad while reviewing the multitude of jobs offers, sign-on bonuses, and fending off calls from search recruiters.
• Use more consultants: because 1099s are not people, right? Otherwise a “people shortage” would probably translate into a 1099 shortage. If they were people that is. But they must not be, since that seems to be the solution of choice for so many.

After reading this particular article I had a desire to rent one of my all time favorite movies, “Casablanca.” I just suddenly had an urge to hear Claude Rains say, “Round up the usual suspects” ó as if he had been a VP of HR/staffing his whole life. The outlook for the future turns even brighter (sarcasm) when you add to the mix the fact that 18% fewer students entering college this year are signed up for courses in business or technical areas. So if your company is flipping a coin on whether to develop financial software or publish Elizabethan poetry, I highly recommend the latter based on the educational pursuits of the class of 2003. Then again, I am sure that most of these candidates will profess to have that ever-so-difficult-to-find, life-saving skill, “quick learner.” I wonder if we really need to live through the next decade? Maybe we should just replay the 1990s all over again and avoid the embarrassment of not having a solution for a long-term problem, a long time coming, other than “rounding up the usual suspects.” Appearing to be ill-prepared, ill-equipped, and preoccupied with lesser issues is something many of our clients have grown accustomed to. Why change now? Let’s put this in perspective:

• Ten years ago, your VP of Sales was made aware that in twenty years 40% of his client base would disappear, and to date he or she has done nothing.
• Ten years ago your VP of Marketing was made aware that the product line was approaching obsolescence and the market would dwindle by 40% and to date he or she has done nothing.
• Ten years ago your VP of Purchasing was made aware that the number of suppliers of raw materials was going to decline by 40% and to date he or she has done nothing.
• Ten years ago your VP of Finance was made aware that the declining revenue stream, if not arrested, would reduce operating revenue by 40% in twenty years and to date he or she has done nothing about long-term debt, changing acquisition planning, or anything else.

My guess is that you would have almost certainly had replacement requisitions for all of the sub-standard executives above on your desktop if this was a real situation. So, anyway:

• Ten years ago your VP of HR/staffing was made aware that the candidate pool, both in numbers and needed skills, was going to decline by 40% and to date he or she has done nothing.

Should we add another requisition to the pile? Some problems and issues are the sole property of the current company for which you work. The problems and solutions are within your budget, authority, and involvement horizon. But sometimes trends are beyond our scope, our budget, and our problem-solving authority. All too often, sadly, the lack of ability to resolve an issue is also the permission we need to ignore it. All we seem to be able to do is hope and pray that somebody with a bigger paycheck and an office with a bigger window (with which to view the “big picture”) is hard at work solving this very issue right now. Well, they’re not! Why? Because the keepers of the siren for all issues pertaining to HR/staffing are yet again fussing and fuming over the use of “bar graphs” vs. “pie charts” or the best online tool to use to file resumes. All the while, within their career window the sole purpose of their existence ó “to locate, recruit, and retain the best possible employees needed to accomplish the corporate mission” ó will be drastically downgraded. If I sound harsh, good. I was trying real hard to make a point. There is no “10 Quick and Easy Steps” to recruiting in a drought. The issue we are facing as an economy and an industry are daunting and soon to be visible on the horizon. The solutions are not going to be implemented this quarter and have an impact next year. This one will require several approaches we have not yet tried at a level not usually considered. The mission is critical, essential, and at this moment, in doubt. But, if that does not excite the heck out of you…well, there’s always a need for report writers. Until Part 2, think about it. Have a great day recruiting!

• The percentage of employees ranked in your top 20% in professional accomplishments compared with their ranking as a “respectful employee”
• The overall performance of teams with respect to the ratio of employees with positive personal reviews and those with other-than-successful personal reviews within those teams
• Projected improvement in efficiency and profitability for incremental improvements in overall employee attitudes based on the previous two categories

In essence, positive employees with firm professional and ethical convictions and a sense of loyalty, compassion, and commitment to things in this world other than the first-person singular are in effect the most effective, efficient, and productive. Dollar for dollar, they produce more than their “good guys finish last” counterparts. The problem is usually that nobody has ever tried to prove it empirically. Simple Examples of Complex Behavioral Issues Last week, I gave a list of behavior tendencies that indicate the presence of a selfish employee whose behavior is probably causing interaction issues with your team. To briefly give examples:

1. Do you often find the coffee pot in the common mess area empty? (In essence, the last person to get coffee was too self-involved to accept the fact that a fellow team member would not have the luxury of a cup of coffee. They were also oblivious to the fact that there was coffee for them because someone else on the team did care. In addition, this person’s view of their self importance justifies the role of others to care for them.)
2. Is the paper always low or the toner or paper jam light on your copier perpetually blinking? (Same as above.)
3. Is the trash can in your common area usually overflowing? (Achieving excellence requires constant observation and commitment to tasks that may be seen by some as “not assigned” or “beneath them.”)
4. Does “Hey, that’s not my job!” echo down the hallways of your company? (Assigning oneself duties and rejecting others is the ultimate expression of selfishness. All others must accept their roles in order for yours to make sense to you.)
5. How many issues arrive on your desk in the five minutes after you left your office rather than during the other seven hours and 55 minutes? (The favorite pastime of the selfish is passing the buck, and this can only really be done if you are not there to stop them. “Hey, it’s your issue now!”)

The talent shortage, currently obscured by this recession, is still upon us, and finding talented people to fill open slots will always be a temptation. But the consequences of hiring badly usually, if not always, offsets the gain of having done so. A bad hire pulls down the organization around them without putting anything of substance back. The selfish of this world are bad hires. They also reflect badly on the process that accepted them and the image of the company they ultimately represent. One of the final litmus tests I think about when considering a candidate for a position is to imagine them at a social gathering in one of our company polo shirts. Would that be a good thing or a bad thing? Would they represent the image of the company we are trying to project? Or would people at the party make a mental note to ensure they don’t have 401k money in our stock? My father once told me, “Rudeness is ignorance, expressed at its highest level.” So, hiring rude people is akin to hiring ignorant people, and who you hire speaks to others of who you really are. One more good reason not to hire the selfish over the selfless! Have a great day recruiting.

• The selfish never join a team. They may use a team, steal from a team, take credit from a team, abandon a team, deceive a team, or mark time with a team. But they never join. If your goal is to build winning teams, it is not theirs.
• The selfish create dissent and disorder. We all like to believe in the “Three Musketeers” philosophy of comradeship. You know, “All for one and one for all.” But as soon as we discover somebody is all about themselves and nobody else, we all start playing our cards closer to the chest. Some cliches are based on fundamental truths, like the one about “bad apples spoiling the barrel.”
• The selfish are rarely as productive as the selfless. It is hard to spend the whole day looking out for #1, stealing from others, and still finding time to get any real work done. Besides, your goals and theirs may not align, in which case your goals come in last.
• Selfish people suck the joy out of working. No matter how hard you work to build a positive company profile and brand yourselves as the place to be in your industry, “us” and “semi-us” can pick “them” out with laser precision?? and suddenly it is “resume update” time. It is like being at a party that’s been crashed by Hells Angles. Some movies I just do not want to stick around to see the end of.
• Selfish people hire poorly. You see, talented and quality people are not team players to a selfish person; they are people who will compete against their own personal objectives. The lower other peoples’ success, the higher the selfish person’s own physiological, physical, or monetary bonus.
• The selfish are always ready to abandon ship the day before you hit the iceberg. As things go wrong they are in a “me first, and then women and children” mode and not in the “change course before we hit the iceberg” game.
• Selfish people are not that bright. I realize that there is an old myth out there that many of the better businesspeople in this last decade were at best a little sleazy. Well, if by “best” you mean those that like a meteor streaked across the sky for a moment, only to flicker and burn out, I guess you are right. But true immortality is measured in time periods longer than the expiration date of the quart of milk I bought last week. The selfish often are the personification of a flash in the pan.
• The selfish have no true allies. The selfless avoid the selfish, which the selfish only with fellow travelers as companions and confidants. But due to the lack of trust they serve as neither to one another, and the strength that comes from union and sharing never occurs for them.
• Selfish people pass the all burdens onto others as their first choice. After all, it’s all about them!
• The selfish compensate for their problems by creating issues for others.
• The selfish assume that all their problems are beyond their control, and self-constructed universal truth serves to justify their need to pass onto others since it is not “their” fault.
• Selfish people are like people who do not bathe. They are not nice to be around.

Assuming the premise that the above “Polly Anna” point of view has merit, what can we do about it?

• I have spoken against the use of subjective profiling as a hiring tool as a legally risky and dangerous elitist form of staffing.
• There still is not a universal, tested, documented, and legally defendable definition of “selfish” or “selfless” that can be applied in a diverse candidate pool without fear of imbalance in group measurement between racial, gender, ethnic, religious, or sexual orientation.
• Companies do not necessarily have the right, moral or demonstrative, to act as the moral guardians of the workforce.
• Is your recruiting team selfless enough to recognize the difference as important?

So what is the point of this exercise? HR/staffing is not just about who you hire and who you fire. It is also about training and directing your existing workforce. It’s about upgrading your current talent and their performance?? and by that effort, creating the beacon you need to attract and recruit the candidates you truly want in your organization. It’s about building a success-driven team motivated by selfless personalities and enlightened self-interest. Enlightened self-interest, by the way, is like being selfless, after having it explained to you that you will actually succeed faster and to a greater degree by not focusing on just your self. In the next installment we will discuss how to go about building this kind of workforce. But do you really need to make all this fuss? Is this an issue for you? Answer these questions and decide:

1. Do you often find the coffee pot in the common mess area empty?
2. Is the paper always low or the toner or paper jam light on your copier perpetually blinking?
3. Is the trash can in your common area usually overflowing?
4. How often does the expression, “Hey, that’s not my job!” echo down the hallways of your company?
5. How many issues arrive on your desk in the five minutes after you leave your office rather than during the other seven hours and 55 minutes?
6. Do you honestly believe that a workforce engaged in petty and minor vindictiveness as well as daily sessions of childlike “acting out” as a form of disruptive behavior can also as productive and team orientated?
7. What kind of reasons do candidates who reject offers or interview invitations give you as real reasons? If you probe for real reasons, that is.
8. What are the exit comments from the productive and well-liked employees who leave? Again, if you have an exit process that motivates truth.
9. What is your opinion of the company’s actual, not stated, attitude towards employees and the need to be fair and honest?
10. I don’t have an item #10, but all lists in HR/staffing articles always seem to always have ten items, so I figured, “Hey, what the…”

By the way, my mother continued to shop on her own right up to the end in her 75th year. She had a partially crippled hip and required a cane, but she still parked in the back two-thirds of the parking lot. After all, the front one-third was for people with greater need. She was 75 and she still had more class than all those people half her age getting tense, acting out road rage, fighting over the “best parking spaces” nearest the store. They were still out there fighting their parking lot turf war and my mother was already halfway through the store. Now, who was really more productive? Have a great day recruiting.

• Proclaiming a fact not yet in evidence. Many korporate kultures are born in the HR/staffing conference room. They are as much based on wishful thinking or the search for snappy ad copy as reality. It’s not unlike Monet or Van Gough signing a great work of art before bothering to paint it. Having created the myth of completion, they invariably move on to “other agenda items.”
• Elitism. In your efforts to define what a “good” quality is, you are also defining what it is not by omission. In other words, if you define intelligent, you are also defining unintelligent. That is the function of objective skills, tangible and measurable skills. How do you quantify “a felling”? In one company I worked with, they only considered candidates from Ivy League colleges, since they “felt” that it was part of their elite kulture of highly intelligent employees. We rejected a “summa cum laude” from U. Mass for a 2.7 GPA from Harvard ó a belief in standards that exceeded facts in evidence.
• Creating the impossible dream. In the effort to “pig pile” one superlative after another into the korporate kulture stew pot, companies run the risk of creating an impossible goal ó thus dismissing good candidates in pursuit of the Holy Grail and failing to either obtain their goal or a reasonable alternative.
• Non-Essential needs elevated to essential. Should a customer service person have, let’s say, compassion? Sure, why not. But is it a required job skill? No. I prefer well-trained and effective customer service people, well practiced in their role and understanding the parameters of their job. If my printer is under warranty and broken, I want the rep on the phone to tell me how to get it fixed, not offer to bake me cookies. As a matter of fact, angry and upset customers have an adverse reaction to overly salacious responses. So, compassion or good people-handling skills as defined by previous experience with the public in problem resolution situations? Hmmm, let me see…
• Myopia. When a corporation decides it has cornered the market in the korporate kulture arena it tends to become very narrow in its focus. Why? Because if everyone “fits in” and “gets along,” where does the energy for change come from? Is that an essential part of a corporate culture? Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and Wang were very into the culture concept, and see how far it got them.
• No instant culture. I am descended from the Celts and have a real cultural history that is over a millennium in development. With turnover rates of 10-20%, the average company rehires itself every seven years on average. Can you truly develop a culture with traditions and standards in that kind of turmoil? Is the original culture architect still with the company? Has anybody kept track of the metamorphosis? Can you have instant culture like it was pudding? If you think yes, then I recommend taking a quick trip to the dictionary and revisiting the definition of culture.
• None of your business. Nobody I know works harder, with more dedication or loyalty, than myself. But if any corporation ever wants to call me “one of them” by matching me up to their culture, they are going to get a face full of my Irish. My mother and father, aunts and uncles, friends, neighbors, teachers, and a couple of Marine drill sergeants can take all the bows they want for the impact they had on helping me define who I am and who I wish to be. Corporate America, if anything, has more often than not sought to corrupt or challenge those principles, not enforce them. To this date, the average corporation lists stock assigned to their 401k plan as a corporate asset, even through they know it is assigned and destined not to be controlled by them. But by so doing this accounting jumble inflates their value and hence their stock prices. And this is considered ethical.
• Timing. Considering that the average American currently considers Enron the “poster child” for Korporate Kulture, maybe this is not the best time to focus on the “feel good” aspects of human resources and staffing and get back to the basics of being good, consistent, and successful employers and enforcing ethical standards, human qualities, and best practices before seeking them in candidates. First, develop a culture in which the current staff does not have to worry about their 401k plans disappearing or being stopped on the way out the door by a camera crew from 60 Minutes. The average worker needs to be given insight into correct culture by a corporation like a dolphin needs swimming lessons from a camel.

I am proud of who I am. If a corporation does not feel I have the knowledge, skills, ability, or objectives to successfully participate in their future, c’est la vie. But if they chose to decide that I do not measure up to their korporate kulture klan profile then I am grateful to be rejected. One thing I will not do for a job is change my value system or sense of self-worth to conform to a monolithic self-deluding perception thought up in a back conference room just before the debate on new printers and right after the decision to eliminate free bagels on Friday. I cannot believe a forward-thinking, success-driven company would want employees who would. If you want a corporate culture statement, here is one I recommend: “Look, we don’t want to be your mother, father, brother, aunt. or uncle. We do not want to help you be a better person than you are right now. We do not want to enrich your life by taking on the role of life guardian. We are an employer, not a spiritual leader. You are the master of your soul and your destiny. We are still hiring today and not having layoffs because we decided we would rather be a responsible employer with an eye to the future, which includes the people who contribute to making that future happen. We are an employer of career professionals who understand that their real family is at home. We are just the people who help you provide for them. Do you want a feel-good sense of personal value, or a future?” Now that I think of it, there is one corporate culture I highly regard. It is the Columbo corporate culture. Of course, I am referring to the culture they use to make their yogurt. Have a great day recruiting!

Sometimes we make too little out of big things.

Sometimes we make nothing a plus.

Sometimes we make a plus a minus. The “plus” to which I refer is the ever popular added skill factor we so often see in the last sentence of a job description. To wit:

The appropriate candidate will have at least ten years of progressive human resources and recruiting experience with increasing scope, dimension, and decision-making responsibility. The preferred candidate will have extensive knowledge of and experience with automated human resource management systems and online recruiting tools, and be conversant in benefits and compensation. Previous experience conducting informal training is required. Previous experience reading Elizabethan poetry at tea parties is a plus.

I am guilty of exaggerating to prove a point, but this is not the first time. I am a firm believer in complete, detailed, and accurate job descriptions. I have always been a proponent of putting the extra effort into the initial phase of developing a real-world position description based on a detailed position skills requirements list, rather than wasting weeks prescreening and forwarding resumes doomed to fail. I also recognize that one of the ways to ensure that hiring managers are not engaged in inappropriate hiring is to ensure that all the requirements used to consider candidates for employment constitute either knowledge, skill, or the ability required to perform the job function successfully. So what is a plus, and why do so many companies use it in their descriptions? And if they do, what is the harm? Well, is the plus a needed job skill critical to the position, or is it superfluous? If it is required, state it as such. If it is superfluous, why use it? Here are some of the less-than-great reasons that so many use the plus:

• A manager has not succeeded in bringing a particular skill or function into his or her group, and therefore uses the “plus” approach to try to compensate in every and any position, even when not part of the job responsibility: “At least somebody around here will know how to fix the copier!”
• HR/staffing felt the job description was flat and needed something catchy to pump up the appeal: “Previous experience owning a Lexus a plus!”
• HR/staffing thinks it will make the number of requirements seem less daunting to candidates: “Hey, six requirements are way too many. How about four requirements and two pluses? That seems less intimidating!”
• Someone in the staffing process thinks this particular plus is some sort of litmus test for the truly clever or sophisticated: “Hey man, anybody who has done this is totally cool and should be hired.”
• It seems like an easy way to “screen out” candidates without working too hard: “Okay, so even if they have ten years of HRIS, we are all agreed that knowledge of semaphore will be a plus.”
• It compensates for a known deficiency that has not yet been admitted publicly: “I really am not that good at using automated compiling software, but it is one of the things I am supposed to do. But if I make it a ‘plus’ for my assistant position, I can palm it off on them and nobody will figure it out.”
• A childlike belief that a position description is not unlike a child’s wish list for their birthday: “I want a train set, a new ball glove, a tennis racket, and a pony would be a plus.”
• Sometimes when we fail to convince the team that something should be required, we get them to concede that it would be worthy as a “plus,” and thereby we get the requirement into the requirement mix through the back door: “So, we are agreed, even though the job does not require fluency in Latin, listing it as a plus will do no harm.”
• We merely wanted to put our name into the process and blurted out the first stupid thing that came into our heads: “Hey, do we have enough people here with VAX/VMS experience? What if it comes back?”

But the biggest and most damaging reason that the plus is used:

• HR/staffing has failed to create a truly effective job requirement development program that can clearly, consistently, and precisely measure critical success components and enforce them through the core competency mapping process.

The reasons why so many use the concept of a plus are bad enough, the potential effect on a truly world-class recruiting process are even worse. The plus can and often does become the true center of gravity of the recruiting effort. For example, based on your core competency requirements you currently have 25 top candidates, ranked 1-25, under consideration for screening. So, what many recruiters will do at this point is “activate the plus” and seek the candidates with that something extra we like so much. For the sake of argument let us say that of the 25, five candidates also posses the plus. Here are some issues:

• If the number one and two candidates lack the plus, but the number three candidate has the plus, do you knock out numbers one and two in favor of three?
• When you described the plus in the job description, did you consider skill levels within the plus dimension? Does it matter if someone has extensive experience (”plus-plus”), only occasional experience (”minus-plus”), or some experience many years ago and then some minor experience only recently in a limited role (”once-plus then minus-plus now semi-plus”)?
• Are you checking for prescreening decisions where the plus factor is only used on occasion and not consistently across all candidates? For example, if all Caucasian candidates under 40 years of age never seem to have the “plus” taken into account, but all minority candidates over forty consistently are screened out for a senior CPA position for lacking early Egyptian pottery experience.

It is inevitable that the plus factor will often take over the process. The core skill component, in practice becomes your pre-screening tool, and the plus becomes the de-facto selection tool.

• Why use a plus? If you require a skill in a position, then require it and enforce its use as a selection criteria, uniformly and consistently, in considering all candidates. A “plus” masquerading as a skill requirement and it’s use in prescreening candidates is not regulated or managed, therefore there is a very real chance you may find yourself being deposed by the attorney representing the plaintiff in United States versus XYZ Corp. for engaging in unfair and discriminatory hiring practices.
• Stick to the real skills. If a skill is a component of the position, list it. But keep hobbies and “wouldn’t it be nice if…” off the position description. In balancing your own personal prejudices and basis (unless you live in a bubble you have them) the use of the “plus” concept is just one more chance for your objectivity to be broached by your subjective instincts.
• Little issues can indicate bigger issues. Tom Peters, in his book, In Search of Excellence, tells us that a dirty fold-down tray on an airplane is an indicator of bad engine maintenance. Why? Because a company that is committed to excellence translates the same effort down though an effective management team to all levels of effort. A plus indicates a job development process that never quite finished the task of deciding what is truly needed and what is not. The plus always indicates a “loose nut” in the job development process, to my way of thinking.
• Clearly it’s an effort to engage in “hiring on the cheap.” Often the “plus” is a signal on the part of the employer that even though they claim that core skills are the most important, they really do not like training new employees. So, as XYZ Corp. currently uses recruitment automation tools, they want to hire people with the specific family of tools used at XYZ Corp. already in place. The irony is that they probably purchased “Soft-Test-Hire’em-Fast” due to its uniformity and its reputation for being a quick study. So, as predicted earlier in this piece, a highly qualified recruiter candidate with irreplaceable core skills is rejected for a candidate with lesser core skills but who has the “plus” of previous experience using Soft-Test-Hire’em-Fast ó an advantage that would have been negated within two weeks if the latter candidate was hired, but how long for the lesser candidate to come up to speed on the core requirements?

You see, when you have a plus as a wild card, it will inevitability draw down your attention from the core requirements. If you have your doubts, try this simple test:

1. Send 25 resumes to your recruiters with a position description listing four critical skills. Ask them to select the best 10 candidates and rank them in order of match. Also ask them rank in descending order the 15 they did not choose.
2. Resubmit the same resumes with the same position description, only add on the traditional plus you see most often in your own position descriptions. Ask them select the best 10 candidates.

If your recruiting team understands the concept of core skill components, the list should not be altered between the two examples. If, on the other hand, none of your team are from the planet Vulcan or have ever studied under the Dali Lama, it would be a statistical anomaly for them not to allow the presence of a plus to pull them away from the emphasis they should exclusively place on the core competencies versus the ability to tap dance while writing code. So stick to the real skills needed to perform successfully in the positions you work to fill for your business partners or clients. Ignore the components that are not truly part of the success formula for potential candidates. In the very beginning of recruiting for candidates you should be armed with a solid commitment from the hiring team of what they are looking for in a truly successful candidate. The process should not allow any ifs, ands, or buts in deciding what skills a candidates must have to be considered potentially successful. That would be, after all, a “plus” for your process. Have a great day recruiting.

• For cause
• Not for cause

The difference is easily explained. In the former case, you were deemed not fit to work with. In the latter, it was your work that was deemed not fit. One is judgment about you as a person or your value system. The other a judgment about your ability to perform your current job requirements successfully, with no moral or legal consequences or questions about your quality as a human being. As in all things, there are exceptions to these rules. But neither time, space, nor interest on my part exists to invest endless production in enumerating the scores of “hypothetical exceptions” that exist in real life or fiction. Here, though, are some examples to clarify the essential differences between the two; Examples of termination for cause:

• Repeated unexplained and unauthorized absenteeism
• Stealing time
• Stealing property
• Abusive behavior
• Violence
• Intolerance
• Drunk on the job
• Inappropriate language
• Engaging in harassment
• Creating a hostile work environment

Examples of termination, not for cause:

• Lack of basic knowledge needed to perform assigned tasks
• Poor performance
• Failure to meet work or revenue quotas
• Failure to progress
• Poor productivity
• Excessive errors

The obsession so-called “staffing professionals” have with evidence of prior career failure has always astounded me, since the failure often needs only to exist to be considered relevant ó without investigation or any effort to place the importance in context. In its absence, we find peace and calm. But can the presence of past failure also be reassuring or its absence a cause for concern? The obsession with past failures may have justifiable rationale on occasion, but here are a few less noble examples that exist in our profession:

• Terminations as a screening tool. Many recruiters use the presence of gaps or non-voluntary terminations as a simple screening tool. No effort is made to gauge the issue or measure its relative importance. It’s out there, so the candidate is out there too! Why not use race, religion, r gender to screen out candidates? A predetermined and conscious decision to profile any attribute without investigation is prejudicial and wrong. Period.
• One strike and you’re out. Usually the criteria of the self-involved, narcissistic, or petty, some recruiters believe that failure is always and without exception a behavioral trait. Manifest it once, and you might as well give up all your dreams. It assumes we are not creatures capable of learning. Fall once when learning to walk and be condemned to crawl for the rest of your life. Let’s not even get into toilet training!
• Born to lose. Some people seem to think that we are predestined by fate to be either winners or losers. An indicated failure is fate’s own way of letting others know which you are. This HR/staffing person probably believes their horoscope in the newspaper. But don’t forget, Hitler believed in predestination. Is that the role model you seek?
• Petty revenge. When some people feel set upon or denied their rightful place by those who they perceive as above them, they strike out at any available victim powerless to reciprocate. For some in our profession, “shooting down” a resume is a form of “getting even.” Sort of a situation where, “The voices made me reject them. The voices. THE VOICES!”
• Saving face. Many recruiters see considering a candidate with a justifiable flaw a bad reflection on themselves. We know the hiring manager’s prejudices and we “play to them” rather than teach the manager how to do a better job. We fear the “can’t you find better candidates” critique more than we fear doing our job poorly.
• Laziness. A person of merit, with a possible past flaw indicated, is someone who should be screened, not merely screened out. But to many, the glaring flaw of past termination issue is a “no brainer” way to screen out candidates without having to actually do your job. This is a “no brainer” solution as the name indicates, since it does not take a brain to recruit this way.
• Short-sighted “no brainer.” Some recruiters are actually so foolish as to believe that the easy recruiting environment of the last two years is an excuse to give low offers, treat people poorly on interviews, and exercise bad judgment in the screening process. They forget that, not unlike a sewer, in life what comes out depends on what you put in. Put in roses, and roses come out. Put in… well, enough said.

Here are a few of the examples of where a person who has been terminated may not be the diseased creature you assume him or her to be:

1. I interviewed a candidate with a six-month gap in her career occurring seven years prior. She had been pursuing what appeared to be a sales career. Her next position was in operations, where she had remained for the last seven years with increasing success and glowing references. Conclusion: This person had learned she was on the wrong career path; she was a poor salesperson. She corrected her direction and was now successful. The failure has actually helped this person determine the best career for herself.
2. I interviewed a candidate who admitted, openly, without my inquiring, that he had been terminated for repeated absences from his previous job due to drinking. However, in the ensuing five months he had not had a drink, was attending AA meetings regularly, and was going to night school to get his graduate degree. He had his family’s support and felt that by being forced to confront this problem he had saved himself from a life-destroying weakness. Conclusion: As he spoke, I thought of another person in the company who had been told to “find another job or be fired.” His problem, too, was absenteeism due to drinking. But the manager decided not to fire him, and instead gave him two months to find a different job to avoid any legal hassles. This person would interview for their next job without the stigma of a termination, without having to admit to himself or his prospective employer that he had a problem. After all, he must be a good candidate; he had never been terminated. But the person in question had confronted and identified his demons and was a better person and employee for that reason. The other was not forced to face his sickness. Confronting flaws is not a weakness. Denying flaws is not a job skill.
3. I hired a person once who had been terminated “not for cause” due to a decline in her productivity and increasing errors. The employee’s mother was in the final stages of terminal cancer, and this was before the FLMA. Her boss was, to be frank, a jerk, who cut this person no slack. So she worked the ten-plus hours a day her work required, took care of an elderly parent at home, went to the hospital, and stayed with the dying parent. Conclusion: An excellent employee with energy, loyalty, passion, and commitment was forced to over-commit herself by a management infrastructure that should have supported her. But she tried. Given good management, that energy and commitment has to translate into success.

There is an old expression about “assuming” that I am sure we all know, yet, we continue do it with particular “sacred cows” in HR/staffing. It is a prejudice we teach early and in some cases it almost creates idiotic blindness. In one instance a young recruiter working for me was preparing to challenge a candidate on a “career gap” from 15 years in his career past. More recently, this candidate lead the competitor’s sales force that six months earlier had outsold our team on a $12.5 million contract. We knew the previous and ancient termination issue was not criminal or for cause, but the attitude prevailed, “Let’s check out that non-sales, non-technical, unrelated incident five employers and 15 years ago that has not caused this person to be denied employment or the ability to whip our sales team and cost us $12.5 million and see what happened!” I intervened too late, and by that time the candidate declined continuing the interview process. He told me that any company stupid enough to focus on ancient history was too stupid to take seriously. Two months later his sales team took us down for another $3 million in lost business. Guess we taught him the price of past failures! We wonder why so many companies want to outsource the HR/Staffing function? It astounds me even further that we are offended by candidates’ efforts to cover up past career issues. In essence, it is okay for us to be short-sighted, prejudicial, biased, and unprofessional, but any candidate who reacts to that tyranny is dishonest! We have trained candidates to develop bad and sometimes dishonest practices ó but careful and unbiased investigation will show that fully 90% of the time it was in response to a venial or mortal sin practiced by the HR/staffing community in the way we perform our jobs: If you do not cover up a gap on your resume, you will not be interviewed. I suggest a quick trip to Mr. Webster’s and look up “hypocrisy.” What is even more amazing to me is the attention paid to assumed failure as opposed to assumed success. My personal failures occurred in areas not specific to the bulk of my career or the 26 years of business experience I have accumulated. They represent less than six months combined total, or 1/52nd of my total work experience. But some recruiters could easily spend one-half an interview making sure that all the lurid details of my sins are once again unearthed, examined, tagged, and returned to the grave, after the required poking of the wounds with a sharp stick! The claims of success are but given lip service and barely discussed, even though they are 51/52nds of my career, they must be true. I am the first to admit that having your flaws, errors, and omissions pointed out are never fun, and some of my own angst is the result of that conflict with my own pride. But what bothers me more is that the human resources/staffing community has created an attitude about termination that can only be explained by me in unkind and unflattering terms. I can only assume that those who have never risked exceeding their self-perceived level of skill or who have never accepted a challenge as much to enjoy the risk as will never understand those who do, or the benefits we have derived from the experience of assaulting our assumed limitations and not merely being pacified by them, suffering glorious failure rather than accept an existence consisting of successful mediocrity. As my old Gunny Sergeant used to say: “If the losing don’t hurt, it ain’t poker.” Time does not permit you to interview every candidate, and the need exists to develop expeditious procedures. But when those become the pretext for sloppy recruiting and badly structured logic concepts to create shortcuts ó well, the next termination you face may be a lot closer to home. Then it will be your turn to admit you had been fi… fir… terminated. Have a great day recruiting.

• What is your expected role in this process from the candidate’s point of view and your permitted role from that of the hiring manager or client?
• Will your actions enhance or destroy your relationship with one or both parties?
• Will you have either the authority or the ability to intervene effectively?
• Will you make the situation worse than if left you left it unknown?
• Will you be placed in a position where you may have to act against the interests of either the candidate or the hiring manager/client?
• Will you be in a position where no action on your part may be equally damaging?

See, the call itself is a no-brainer. It’s the preparation that eats up all the cycles. Then again, it would be safe to say that, based on all the issues and disasters a poorly planned call can create, not planning for your follow-up call is a no-brainer act in and of itself. If either party indicates there is a problem, it’s helpful to think of your approach in general terms as follows:

• Determination. You should initially determine the “age” of the situation. This lets you know if the problem is new or ancient history, and thus the speed at which action must be taken.
• Dissemination. You should ascertain who knows about the problem other than the candidate.
• Damage control. Has there been any negative act or words prior to this call?
• Dimension. How serious an event, act, or words are we talking about?
• Direction. This is the advice or guidance you need to give on the new hire’s “next act.”
• Diffusion. This is your plan of action regarding the hiring manager or client.

“Level 1″ Issues A new employee faces many emotion issues during their initial weeks. Often the first and most effective step is to be willing to listen. A significant percentage of issues ó new employee or manager ó will fade based on previous call preparation and ten minutes of saying, “I know, I know. I totally understand and agree.” The new employee’s separation anxiety, with no existing peer support group, can make a small issue seem worse than it really is. It is an unwise course of action for you to either trivialize or overstate the issue if it is a “breaking in” issue. Hiring managers often face remorse over their “buying decision,” believing that failure will reflect on them. They will often panic if the new employee is late for work twice in a row by as little as five minutes. Again, listening and offering simple common sense advice will often suffice: “Hey, the guy is getting settled in a new commute route. He probably hasn’t worked out all the kinks yet.” Your ability to act or overreact will soon become public knowledge (you have been around long enough to know there are no secrets in HR/staffing, haven’t you?). Whether you are an external recruiter protecting a fee or an internal recruiter protecting a reputation, this is mission-critical stuff in your career. If the issue was merely the need to vent, assume the venting and a little good advice was sufficient, but make a note to call back in a week. But, make no promise to call, that is an indicator to a nervous person that there might really be an issue. “Level 2″ Issues But what if the phone call begins, “First, you’ve got to promise me you will tell no one else about this…”? That creaking sound you just heard was the sound of Pandora’s lid starting to open ó and nothing good usually comes out of it. The chances of your dealing with this issue correctly are in direct proportion to the amount of time you spent ó before that question is asked ó deciding:

• Are you working for the candidate, no matter what?
• Are you working for the client, no matter what?
• Are you working for yourself as a professional, and feel that neither side owns you?

The last answer was the correct one, but even in the role of professional you still must not make unconditional agreements. Whenever I have been asked to offer the “silence of the confessional,” I have always responded, “I cannot make a promise concerning information of which I am not yet aware. But I do promise that I will only speak of this information in an effort to resolve the problem fairly for all parties. It would be wrong for me to act against the best interests of either you or the hiring manager.” If a hiring manager comes to me with a concern about a new hire and wants me to act in secret ó conspiring in an act I think inappropriate, premature, or simply illegal ó I also have a similar response: “My primary goal is to ensure you have the best possible people working for you. There are methods and tools we use to advise, encourage, and motivate employees to actively participate in correcting work-related issues; I will actively help you in any of those. But I cannot in good conscious act in concert against an unsuspecting person.” Taking sides not only hinders your effectiveness in supporting the current issue, but it sets a precedent for issues to come. If you are seen as management’s tool, then other new hires, existing employees, and potential candidates will get the word about you and, whatever value there was in it, this decision will have depleted your ability to intervene in and have real impact on all issues in the future. If management decides the same about you as pertains to employees, they will be less likely to consider you a resource and therefore less likely to include you in their confidences. Yet again, your ability to influence problems between hiring managers and new hires is diminished. If you suspect more than mere hand-holding is required, then you need to:

• Collect information (the six “Ds” from above)
• Encourage and counsel on the best course of action so that both parties can self-resolve the conflict with your assistance
• Promise to be available for follow-up support

If the new employee or manager is reluctant to act:

• Get permission to call the other side.
• Define the role and limits you intend to attempt.
• Promise a follow-up call within a specified time period.
• Ensure you are not talking without knowledge of your “permissions” from the other side.
• Ask the other side for their input before you make solution suggestions.
• Don’t be afraid to tell one party or the other your concerns about their stand. Arbitrators are fair and open, but never blind or naive.

Nothing makes people happier than success in problem resolution. If you are successful, they forget whose side you were on ó especially if neither party thinks you were on the opposing side. Your career can survive in neutrality; it will not survive being identified as an ally of one party or the other. “Company Man/Woman” or “Social Worker” are not labels you should seek in your efforts to build internal or external client respect. The most effective impact you can have is engaging in multiple contacts with both parties, slowly elevating the message that each party needs to be aware, to gain perspective from the other party’s point of view, and to agree to discuss the issue. “Level 3″ Issues The final level of impact is when you suspect that either party is preparing either to act against the spirit of the employment contract or to engage in a form of illegal action. In that event, your role is clear: You must either go the next level of management or contact the authorities. The situation will dictate the course of action. You are an employee, but you are also a citizen. Sometimes it might not be about HR/staffing and our little world. We also work and live in the real world. Workplace violence is often the result an escalating worker dispute where an abundance of willingness to do nothing prevailed and players chartered their own course unhindered by good counseling or effective intervention. Your goal to protect a hire, fee, or reputation is a good one and nothing of which to be ashamed. But there is a price for all decisions; make sure the price you pay for your action or inaction is one you will be willing to pay. Never overreact, never assume that the worst-case scenario is so remote as to not be worth contemplating. Don’t let your actions be guided by the one event on the table at the moment. Consider the long-term effect it may have on your ability to function effectively as a third-party arbitrator, either internal or external. Using the post-hire follow-up call to protect fees is a short-sighted and disastrous business approach. If you “shore up” bad hires past the guarantee date, the trend will emerge regardless of your fee-protecting efforts. If you use the call to protect your reputation as an internal recruiter by “babysitting” new hires, you also run the risk of delaying their corporate “toilet training” ó and before you know it you have a daycare center with your last 25 hires crying for their milk and cookies. The manager will note those hires who seem never to have been weaned from their HR/staffing connection. Always intervene with a plan to not make the situation worse than it already is and with an exit strategy of not being needed the next time. Opening Pandora’s box only went wrong in mythology; the rest of us have a chance to use Pandora’s experience to figure out how to do it right. Have a great day recruiting.

• To make sure you are not surprised by a sudden change of heart or desertion
• To cement your relationship as a resource for information and candidates from the company the new employee has left
• To develop further intelligence about the company the employee now works at (your client) for future business
• To create the right atmosphere to ask information regarding future needs on your part
• To plant the ever-popular “call me first if you have any issues” suggestion to preclude unfortunate misspoken words
• To remind the new employee that the first few weeks can be both exciting and frustrating, and to remind them why this looked like such a great opportunity and to keep their eye on the prize.

In terms of the satisfied client, post-hire follow-up calls are important because:

• There’s no better time to remind your client who got the job done for them.
• They’re a good opportunity to assure them it was their decision to hire this person and remind them of the positive comments they made about the candidate during the closing phase.
• They’re a good opportunity to remind the hiring manager of any “understood” promises made (not in the offer letter) to insure they have not been forgotten.
• There’s no better time to look for additional business.
• There’s no better time to ask for that face-to-face appointment if you have never done so.
• There’s no better time to get industry information and other market intelligence from a self-congratulatory conversation.
• They’re a good time to discreetly and carefully discuss issues or procedural problems to make future transactions move more smoothly. (Be real careful on this point. If you are unsure of the thickness of the ice beneath your feet, go back to shore and try another time.)

If you are a third party who worked directly with the hiring manager and “skipped” the HR/staffing department, post-hire follow-up calls are important because:

• They’re a good time to mend any broken fences caused by your working directly with the hiring manager.
• Your success, like it or not, was supported by the internal efforts (offer authorization, post offer, pre-start follow-up) of HR/staffing. Thank them and offer a lunch meeting.
• They’re a good time to try and build a better working relationship for more direct contact with HR/staffing regarding hiring plans. You may have an “in” with one hiring manager, but HR/staffing works with the other 25.
• They’re a good time to review hire conditions to ensure they are followed up on in a timely manner, especially since hiring managers are not always good on follow up.
• As a rule of thumb, third-party recruiters with good working relations with internal HR/Staffing folks rarely have issues with “delayed checks.”
• A good recruiter never avoids a chance to talk to a person of influence and make them a friend. You may notice that in today’s economy, a lot of arrogant “you need me” third-party recruiters from the mid to late 1990s are selling hamburgers and fries.

All the above make good sense. So let’s peek into a few different “open boxes” for some examples of a good idea gone awry: Ring… Ring… New employee: New guy. Can I help you? Ricky Recruiter: Yeah, new guy, it’s Ricky Recruiter here, the guy who got you your new job. How is it going buddy? New employee: Thank God you called. Get me out of here! Ricky Recruiter: Ah, ah, now wait a minute. You’ve only been there two weeks. It can’t be… New employee: You told me that if I didn’t like it here, you would personally make it a priority to find me a new job! Remember? Ricky Recruiter: Well, yeah, yeah, of course. But, you see…what exactly is going on? New employee: The boss is a jerk, a real jerk. In fact, I told him so this morning. Ricky Recruiter: Whatttt!!! Or: Ring… Ring… Hiring Manger: Hiring manager speaking. Can I help you? Ricky Recruiter: Hey, Ricky Recruiter here. Just calling to see… Hiring Manger: I was just thinking of you pal. Remember how I said I was concerned about the new hire’s sort of “wise guy” manners on the interview and you said it was just nervousness? That he was a real class act with you? Ricky Recruiter: Well yeah, I remember… Hiring Manger: Well, the team hates him, he’s a total jerk, and when I tried to tell him to work harder to fit in he told me to look up the freedom of speech clause in the Bill of Rights! Ricky Recruiter: You know, maybe he just thought ó Hiring Manger: I am reading the guarantee clause of our agreement as we speak. He’s only been here three weeks… Like the eternal concept of the layers of an onion, the follow-up call is a good idea if:

• You put preliminary effort into the process weeks before you made the call.
• You know in advance what you will or will not do with the knowledge gained.
• You already have your answers prepared for the range of potential “damage control” situations that may arise.
• Preliminary contingency plans have been developed and discussed in advance to ensure they are more readily accepted in the heat of the moment.

This concern for preparation is not because all follow-up calls go bad, but because when they do, they tend to go very bad. With fees, reputations, future business, and a person’s future career on the line, to be unprepared is to be unprofessional. In case you have never read one of my tirades before, let me explain that if you are a recruiter, you are first and foremost a sales professional, and sales professionals never improvise. Sales professionals need to control situations to be effective and useful, and control never comes from a sentence that begins, “Er, ah… I mean…” The follow-up call to new hires is not a separate event, but is in effect part of a long-term sales or retention plan that begins when the candidate accepts an offer and transitions from the “candidate” into the “new employee” phase of your recruiter/sales relationship. Your goal for retention may be to protect a fee or to protect a company’s human capital investment, but either way the steps are the same. When a candidate accepts an offer, he or she usually has the closest bonding with both the new hiring manager and the recruiter, regardless of their title or position within or without the company. If your process does not in effect bond the candidate to at least these two individuals, then you have bigger issues to concern yourself with before you worry about the post-hire follow-up call. You have a fatally flawed hiring process. So, for the purpose of today, let us assume that is not the case. Shortly after the offer has been accepted and before the new candidate actually starts, he or she should be contacted by the recruiter involved and the following points should be covered:

• Remind the candidate of the position, its duties, and the reporting chain of command. Do not allow his or her euphoria to create a “fantasy” that will not be satisfied.
• Remind the candidate of the elements of the position that match their original, new opportunity, reality-based wish list. If you do not have a reality-based wish list you have another issue to deal with in your process (and I have another article).
• Remind the candidate that the first 90 days can be both fun and frustrating. The candidate should make no statements nor act in a manner that cannot be unsaid or undone upon reflection.
• Remind the candidate that you are both in this together, and that you should be contacted to discuss any qualms or concerns BEFORE they are acted on or acted out.
• Remind the candidate you cannot fix all problems or cure all ills, but that you are the voice of experience, and if nothing else an impartial sounding board.
• Remind the candidate you have a pre-existing relationship with the hiring manager and can therefore at least offer alternative insight, if not actual solutions.
• Remind the candidate that you are an ambassador, not a member of congress. Therefore you need their advance input and advance notice of issues to be effective in assisting them to seek solutions to problems.

All too often, a well-meaning internal or external recruiter sells him or herself to the candidate as an “all knowing and all powerful” Wizard of Oz ó only to be revealed in a crisis as a well-meaning but relatively powerless carnival act behind the curtain. Set the correct expectation. A similar call needs to be made to the hiring manager. After all, the hiring manager needs to know that even though they see themselves as the new hire’s boss, there still will be a recruiter’s nose under the tent:

• Your advance call ensures no hurt feelings if you need to call them about a new hire issue you uncover due to territorialism on their part. There’s nothing worse than helping someone who does not wants your help.
• Your call ensures that your role is not misconstrued as “spy.” Even if you are spying, being uncovered as such sort of defeats the whole purpose.
• Your call allows the manager to know they can use you as a discreet “sounding board” for any potential issues where they do not want to be the initiator.
• Your call advertises yet another service your “client” can expect from you, and therefore an added value to your fee or line-item budget cost. An unadvertised service is a wasted effort.
• Your call creates yet another bond between you and your “partner in crime.”
• Do not assume that you do not need to remind the hiring manager of why they hired this person and what they hired this person to do. Managers are just as likely to suffer from euphoria or absentmindedness as a candidate.
• Do not assume that you do not need to remind the hiring manager of the potential frustrations that can occur with a new hire, especially during the first 90 days. They too should not say something that cannot be unsaid or do something that cannot be undone. Again, offer yourself as an “insightful” partner with alternative knowledge and history with the new hire.

I have always hated the expression “disinterested party,” since it appears to indicate a person who could care less about an outcome. But hopefully the disinterested party is one who is considered a valued ally with a knowledge of the situation and its interacting components, one who also appears to have no bias and can therefore be useful as an intermediary in a problem resolution process. If in your first post-offer-acceptance phone call to the new hire and the hiring manager you succeed in establishing yourself as such, your new-hire follow-up call has hope. Have a great day recruiting!

• What’s an Irish seven course dinner? A six pack and a potato!
• Who is the corpse at an Irish wake? The sober one in the corner!
• What is the thinnest book in the library? Great Irish cooking!
• What’s Irish Alzheimer’s? You forget everything but the grudges!

Not once do many glance over their shoulders to make sure no one Irish is around who might overhear their ethnically marginalizing humor and file a grievance. One has to wonder at the willingness of so many to enjoy a laugh at their own ethnic expense at the hands of those other than their own. Then, saints preserve us, they start signing “Irish” songs, written by Americans who have never been to Ireland and most of which are totally unknown in Ireland, or if known are referred to as American music. “Too-rah-la-lura-lura?” Excuse me? Even worse, these “faux Irish” only know the words to the first three stanzas, and after that they start humming. So even if they do hit on a real Irish song, they blow it! “At the rising of the moon, the rising of the moon, with my pike upon my shoulder…hmm hmm hmm…” So, somewhere around last call you have a bunch of wannabe Irish wearing silly buttons, talking in fake accents, humming songs about a country they have never been to or a people they do not know the least bit about. My people, my culture, and my heritage are condensed into an excuse to drink to excess, talk too loud, and giggle incessantly in an insulting miming of my cultural accent. Everybody effects a brogue that would even be over the top in a Barry Fitzgerald movie. By the end of the day I swear I’d just like to take “me black thorn walkin’ stick and have at them in a grand to-doo, followed by a wee dram at the pub and some drunken singing!” Of course:

• When Europe was plunged into the dark ages, the average Irishman could read and write.
• We kept the knowledge of the ages alive while the rest of Europe thought leeches were medicinal.
• When the lights came back on in Europe, it was the Irish who carried the torch of education back to the mainland.
• Our noble conquerors, whomever they were, sought Irish tutors for their children rather than their own poor teachers.
• Alcoholism is lower in Ireland, today and in the past, than it is in any other European country or even the U.S.

No, we are not perfect. There are individuals, groups, and events as shameful and as cruel in Irish history, ancient and recent, as any other ethnic group worthy of note. But we are legions better than the published stereotype that is not merely spoken in private, hushed conversations but openly advertised in print, radio, and television:

• How many cops on TV are not Irish?
• Ever see an Irishman on TV who wasn’t “charmin’” and always looking for, or offering, a “wee dram” after having a “wee fight”?
• Irish Spring commercials are just two degrees shy of making the Irish appear like a simple and stupid people.
• On TV there is always some funny old guy, who always seems a little tight, who is portrayed as a cute little funny tipsy Irishman nicknamed “Paddy.”

By the way, even today you will hear the expression “paddy wagon” on TV or in a movie or joke. But do you know the origin? Well, it goes back to the early days of the Irish immigration to America, where the anti-Irish would say, “There are either crocked Irish cops riding on them, or Irish criminals in them.” The word “Paddy” is an ethnic slur on par with the “N” word to a real Irishman. But you meant it in fun, right? I wonder what the results would be if similar treatment was given to any other ethnic group in today’s PC environment. Would my Italian, Polish, Jewish, African American, Hispanic, Native American brethren or others submit quietly to a day of national humiliation and ethnic impersonations? Sort of like Al Jolsin, only this time he is wearing shamrocks. What is even more astounding than the excessive liberty people take marginalizing, diminishing, and outright slandering of my people, for fun or not, is the absolute absence of any objection from the insulted, the Irish, or even from the usual defenders of diversity and our new world of multicultural celebration and regulation:

• Been to any good anti-Celtic defamation lectures lately?
• How many hostile work environment filings have crossed your desk submitted by a person of Irish cultural background over the sight of a “kiss me I’m Irish” button?
• Anybody filing suit for not offering scones as well as bagels for morning meetings? (If you’ve never had a real Irish scone, don’t talk to me about heaven!)
• Tell any good Irish jokes lately? Ever tell one that didn’t start, “There was an Irishman in a bar…”
• No outcry on NPR about Celtic slander.
• No segment on 60 Minutes denouncing the prejudice the Irish still must bear on primetime TV as stereotype alcoholics.
• No bills before congress to make beating up Leprechauns a hate crime.

Where are my outraged liberal defenders? But maybe that is the point. We don’t want to be defended. Who do you think started all jokes, laughing, and fun poking in the first place? We did, and it worked! Nobody enjoys a good laugh more than an Irishman, especially one delivered at his or her own expense. Not because we are the world’s clowns or lack self-esteem. Just the opposite, in fact. The lesson to be learned from the Irish is the secret to assimilation in America, without being ethnically diluted or destroyed. We defeated our detractors by not always taking offense at their insults and thereby empowering them. We allowed them their jokes and then laughed louder than anyone in the room. Then we followed up by telling a few of our own tales. The weapon of mirth and self-deprecation is the most potent form of self-empowerment! Of course, while everyone was having a good laugh, we took over, and nobody noticed till it was too late. My grandmother was born in a sod hut. My father was born in a five story flat in a working-class neighborhood. I was born in a middle-income suburban community (lace curtains and all the trimmings). Now my family goes to Ireland for vacations. The Irish whiskey I drink costs $35 a quart. We don’t clean “his lordship’s” Waterford crystal, we own it. We have arrived. (Want to hear an Irish joke?) Whether politics, civil service, finance, industry or other fields, the Irish kept laughing while infiltrating and working our way into the very fabric of the entrenched upper class society that looked down on us “wee poor children of the bogs.” Now, don’t fall victim to the misconception that, among Caucasians, the loss of ancestral accents erases the evidence of our ethnic, tribal, or national origins. As an American-born descendent of Irish parents, my father was refused service in a fine old Boston hotel restaurant in the early 1940s. He was told the only way for him to get in the dining room was to bus tables. We all still laugh at that story at family gatherings. I had my wedding at that hotel and my anniversary dinner at the restaurant. The chain is now owned by a man whose people were once farmers in County Cork. For my part, nobody has ever asked what part of England, France, or Germany, my people came from. To this day, three generations from the original brogue, nobody doubts by Irish roots. It’s not just about lost accents and altered last names. You see, the chief weapon of those who seek to diminish or harm you will always be their efforts to make you ashamed of yourself or your people. In your angry reaction to the lies and filth they say about you, you lay the seeds of confirmation that their beliefs must be founded on fact. They are ready and prepared to use your verbal or physical violent reaction to their idiocy to further their own goals and to diminish you further. They may be the driving the engines of hate, but without your reaction for fuel, they can’t get started. Well, the Irish have been oppressed, invaded, enslaved, and diminished for centuries. We can teach subjugation at the doctorate level in any university. We are something of experts at being under other people’s feet in our history. Yet, at home or wherever we have traveled, we have ultimately survived, flourished, and yes, we have eventually taken over ó laughing at, and with, those who underrate us as opponents. The Irish were once even on the Klu Klux Klan’s hate list. (I actually wish we still were ó sometimes there is a lot to be proud of based on who hates you.) There are several ways to fight for justice, and sometimes issues and circumstances in that fight require words, or blows, or both (thank you Frederick Douglas). In the Irish assimilation there were moments where blows were resorted to in lieu of a good laugh. But, whenever possible and circumstances permitted, we chose laughter. Nobody gets hurt, and there is nothing funnier than a bigot walking away frustrated at his or her failure to get a rise out of you with a barrage of epithets or slogans of hate. The fact they only created laughter and mirth really ticks them off. They do not even get a chance to light their cross. The Irish assimilation plan in America worked so well that not only does everybody love us, but once a year everybody wants to be us! “Irene Goes Bra!” Sigh. Close enough boy-o. So, please, enjoy next year’s Saint Patrick’s Day with the passion it was meant to be enjoyed. I will. Do not even for a moment feel that you have diminished or marginalized me or my people by your poor non-Irish efforts to sing that silly song about unicorns with a feigned accent. We loved every minute of it, and are flattered that you tried. So have a grand day on us. Drink green beer, wear a funny button, and have a bowl of Lucky Charms on me. If you run out of funny Irish jokes ó no problem, just ask the nearest son or daughter of the Emerald Isle, they will gladly share one with you and laugh the loudest of all at the telling of the tale, if it is done well. The sad truth is, on the 18th you will no longer be Irish and have to wait another whole year to enjoy yourself this much again. Have a grand day recruiting.

• You are the human resources manager, one of four managers reporting directly to the VP of HR, at a manufacturing company with 5,000 employees. You have responsibility for 2,500 employees in the manufacturing group. The other three HR managers oversee sales/marketing, IT/development, and accounting/finance/administration/HR. Each HR/Manager has a recruiting peer from the staffing organization.
• The company is over 75 years old, publicly traded, and involved in heavy manufacturing. Twenty-seven percent of all business is federal, 32% state and local government, and the rest U.S. commercial. The shop is non-union.
• Business is brisk, but staffing is maintaining a reasonable fill rate against attrition and an average annual growth of 4.3%.
• In reviewing your employment stats, you realize that of the 2,500 employees under your care, only 123 are female and only 72 are persons of color. This is well below both your industry average and the demographic of the area your plant is located.
• Management, although aware, is not sufficiently concerned to take action.

Your assignment:

• What steps would you take?
• What are the predicable issues you may face?
• What actions would you plan to successfully implement a more diverse recruiting program?

Added issue:

• It is 1972.

The hook in this question was obviously the date. It is easy to comprehend the role as a change agent in the area of diversity today, certainly easier than it was for the pioneers of diversity programs some 10, 20, or 30 years ago. Although it would be fair to say there are still issues to be resolved in creating a truly diverse and equal workplace, it would be equally true to say that there are far fewer obstacles than 10, 20, or 30 years ago. One of the important lessons change agents learn is that often they are able to make and effect change in their environments due to the fact they are standing on the shoulders of change agents that have come before them. In 1972:

• Executive, director, senior and middle management was still comprised primarily of white males.
• Although the civil rights and feminist movements came to the forefront in the 1960s, by the early 1970s the concepts were still not popular in the mainstream of daily life.
• Most legislation regarding fair hiring practices still had not taken hold, nor had any of the rules developed truly effective enforcement “teeth.”

An effective change agent is not only a champion of causes, but also a student of the working world around them. The truly successful change agent recognizes the beginning of trends based on their ongoing research and study of the working world in which they dwell professionally. For example:

• A truly effective Change Agent would be aware that, by the early 1970s, fewer and fewer sons of the “blue collar” workforce wanted to be “just like dad.” Most middle income workers could afford to send their children to college, sons and daughters alike. In the preceding decades a significant percentage of employees were the sons of current employees: the result of ancestral recruiting.
• Affirmative action programs, relatively unknown or ignored by private industry, were being implemented in federal and state service. Consequently, those companies doing business with federal or state government were finding themselves to be among the first who had to deal with the term “compliance.”

So, here is what the scenario looks like in an outline based on the principles of SMEAC: Situation: There is a growing trend that is eliminating a significant source of past employees. In addition, the federal and state governments are beginning to look at minority and female employment as a consideration to be eligible for contracts and purchasing. As federal and state agencies themselves continue to hire and promote persons of color or female employees, your own sales force has come in contact with larger percentage of decision-makers who are not of the “majority” profile. At present, your company has a poor track record for recruiting non-majority candidates ó or certainly has a poor track record of hiring non-majority candidates. The trend for minority and female issues has an upward curve. Mission: In order to maintain effective headcount in response to the decline in ancestral staffing ó and to prepare the company for new hiring criteria based on civil rights legislation and a growing feminist movement ó work out the strategy you would pursue to ensure success, success being defined as a larger percentage of employees from non-majority profiles. Execution: Execution of this mission could entail the following actions.

• Arrange a meeting with your four counterparts in human resources and staffing to review your overall company profile and determine if this is a departmental issue or a common issue throughout the company. This also affords an opportunity to determine if you have allies from among your peers.
• Arrange a meeting with the senior HR officer to enlist his or her support.
• Based on the information gleaned from the above, meet with your hiring managers to determine if the imbalance in staffing is a result of insufficient candidates or a biased selection process.
• Work with your recruitment ad agency to develop a recruitment advertising campaign that would increase your candidate base (print advertising ó it’s 1972, no web recruiting yet).
• Develop a trend profile for your immediate superior to show the efforts being made throughout your industry in these areas, in order to enlist their support and the support of the senior management staff.
• Meet with those employees from non-majority profiles and encourage them to refer friends and peers for employment. Determine from them what the advantages, from their perspective, are to working for your company.
• Place emphasis on diversity recruiting for supervisory, managerial, director, and executive-level candidates, because nothing will change unless it occurs at all levels.
• Research and investigate all media pertaining to this topic and develop informational briefings for all team and departmental meetings to keep the issue in the forefront.

Administration and support: The following administration and support tasks could also be required.

• Develop a spreadsheet to track applicant flow based on diversity profile and develop a monthly report indicating percentages of those recruited, interviewed, or hired as compared to majority profile candidates.
• Develop contacts and relationships with leaders in the non-majority communities and professional organizations.
• Seek professional guidance through consultants who specialize in diversity employment to assist in your own training or the training of your peers and hiring managers.

Command and communication: With your own managers and your department peers, have a specific meeting on a routine basis to share information to support the diversity recruiting effort. The results of all these efforts should be communicated on a routine basis and included as an additional reference in all staffing and headcount reports. Obviously this is not rocket science. The role of change agent does not require the highest IQ in the room or the most degrees on the wall. It does, however, require courage. I chose a topic, diversity recruiting, that we all embrace and accept today, but that 30 years ago could have been a “career killer.” It is easy to see yourself as an enlightened person advocating all the right things, for all the right reasons, that are both fashionable and trendy. But the true change agent is the person who today is working towards the next important change, not yet commonly accepted or protected by Acts of Congress. Look around your work environment and see what it is that needs to be done. If it is merely sending memos about an existing policy, then you are a functionary. If you are recommending a concept that came to you from others in your professional research, then you are a change agent. But if your efforts have brought you to a new level not yet considered or advocated, they you have become a visionary. Be one or all of the above. But whatever you choose, choose to do it well. All three are needed in business. Everything good about where you work came as the result of the change agents who came before you and the visionaries they studied. What is it that you think needs changing? Have a great day recruiting!

1. A body will remain at rest, or in a uniform state of motion unless acted upon by a force.
2. When a force acts upon a body, it imparts an acceleration proportional to the force and inversely proportional to the mass of the body and in the direction of the force.
3. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

There will be a quiz at the end of the article. (Just kidding!) Bodies in Motion “A body,” as described by Sir Isaac, may seem to have little in common with the non-physical concept of change. After all, an object in the physical world has mass and size. Size is a function of space occupied by an object, and mass the density of the matter in that object. But change does have both properties:

• Size, referring to the numbers of persons, processes, or procedures to be created, altered, or eliminated by the change you have chosen to champion
• Mass, referring to the emotional response to your change

For example, a healthcare project to promote anti-smoking would have the same size in two companies with 5,000 employees, but the mass would vary if one of those companies were the American Cancer Society and the other Phillip Morris. There are other factors that alter mass from issue to issue. Timing is another factor that impacts mass. Implementing a program to increase the number of female managers of color in your organization as part of a diversity project at Harvard University in the year 2003 requires less moral courage and will meet less resistance than a similar project at the University of Alabama in 1962. Therefore, the successful change agent determines not only the size of the project he or she is considering, but also the mass of it. Size and mass are both a function of resistance. The forces of opposition will only have minor issues with your recommendation to change the size of the department’s standard paperclip. But your efforts to eliminate free coffee and bagels on Friday mornings in the same department may face severe stonewalling. Forces of Change “A force” as described by Sir Isaac could be something as small as a blow from a hammer or as large as the output of a 5 million kilowatt nuclear power plant. In our situation, force refers to:

• Chartered authority of your position within your organization
• Loaned authority from a person in higher authority with the charter to delegate
• Allied authority from others within your organization with authority
• Earned authority, or respect, as a result of past successes
• Moral authority, the energy generated by the collective belief in the change you are championing.

The successful change agent understands the calculations needed to determine if the “force” they have available is sufficient to act on the “body” they wish to set in motion. A change agent also understands that they are not alone when it comes to force and that there are others who may be acting against them to prevent change, or at “angles” to alter the change effort and direction. Reactions to Action “Opposite and equal” reaction to action is not only a function of the moment in change management, but a consequence of resonance. If your calculations regarding the amount of force to exert against an issue to enact change are correct, based on its size and mass ó it will move. If no other forces act against it at that time, it will move in the direction and the distance you predicted. However, the change you set in motion will in many instances, based on the emotionalism or volatility of the project, create official or unofficial reactions. Your surface success may well have begun a whole new physics of its own below the surface. In a political revolution they would be referred to as counterrevolutionaries. In business, they are the legions of the “status quo.” The “Thank You” Factor There is a fourth consideration in the Laws of Change Agency not found in Sir Isaac. In nature, change occurs, for good or bad. The laws of physics and nature do not care about outcome. The random destruction of a populated planet or an unpopulated planet occurs with no consideration of the effect of the change, but is merely the predictable and programmable result of bodies interacting with gravitational pull. But change agents, unlike nature, can choose their battles. A successful change agent constantly reviews the impact of the change he or she wishes to bring about. Because power and authority are finite, every time you become involved in change, you spend some of that power. If you fail, or succeed badly, you do not get recharged. It takes years to build a reputation and only one false step to destroy it. Consider these questions:

• Are you investing 500 million kilowatts of power on an issue that will only marginally effort less than 2% of the total workforce?
• Is the workforce as anxious to bring about the change as you are to cause it to happen?
• Will success in this issue make future successes less likely?
• Are you trying to bring about a fundamental change of importance, or merely a “window dressing” response to a transitory and trendy issue du jour?
• Does the moral imperative represented by this change override your ability to effect or bring about other changes in the future?

I call the above considerations the “thank you” factor. Of all the pitfalls, minefields, and traps laid by the opposition to forestall change, none is more powerful or more devastating than our own frustration at “their” ingratitude for all the good “we” trying to for “them.” If your motivation to seek the role of a positive change agent in your environment is to get “thanked” in proportion to the effort and risk you are taking, by those you are seeking to help, seek another form of gratification. The return is not always in proportion to the effort. Come to think of it, if you understand the physics and the dynamics of pool or billiards, then you understand the concepts of being a change agent. To further enhance your knowledge, let the cue ball smash into your hand every now and then to simulate the real total experience. In review, in planning change you must:

1. Calculate the effort based on its physical size and emotional impact.
2. Determine the power you have to enact the change based on all force available to you.
3. Consider the opposing forces to your action, present and future.
4. Determine if the use of force and reputation as a risk to initiate change are balanced out by the benefit of the outcome and the number of those benefited and their knowledge that they have been the recipients of a benefit.

An Exercise For Next Week Using the principles of SMEAC (described in a previous article of mine on ERE, “Now For Something Completely Different: ‘SMEAC’,” on 8/7/01), predict the issues you will face based on the four principles of change as outlined above: You are the human resources manager, one of four reporting directly to the VP of HR, at a manufacturing company with 5,000 employees. You have responsibility for 2,500 employees in the manufacturing group. The other three HR managers oversee sales/marketing, IT/development, and accounting/finance/administration/HR. Each HR/Manager has a recruiting peer from the staffing organization. The company is over 75 years old, publicly traded, and involved in heavy manufacturing. Twenty-seven percent of all business is federal, 32% state and local government, and the rest U.S. commercial. The shop is non-union. Business is brisk, but staffing is maintaining a reasonable fill rate against attrition and an average annual growth of 4.3%. In reviewing your employment stats, you realize that of the 2,500 employees under your care, only 123 are female and only 72 are persons of color. This is well below both your industry average and the demographic of the area your plant is located. Management, although aware, is not sufficiently concerned to take action. What steps would you take? What are the predicable issues you may face, and what actions would you plan to successfully implement a more diverse recruiting program? Plan to change this organization. Oh, by the way, it is 1972. If you would like to forward your solution and suggestions, in SMEAC format, feel free to forward them to me at kengaffey@earthlink.net. Opposing or different solutions will be incorporated and noted in the next installment, “The Solution,” since mine is not necessarily the best or only solution. You see, even change agents do not always agree. Have a great week recruiting!

• Joe Automatic. Joe will always have a negative knee-jerk reaction to any change. He is the person whose ego or sense of self-preservation is totally wrapped up in maintaining the status quo. He is so fearful of his inability to learn new things, he clings to the old ways to prevent their being revealed as incompetent. Joe is the one shaking his head within the first three sentences of your presentation for a new concept. Don’t take it personally, he probably took three months to warm up to the idea of using half and half instead of light cream in his coffee. It isn’t you he dislikes, it’s change he fears. Joe Automatic can wreck your efforts even before they begin. In planning your change efforts, dealing with him in private can often defuse his negative input. But left unidentified and unresolved, Joe and his cousins comprise the minefield you must walk to create change.
• Larry “My-Ball-and-Bat.” Lord help you if you are recommending changes or improvements in an area Larry considers his own. Larry thinks about “turf battles” as most of us think about protecting our children, with an almost primordial drive. You may want to seek Larry out to “help” you work out a few ideas. Inclusion will resolve his fear of exclusion. He hates surprises, especially the ones that occur at meetings populated with other people.
• Barbie Bigger-Issues. Barbie will always oppose recommendations for change because, “We have bigger issues to deal with first.” Nothing ever gets done, because nothing is big enough to actually be a bigger issue. You have to be able to infuse your ideas as part of a greater whole to win Barbie over. Whatever it is you are proposing, make sure it is presented as “Phase 1″ or “The Initial Effort.”
• Winnie Weather-Vane. If Winnie sides with you, you are in. Because there is no way she risks being on the losing side. Survival by remaining nameless is her only career ambition. She votes in favor of an issue only after the majority has already cast their ballots in favor. Winnie will never be a threat?? that would require speaking out. But there is little or no reason to invest time in winning her over to your cause. When it is obvious things are going your way, she will join. Winnie and her ilk make great barometers.
• Jerry Joiner. Jerry comes on-board any effort, because that is what he does?? for everybody, for every issue. I suspect Jerry Joiner is a social animal and hopes that by always joining he will not miss any good parties. But Jerry can diffuse a good effort due to his reputation for not being selective. He lacks depth of conviction, and therefore should be given a less visible and critical component of a change effort. Have him make coffee and distribute copies, but never make him one of your spokespeople. He will easily be convinced to join the other side of change as yet another opportunity to join a “bigger group,” and hence the potential for a bigger party.
• Corey Corporate. Corey still thinks that “what’s good for General Motors is good for the U.S.A.” Your recommendation for change had better have the corporate logo all over it and be presented with the corporate anthem playing in the background. (What, you don’t know the corporate anthem? Well, Corey does, you can be sure of that!) Corey will only look at change from the perspective of the existing corporate culture. If he sees your change as placing that culture at risk, you have lost his support.
• Sally Social-Worker. Sally will embrace all change as long as it appears to be the “good and decent” thing to do. A project to reduce paperwork will have to include a paper recycling project, the proceeds of which should be given to either Greenpeace or MADD. Both worthy causes, but people become weary of Sally’s tendency not to see the bottom line as the real issue in business. As righteous as Sally’s ethics and goals may be, the goal of a successful change agent is to bring about real and fundamental change. If you take Sally as an ally, you run the risk that your recommendation will be ignored as just another “social project” and not business relevant.
• Stew Skeptical. Stew does not oppose change, but he is always concerned whether it is the right time, the right place, the right plan, the right team… If you look up “vacillation” in the dictionary it says, “…see Stew.” Stew will challenge your patience as he comes up with yet another far-fetched scenario where your change could place the company at risk if on the same day the building were to catch fire during a flood while planning a RIF while the parking lot was being plowed…
• Billy Bellicose. Billy doesn’t like you. He never did, never will. If it is your idea, it stinks. He would refuse your offer to give him a kidney because even if his tissue did not reject it, he would. You can only hope to manage Billy’s opposition to your plan, not overcome or eliminate it. When you accept the role as a change agent, you also accept giving your enemies another target to aim at.
• Barry Bean-Counter. Business is all about money, as Barry will remind you, unless you work for a non-profit, in which case it is only 85% about money. All ideas must conform to the bottom line. That is a reality that will not change for quite some time (no visionary I am aware of working on that one). Failure on your part take this into account is not Barry’s fault, it is yours. You know he is there, so plan your change taking Barry into account. Change can be fundamentally good and moral and still have a positive impact on the bottom line. Find it or you will never get Barry’s vote.
• Freddy Fan. Freddy is your bud, your companion, your shadow. In seeking help in planning to implement change, do not confuse his blind loyalty for real assistance. There will be plenty of time for pats on the back AFTER you succeed. Change agents need realistic allies who will find fault and thereby aid in finding workarounds and alternative solutions. Freddy is useful as a vote, but less useful as an ally. If you really need reinforcement that badly, buy a puppy.
• Laura Leach. Laura will take recommendations and other ideas from other people and put her own spin on it. She’s likely to reprint an idea in its original form with her name on the letterhead and submit it as her own. You just have to be better, and smarter, and faster to overcome Laura’s efforts to steal your work and ideas to claim as her own. You must also learn not to broadcast your thoughts before you are ready to deliver action. On the bright side, plagiarism is, in its own way, a compliment.

Being a change agent requires, first and foremost, a decision on your part to want to effect change and to be seen as such by your peers and business partners. Change agents who manage the process poorly run the risk of being seen as nothing more than troublemakers. If you fear your ability to manage the process of change without risking alienation, then you should avoid any effort to force you into that role. But if you enjoy risk, working without a net, angst, self-doubt, potential failure, and never being totally accepted as “one of the gang,” it is a rewarding and fulfilling role to seek in your career. But a change agent must never forget that no one will ever benefit from their failing gloriously. It is better to succeed at many small victories than to be defeated constantly seeking a truly “impossible dream.” Next week: planning change. Have a great day recruiting!

• Benefits
• Compensation
• Employment Law (State and Federal)
• Recruiting
• Automation (recruiting-related and HRIS, or each as its own sub-group)
• Employee Relations
• Others

You may choose to combine or expand the basic categories. For example, if you use a lot of non-citizen employees, then visa processing may be a category unto itself. One of your recruiters may be very weak in general HR law, but well practiced and knowledgeable when it comes to the ins and outs of the INS. You may want to assign multiple tasks based on the personal and professional experiences of your staff. Based on the skill inventory, you may find one or two individuals “burdened” and others with no assignment. At the beginning you must remember you are not “dividing up labor”; you are assigning a critical responsibility to those best prepared to be successful. Part of this program should include assigning a “deputy” who lacks specific critical knowledge to a “primary” to facilitate expanding your team’s knowledge base. An inventory must always be accurate and not based on good intentions or wishful thinking. Just ask any member of the audit department at Enron. You may need to import talent into your HR/staffing organization due to a deficiency within your team. For example, you may require the assistance of corporate counsel for legal issues. It is better to accept your team’s shortcomings and take steps to correct them than it is to ignore them. During this inventory, one major issue to consider is human nature. All of us wish to succeed, but sometimes the desire to be “seen” as successful overrides the understanding of what it means to be truly successful. In an effort to meet your requirements, your staff may overstate their skills or embellish their depth of knowledge. This is human nature and not intentional dishonesty. Do not hesitate to ask for examples or verification when you are in doubt. Some of your team members may well feel qualified in their roles, or desperately wish to be, and therefore may tend to seek more responsibility than is prudent. Take a good inventory. When you are done, you should feel that you have a “subject matter expert” in each critical field. Step 2: Policy and Practices A simple policy needs to be in place that clearly specifies that no website can be used for information that will determine policies or practices in those areas where there exists the likelihood of legal or litigious risk, unless that site is:

• Regulated by a state or federal agency
• Regulated by an industry-recognized expert, or board of industry-recognized experts
• Regulated by a school or university with credentials in that specific area of information
• Currently on the approved site list
• Approved by the subject matter expert, and signed off on and added to the approved site list. There is no need for prior approval for sites to be used as general information resources or self-education resources. But if you are doing research for new policies to reflect changes in the pension regulations for a handout for your employees, you should not be using information gained from the responses from the Q and A section of the Better Homes and Gardens website. The sign off should include the department head or their designated point of contact. It makes sense to have the webmaster supporting HR also involved in this process. Of course, this only makes sense if both the HR/staffing corporate officer and webmaster take their roles seriously and exercise due diligence in reviewing the authorization request seriously and review the supporting data with a critical eye. A person in the HR/Staffing group should maintain the approved list online, and in real-time, to insure accurate data is maintained. In addition, to save time, you should also have started to maintain a “Banned In Boston” list: a collection of websites that ó based on past experience, reliable network information, or industry reputations ó are not allowed to be used for official company business. Sign off should also include the subject matter expert in your organization in that related field. If you are accessing sites for legal information, the corporate counsel should be involved. If you are seeking financial resources, the CFO should be involved, and so forth. Again, they must take this role seriously and investigate the reliability of the site you propose based on their expertise. A site need only be approved once. Step 3: Validation A site should be investigated to determine who is the person responsible for content and content control. This should be possible through the websites’ own list of contributors, their roles, and their bios. In addition, you can use the research and investigative power of your web tools to do further research of the site and its creators. Are they who they say they are? If this site charges a fee and you cannot accomplish the above through resources provided by the site, that would be a first “red light.” An effort should be made to determine if the site is in fact directly or indirectly the property of a product or service provider related to the information they offer as a service. The fact that an ATS newsletter is controlled by an ATS company does not negate the value of the data totally, but it does indicate the need for the use of multiple sources for research to offset any bias, intentional or unintentional, in the information presented. Even honest people are prone to favor that which they are closest to. For example, my niece and nephew are the two smartest teenagers alive in the world today. Period. If you are searching for the two smartest teenagers in the world as a function of your job with a real need to be accurate, you may want to rely on more than just my word on this issue. (Actually, they really are the two smartest teenagers in the world. It’s safe to risk your job on my say-so.) We are judged by the company we keep, and websites should likewise be judged by their sponsors. It also gives you a list of sources to contact to inquire about the prospective site and the reasons why they have chosen to invest their marketing dollars in association with the site in question. Remember, often the reason to invest is more a function of “hits” than quality. But this is also offset by an advertiser’s desires not to be associated with “train wrecks.” The same attitude and efforts towards judging and referencing advertisers should also be used in judging and following up on links offered by this site. If it is associated with reliable and knowledgeable sites through “shared links,” that is a positive reference. It is reasonable to assume that a site with few industry-related or respectable associated links is as good a source as one with a long list of co-operative links. Look for names of industry-acknowledged leaders. Test the site by asking the resource under consideration via the Q and A section or active peer discussion group a series of known quantity questions of pre-determined quality levels (A, B, and C) in several critical areas of HR/staffing practices, resources, and law. Judge the responses by accuracy and grade accordingly. Take several past projects, already researched by means currently available, and repeat your efforts. Again, grade accordingly. Is the new data more or less complete? Is this source offering a value plus, neutral, or negative? Ask the subject matter expert to give you some “higher level” questions and grade the responses gleaned from the site. You now have the ability to give the site a grade on its effectiveness. Look at the profiles of respondents. Is there a rich and diverse membership? How many respondents came back with hyperlinks to sites and issues you were not interested in, leads “a la spam”? Enlightened self-interest is a good thing, but if you do not get your questions answered by those also offering their need as part of the equation, why bother? In addition, judge the site or respondents for their professionalism, timeliness, originality, accuracy, and pedigree. Target knowledge levels of a site with the knowledge level you are seeking. If you are a senior HR/staffing executive working on international HR/staffing issues, a site populated primarily with third-party recruiters in Nebraska with no international business experience is of dubious value. If you are a recruiter with daily interview process issues, then a site full of HR/staffing executives who have not conducted a serious field interview in 12 years is of about the same value, i.e. none. Ask respondents to advise you about their experiences with the site in question and to recommend others that might also be of value. Do not forget to match the respondent’s email address with the site they are praising. If the respondent is sales-dude@xyz.corp.uk and they are recommending a site called www.xyz.corp.uk, well, you just have to consider the source. Quality of moderation or regulation is another issue. Too many “professional” sites seem to actually be “venting societies” for people with attitudes or the inability to deal with issues face-to-face, so they use the web to go ballistic. If I want a fight, I will go to a family reunion. I go to websites for informational discussions and intelligent information exchange. Is the site regulated to limit “net rage”? Procedure As with a candidate reference check and credit approval, have an online form with the steps you have determined best protect the integrity of your information gathering. Require that “e-footnotes” be included on the source of any policy developed or researched. It may be necessary to be able to demonstrate your efforts to control information utilized and the source of all external data used in creating policies and procedures. It is possible to “dodge a bullet” in litigious matters when due diligence can be demonstrated. Have a policy in place clearly stipulating the requirement that all resources used for the development of policy or procedure with legal or litigious risk require approved sites only and the use of information from non-approved sites in the development of policy or procedure is terminal offense. This may aid the company in protecting itself from action taken by officers of the company in formulating poor policy based on erroneous information outside guidelines, but only if periodically audited and constantly enforced. Maintain an “approved information resource access” list, much like an approved vendor list, with a clear review and retention policy. It is more likely to work if you assign a member of the HR/staffing organization with the chartered responsibility to maintain the list and enforce the practices. Nothing insures enthusiasm more than personal jeopardy. Conclusion We have accepted the rise of technology and data transfer with “firewalls,” data security procedures, virus protection and password access. But we routinely allow our employees to access and use the information they find online without any of the other guidelines and policies we readily apply in other critical areas. Think of the most recent critical policy you approved or countersigned from a subordinate based on the research they completed and proudly displayed on an Excel spreadsheet as part of their justification.

• That data was verified by whom?
• Using what standards?
• Other than verifying that “they” were satisfied with their resources, what other standardized assurances did you have that they had a right to be “satisfied” with their e-sources?

Once upon a time, companies retained senior and experienced staff to maintain an internal information library of knowledge that could also serve as a double check for the work of others. Many have mistakenly assumed that the existence of the Web and the information gleamed from it has eliminated that need. But that leaves the question open, who verifies? President Reagan, when asked if he really trusted the Russians as pertains to nuclear arms reduction said, “I trust, with verification.” Last week I created two fictional websites in my scenario illustrating these issues. I received several requests to reprint the links, since many readers tried to access the sites and could not locate them. Too many of us blindly try and “click our way” to answers. As a policy I always feel that anytime you rely on strangers who face no consequence for error to provide information critical to the training of your own staff, you have already accepted a degree of risk with great potential negative consequences. So, who is training your staff anyway? Have a great day recruiting!

• Sending emails to equally inexperienced peers
• Sending emails to the various professional “chat room” websites to which they subscribe
• Visiting favorite sites where they have mined information in the past.

One of the websites she turns to as an information source is www.HREverythingyouneedtoknow.com, which purports to be published by J. Doe, PhD, HR Stuff/Flotsam/Jetsam and a leading consultant to Fortune 500 companies. This is a favorite HR information site, primarily due to the fact that it has a daily HR/staffing joke that is usually pretty good and worth downloading and disseminating. One of the previous newsletters had a section on, “How To Legally Screen Out Possible Candidates Who Are High Risk At Using The Provisions Of The FMLA.” This information is used to develop a “legal” question for female candidates of child-bearing age. Four months later, while your corporate attorney is preparing briefs on one of 27 lawsuits currently pending against your company from female applicants claiming to have been asked an illegal, discriminatory, and biased question, and while also compiling information for a potential audit from the State Department of Labor, in addition to compiling interview and hiring data for federal auditors expected next week due to congressional inquires based on angry female constituent complaints with EEO/AA implications, placing your current $25 million in federal contracts at risk, your corporate counsel discovers that the website www.HREverythingyouneedtoknow.com was actually the brainchild of an HR/Staffing generalist with two years of business experience at a 15-person company. Their B.A. degree is in general studies, and their experience is all OJT, one year as office manager and one year as HR/Generalist in a family-owned company where all the employees are related to the owner and there are no HR/Staffing issues. Consequently Jane/John Doe has nothing better to do than run an “expert” information website based on information they gleam from a website, www.IthinkthisisagoodideaforHRStaffing.uk, managed by the 16-year-old son of an HR/Staffing racist, terminated for cause due to using racial slurs in the workplace and posting anti-female newsletter clippings on the staff bulletin board. At this point, there are three potential outcomes:

1. All the attorneys, auditors, and angry candidates anticipating high fees, settlements, and fines, upon learning of the totally honest mistake made by a well meaning but inexperienced HR/staffing representative, all laugh and laugh and laugh and go home tearing up their lawsuits, telling you how they understand how these kinds of things can happen and no harm done. (Somewhere in this scenario there should be bunny rabbits and butterflies with a smiling sun chasing away the nasty frowning clouds.)
2. After surviving devastating settlement costs, your company has to invest a significant amount of its limited surviving cash flow trying to brand your company to prospective customers, investors, and high quality candidates as something other than an anti-female, low-revenue, low-dividend, high-risk investment with questionable capability to meet deliverables (aslthough, the 60 Minutes piece on your company’s fall from grace did earn an Emmy, guaranteeing multiple re-runs throughout the season).
3. Your company goes Chapter 11 and your HR/staffing representative starts looking in the help wanted ads for a company looking for someone to act as the catalyst for their ultimate destruction (for which I highly recommend the job board of choice for fallen executives, www.I-blew-it.com).

Overstated set of circumstances? Sure! Self-serving hypothetical example designed specifically for the purpose of proving a point? Absolutely! It could never happen to you? Of course not! Maybe. I think. Well, not likely. Right? (Nah! You just have a corporate counsel on retainer because they always have the best lawyer jokes.) The new age of information represented by the Web has guaranteed unlimited access to information. It has also guaranteed unlimited ability to make information available, regardless of knowledge or the right to do so. Which gives rise to the question, is all information of equal value? Of equal importance? How can you discern fact from fraud? Up until ten years ago, availability was usually in direct proportion to value because availability was also in direct proportion to cost. Not a rule that was reliable 100% of the time, but sufficiently so to act as a reliable “first pass litmus test” of sources and resources. The days of print media made access expensive. If a company had a front-page ad in the help wanted section, that did not guarantee that they were financially sound, but it did mean they could pony up $80,000 for an ad. The more often you saw a company’s message, the more certain you could be of its value. Again, not an absolute, but a reasonable first test, as the cost involved in making oneself visible indicated cash flow. To be “commonly known” or “commonly accepted” had a reference value in and of itself. The same was true for self-styled experts. Visibility was too expensive for “hacks” and the liability risk for the publishers was too high not to be cautious. Today, the website of a major player in a specific industry and that of a hobbyist or practical joker can have the same look, limited only by e-talent and access to reasonably priced tools. This is not an issue requiring evil intent; well-meaning amateurs can be as harmful as intentional deceit where information is concerned. One of the other past common methods used to evaluate information sources was experience. Ten-plus years of being “in the business” developing contacts, networks, and resources based on years of trial and error, success and failure, and acquired personal knowledge were the components of perfecting your professional library of fact versus fiction, reliable versus dubious, best practices versus “neat-o” ideas. But reverence for experience has faded. Why? Because experience equates to cost. High levels of professional experience equates to high cost. Several years ago, you did not bother to “brag” about the year your company was established in your market branding efforts until your first half century of continuous operation. Last month I read an ad for a company proudly proclaiming, “Providing service to New England since 1998.” Then again, to have survived the last two years is no mean feat. The value of experience has been deflated by direct access to information…assuming that those with limited inexperience can discern the value to the source and the veracity of the content. With the wholesale slaughter of the HR/staffing community in the last two years, more and more companies appear to be relying heavily on a thinly spread and very junior HR/staffing workforce to act as their navigators along the rocks and shoals of human resources practices. It appears that many, if not most, companies are oblivious to the metaphysical damage a small rocky shoal can do to a “supertanker” taking the wrong turn, or else they are more focused on the advantage of immediate short-term savings that come from cutting senior salaries than the potential strategic damage caused by misinformation or disinformation accepted as fact. Save six digits, lose seven or eight digits. Those who are currently in a position of responsibility with five or less years experience, holding a position previously occupied by a staff of three with a manager of ten or more years experience, need not be marginalized, insulted, or embarrassed by this premise. Experience is a function of time, effort, intelligence, and dedication. You can control only three of four of these items. Time in and of itself is not a value, but the opportunity time offers for the repeating of events as a way of learning, and refining theory by that repetition, is a critical component in the development of proficiency. Bravado is self-defeating and counter-indicating. As I have stated before, the “super person” mindset is a certain course to disaster. If you need heart surgery, who do you want performing the procedure?

1. The #1 graduate in his class from Harvard Medical School, class of 2000, with 27 similar operations as an assistant, with access to medical websites.
2. The #25 graduate from a mid-range medical school with 10 years of experience and 375 procedures as the lead surgeon, all successful, and a network of peers with similar experience and backgrounds.
3. A holistic healer who uses crystals.

If you chose #1, then you probably have less than five years experience and are years away from worrying about your heart. If you chose #2 you probably have more than five years experience, accept the inevitability of needing a heart surgeon one day, and tend to look at the issue less as a theoretical exercise than as one that does hold real risk for you one day. Risk is what separates the luxury of a theoretical exercise from the reality of actual consequences. The #3 choice was for our West Coast readers. To support the above premise, go to any HR/staffing professional website and gauge the questions more frequently asked and the depth and value of the answers. Over the last two years the level of knowledge requested has been increasingly at a more junior level, asked by people with senior “titles.” And with equally increasing frequency the peer answers are often of dubious or untested quality. Remember, in a critical role or function in business, being right 99 times is totally negated by the one time you were wrong. This is especially true in strategic business decisions, investment data, issues with potential litigation, and hand grenades. As a resource, most if not all of the new HR/staffing professionals with five or less years experience turn to the tool of choice of their entire careers, the web. Companies have policies on giving credit to customers, or the control and access of information divulged to potential sub-contractors to protect the company’s intellectual property, and firewalls to prevent external web access beyond a specified level. What is your current corporate policy on verifying and use of information developed from website searches? In other words, do you have stricter policies and procedures regarding giving a customer $25 in credit to buy a widget than you require in your HR/staffing area for valuing information “mined” that carries the potential for millions of dollars in liability if that source is, unintentionally or otherwise, incorrect, inaccurate, or criminally negligent? The Web is like a room full of strangers. There is the potential to make friends, enemies, or waste time with individuals with little or nothing to contribute to your life. How to choose correctly the best person with whom to shake hands is the challenge. Before next week, ask your peers, “What is the litmus test you apply to website resources before you accept the information they offer to influence reports, recommendations or proposed policies? Is the process standardized? The data you downloaded last week from a co-worker, was it also held to the same standard?” Of course, I exclude myself from the above. You can always trust me, right? Have a great day recruiting!

1. Use common sense in place of statistics. Inevitability, all data is compiled by a person with a mission or a point to which he or she is already committed. Neither may prove to be my own. Besides, amateurs lie; professional liars use statistics. Well, 90% of the time anyway.
2. Collect data and then form an opinion, not the other way around. I have spent too many hours listening to the arguments from people who first formed an opinion, and then sought data, obviously ignoring all data that refuted the opinion.
3. Pay closer attention to the past; it is merely the future is disguise. History repeats itself more than a cheap refried bean burrito. Yet we continue to be surprised by events that have occurred in the past.
4. Assume that “general consensus” merely means that the chance exists that the majority of people may be wrong. Do not assume that they are automatically correct simply due to their majority. The general consensus was once that the Earth was flat and that monsters lay beyond the edge of the world to eat the unwary. The general consensus was that you should always take stock options in lieu of cash. The power of a group lies in the IQ as an average, not the group’s combined total. Following the group consensus only guarantees you company, not correctness.
5. Avoid using “hypothetical examples,” as all real problems have real examples. The absence of real examples calls into question either your ability to find real examples or your unwillingness to reveal them. Through the use of hypothetical examples it is possible to prove the need for elephant detectors in movie theaters to prevent peanut theft. Hypothetically speaking, of course. The use of the hypothetical always calls the existence of the problem into doubt. Hypothetical examples are the tool of those with less a problem to solve than a point to make.
6. The only absolute is the absence of all absolutes. All the time, without fail, ever.
7. Whenever possible, avoid the use of the word “but” and it’s equally sinister cousin “however”, when making a statement. It usually indicates that everything to the left of the word was not true and that your real feelings are revealed to the right. For example, “I do not mind investing in our employees, BUT we must consider cost savings in these difficult times.” Save everyone time and get to the point without the disclaimer.
8. Quit smoking. (I already did that eight years ago, but I figure this way I have at least one resolution already on the plus side.)
9. Assume that if I form my opinion regarding another person’s comment before they finish saying it or before I finish reading it, my enthusiasm may indicate a serious lack of objectivity or excessive and possibly unwarranted self-certainty.
10. Make no lists with exactly ten items.
11. Never use the expression, “Let’s agree to disagree.” If you have a valid point of view other than my own, you do not need my permission, nor I yours, to retain it. All movement causes friction, hence the absence of “perpetual motion.” In the absence of movement, there is only stagnation. To me this cliche is the banner of those who seek consensus above all else, including change.
12. Avoid the use of CAPITALS in sentences when trying to make a point responding to someone else’s comments. For example, “I REALLY feel you are NOT correct in your assumption!” It looks silly, appears pompous, and is self-defeating. I have always felt that a good argument stands on it’s own merits, WITHOUT capitalization (oops!).
13. Accept all criticism without anger, resentment, or the need to retaliate. No matter how big a jerk the ungrateful person is who made the unfair and unsubstantiated assault on, you taking advantage of your good nature ó who, I might add, will regret the day they opened their stupid mouth (hmmm, maybe I need to work on this one).

Celebrating the New Year as an opportunity for change and improvement is a good thing. Success in all efforts is not a prerequisite to victory. In recognizing the need to improve and in identifying those areas to make an effort is to be found a success unto itself. So, Happy New Year to all of us and the sincere hope for a better year ó and the hope that we make better use of it in our professional and personal endeavors. Have a great day recruiting! P.S. The unwritten resolution is to lose 20 pounds, but that has been a given ever since I turned 40.

From:		J. Doe, Director, Human Resources, Anti-Deformation Team, Holiday Sub-Group, Display Control Monitoring Section, XYZ Corp
To:		All Employees, XYZ Corp.
Subj:		Holiday Happiness Moderation and Spontaneity Scheduling; Employee Handbook Update

With the holiday season approaching, the tendency for the average company to relax its usual efforts to ensure zero tolerance of self-expressive activities outside accepted and regulated correct-speak parameters is common. Not so here at XYZ Corporation. We gladly align ourselves, mindlessly and without any effort to express individual courage or personal conviction, with the accepted trend du jour. The trend is good. All praise the trend. The following guideline updates will be available for download on the internal website, “Employee Correct Behavior Handbook” at www.xyzcorpisalwaysright.com within the next two or three working days. However, due to the temptation to stray and forget what is truly important this holiday season, I hasten to update you now, before it is too late and you unintentionally take action or actions that cannot be forgotten or forgiven. Holiday decorations within your personal workspace:

• Must not cover more than 10% of total wall space in a cubicle, standard 6/8, or more than 5% in a standard workspace, 8/10.
• Must not be visible in other than direct view angles within a distance of less than 3.7 feet.

Decorations must be non-denominational and cannot contain words or phrases such as:

• “Brotherhood” (see also chapter VII, Section C, Paragraph 17, Heading “Common Gender Diminishing Phrases,” for further issues outside of those represented by holidays)
• “The Lord Has Come”
• “Bethlehem” (unless the reference is to the steel industry)

For gift exchanges:

• All gifts must include a certificate signed by myself or my deputy, certifying that the gift is presented without obligation to acknowledge or accept the belief system expressed or implied by the gift giver.
• The gift can be returned, opened or unopened, to the gift giver without prejudice, if the recipient decides that to accept it would represent an unacceptable acknowledgement of a selfless act and the receiver decide that their constitutional right to assume offense supercedes common sense.
• The gift giver is then free to file a statement of forced inclusion against the gift giver.

Other important holiday points:

• The playing of any holiday music of a “carols” nature that refers to a God, Supreme Being,” or Frosty the Snowman, is reason for immediate disciplinary action. Songs recorded by Bing Crosby are grounds for immediate termination if the backup singers are referred to as a “choir.”
• Fruitcake, although not prohibited, is discouraged, at least until we get a lab report on exactly what goes into those things and why their half life is longer than plutonium 90.

The Human Resources Department here at XYZ Corporation encourages it’s employees to enjoy and benefit from all the joy and good tidings of the holiday season, as long as you are willing to subject your personal beliefs and convictions into compliance with policies designed to appease all possible negative responses to you self-expression. I again apologize for the delay in making this available for downloading, but the IT Department has informed me that the “Enforceable Employee Correct Behavior Guidelines” section has filled yet another server, and the additional servers will not be online for a few more days. Happy (politically correct and monitored) holidays, from all of us in the shadow enforcement team at XYZ Corp.! John Doe

“Proud to be guardian of your moral imperatives and controller of your religious expression.”

Fiction? Probably, but not definitely. I recently read that this year, more companies than ever have joined the legions of zombie corporations in enforcing zero tolerance of Christmas and have created more reference-based regulations than ever before in the history of political correctness, or “correct-speak” as George Orwell and I call it. I have to admit that my first reaction to this trend was that it made me feel good to know that we must have solved unemployment, fair hiring practices, EEO/AA issues, as well as world hunger if we actually have the time to get upset or offended at how somebody expresses their feelings of goodwill and joy. One would think in times like these restrictions on goodwill would be discouraged. It is not like we are overburdened with good thoughts. But alas, it isn’t so. “Christmas” is a word increasingly not tolerated in corporate America, or anywhere else for that matter, with the exception of retail stores, online catalogues, malls, and your own home. I was brought up celebrating Christmas, not “holiday,” an important religious and cultural event I love to share. But in a misdirected effort to create a sense of inclusion for all members of all religions and all cultures we have begun by trying to change history and exclude a segment of our religious and cultural population. Since the arrival of the second wave of settlers to the New World (the first wave were the Native Americans and they justifiably consider us invaders, not settlers), the primary source of immigrants was from Europe. Therefore many of the customs and cultural aspects of the American way of life reflect those European roots. Christianity was one of those roots. With that comes the celebration of Christmas on December 25th, not as a “holiday” but as a “holy day.” Tradition tells us that those employers’ traditional efforts to show the correct brotherhood of the season was by giving their workers the day off, with pay. Consider that this harkens back to the days when the average worker was given no vacation or sick days and was expected to work six days a week. So a day off with pay was a big deal. Later as affluence and workers rights expanded, the “Christmas bonus” grew beyond a “day’s pay.” Companies would hold a Christmas party to celebrate the common “holy day” together. The annual added wealth of an unexpected payday or bonus and general good spirits gave rise to increased and expanded gift buying. As affluence increased, so did the scope and domination of the season in our lives. But its cultural origin lies in the belief that the 25th of December represents the birth of Christ, and not the birth of “Holiday” to a substantial percentage of those in this culture. Whether he be viewed as God, revolutionary, or cultural myth, that the “well spring” from which the tradition springs forth. Yet in the spirit of offending as few as possible the legions of politically correct insist upon a program based on the premise that “denying the truth shall set us free.” Our culture is changing, new and diverse elements have been entering in increasing numbers over the last century, and the nation can no longer be considered exclusively Euro-Christian in composition ó and has not actually been for a period longer than we recognize. To all I say, “Welcome, and come share your culture with me, as I hope to share mine with you.” To those whose religious origins celebrate Hebrew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or other holy days, or those who celebrate none, bring the happiness and joy of your seasons or special activities to the workplace as I will mine, and together we will learn to share each other’s joy and peace, and not be frightened, threatened, or offended by our differences. Rather, by observing each other and accepting invitations to join and share, we will become better than we could have on our own. We will jointly elevate where we work from a frighteningly bland and vanilla place where we must accept a non-humanistic reconfiguration to one where we work and exchange in the open air of free speech and a willingness not to be offended by those who are not our own reflection. I was brought up an Irish Catholic in a place where Irish Catholics abound: Boston, Massachusetts (we are competitive with Dublin). The spirit of what this “holy day,” Christmas, brings to me is a combination of joy, happiness, fulfillment, and a sense of hope for the future. None of that need be seen as a threat or a form of marginalization by my brothers and sisters of the Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or any other faith, lack of faith, or combination of one to more of the proceeding, in the celebration of that which brings joy and comfort to me as opposed to that which does the same for them. The joy in my life need not result in the diminishment of another’s. We cannot resent or be offended by something simply because we do not “own it.” In fact, if you ever find yourself needing another name on a mailing list for your religious celebration, “special occasion,” or “cultural event,” feel free to add mine. I assure you I will not be offended by your efforts to include me in that which brings you peace and joy or cultural and religious fulfillment. You do not need to “rename” it for my benefit. I will further be enhanced as a human being by showing my willingness to tolerate other than what is reflective of me. After all, if we are not tolerant, then we must be intolerant. Right? I doubt any culture is supported, fostered or enriched by intolerance of others. Ironically, it appears that it is the HR/Staffing community that has embraced the role as Obergruppenfurher responsible for the blind acceptance of the current intolerance to true and total diversity. To be truly diverse, should we not include the acceptance of religious diversity along with all other accepted forms of diversity? We again appear to lack the strength of will needed to reverse this trend of intolerance in the name of political correctness. We not only allow it to persist, we police, warn, and punish offenders. But that’s okay I guess, as we are only following orders. The Constitution declares that there shall be a separation of church and state to prevent religious intolerance enforced by law or law influenced by religious leadership. To that consideration I give total and unblemished support. But business is free to permit individual expression in all areas, and that includes allowing a person who celebrates Christmas to say “Merry Christmas” in their place of work without the HR/Staffing “correct speak” goon squad from saying, “Didn’t you mean [giggle] Happy Holidays? That’s what you meant to say, RIGHT!” (Get the thumbscrews; the Inquisition lives!) But if your company feels morally obligated to protect those who may be offended by the celebration of Christmas or its mere utterance or simple expression through decorations, all it has to do is make December 25th a working day and add an additional personal day to your corporate allowance. In addition you may want to eliminate the “holiday” bonus whose origin lies in a “Holy Day” observance. So doing would deny critics the opportunity to use words such as “hypocritical” when referring to your policies. That is to say, to allow the event, renamed, but deny the origin of the event to those who believe and practice that belief for the convenience of those who do not, but still want the day off, a bonus, and party. But that would also mean the possible cultural rethinking of new names for Mardi Gras, St. Valentines Day, and Easter. That is a lot of lost retail money due to re-branding, and I guess money is a religion unto itself for some. Before the “correct-speak” police arrive at my door to haul me off for reconfiguration and correct my thinking, let me exclaim at the top of my lungs, the most sincere wishes for you and yours ó in the spirit of brotherhood, sisterhood and sharing; across all faiths, belief systems, or naturalistic outlooks ó a totally politically incorrect and inappropriately phrased… Merry Christmas! Tell you what: end world hunger or bring about world peace and THEN come back to me about your concerns regarding the use of the word “Christmas” versus “holiday.” Seems like a fair and balanced set of priorities to me. Have a great Christmas recruiting!