Category Archives: capitalism

Silver Lining of The Great Recession: Hiring Over-Qualified Candidates

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Astute Employers Can Benefit from Treasure Trove of Potential Candidates
Do the rewards outweigh the risks?  The experts would suggest as much.

The Great Recession presents new opportunities for employers who have just begun to hire again.
The experts are telling us: before you decide to pass on a candidate you might think is overqualified, take a little time to get to know him/her; even though you might be inclined to dismiss the offer, the “extra” skills of the applicant could be effectively utilized to boost performance in your work group or business.  
Unless you undertake this small task (a phone call?), you’ll never know the reasons why he might be interested in the specific position: does he want to shift industries?…relocate?…create a better work/life balance?  Find out.
Here are a few ideas on how to go about the process of discerning whether you should pursue the overqualified: 


First, define the risks: 

  • What are the hazards of hiring someone with more experience than you think might be needed for the job?  
  • Might she upstage her manager?  
  • Quit early into the job because she’s not challenged or because she finds a better job?
  • Disparage co-workers for being stupid or inexperienced?

Second: define the upside: 

  • What are the possibilities, the potential benefits of taking on a worker with some bonus abilities?  
  • Might it propel your work group to a new level of attainment?  
  • Could she bring personal, organizational or technical skills that are either non-existent or in short supply that could help the group function more effectively?  
  • Does her character offer some features that might help others on the team…just by observing?

With these two pieces of work out of the way, you’re likely to be a better helmsman in steering the process.  


Ideas that can help both in the hiring and the  ”onboarding” process: 


Expand Your Thinking About the Job
Stretch your thoughts about the job: in the past, you might have searched for the right candidate to fill the opening.  Now, you can look into the future: are there needs that we will have in the future that this candidate could address?


Be Careful How You Bring Him On
Unmet expectations are, often, a key reason for turnover; it can be amplified in situations where the employee is over-skilled.  Make sure to clearly spell out the job, in detail.  Preemptively outline the tasks, responsibilities which might be “below” the skills of your new thoroughbred.  
Assure that fellow employees are aware of your decision and are going to participate in making the new hire work.


Pay Her What She Is Worth
Even though it would be easy to “discount” pay, according to the experts, by as much as 25% compared to pre-recession levels, the strong advice is against that: pay her what she’s worth.  It will work better in the long run.
If you can’t afford her, then it would be more prudent to pass.  If you have to pay her less than market, make sure she knows what the possibilities for advancement and bonuses are and, then, she can make the decision to accept.  


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Using appropriate strategies could help you add key people to your organization.  I, for one, would recommend “pushing the envelope” to get the best talent that’s possible.



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Throw Out the Performance Review

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Finally, Some Frank Talk About the Failings of An Old Paradigm

The Annual Employee Performance Review: both boss and employee respond with an “Ugh!” to this event.  How could we justify getting rid of these archaic and unproductive exercises?

Does the process help boost organizational output, increase throughput?  Doubtful.  Does it make the employee feel good?  Unlikely.  One would be motivated to ask the logical question: “Why do we keep doing them?”  I would say: “It’s a bad habit for which we…yet have no replacement.”

“First, they’re dishonest and fraudulent. And second, they’re just plain bad management,” writer and UCLA professor Culbert says in a radio interview the week of July 6.

Tough talk from (what looks like) a not-so-friendly-looking guy.  (I wouldn’t want a Review from the likes of him!)  But, he’s right: performance reviews don’t do much to get out in the open the challenges in the business nor facilitate a discussion of the possible solutions.

Employees come to the process anxious about its impact on their pay or career.  Supervisors, managers are given a limit of how much the pay can be increased and, that small view, becomes the focus of the discussion: what did you do well? — and, of course, that becomes the employees shield — and how much more money am I going to give you.  Which, of course, the boss knows before he heads into the Review.

People want their work to matter, to mean something.  And, the annual Review doesn’t facilitate such a goal.  The process is devoid of humanity, in many cases.

“Once you set up the metrics, that’s the only focus for the employee,” Culbert says. “The problem with performance reviews is that the metric that counts most for the employee is the boss’s opinion. So the employee starts doing what he or she thinks is going to score in the boss’s mind, and not even talk about what he or she believes is necessary for the company to get the results that really matter.”

With what should we replace these arcane practices?  How about a frank discussion where, perhaps, the boss provides some clear targets for the employee that are aligned with the goals of the organization, the unit?  Good.  Another major problem solved.

For anyone who would like to gauge where they stand on the annual review issue, Culbert and Rout have posted a test on their site, with the slightly biased title of How Much Do You Hate Performance Reviews?

Here’s Your Brain On…

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…The Internet: I Won’t Try to Argue the Point

Do you remember the TV advertisements back in the ’80′s where the topic was DRUGS?  Setting: a kitchen with some earth-toned appliances, a frying pan on top of a stove with a voice over that went something like: “This is your brain…”  Plop an egg into the hot pan: voice over: “This is your brain on drugs.”  


The message?  Drugs will fry your brain.  


The ad should be modified for current times: we should drop a hard drive or a motherboard into the frying pan: “This is your brain on the Internet.”


Nicholas Carr (His Blog) is the man of the hour with his new book: What The Internet is Doing to Our Brains: The Shallows.  He’s on NPR, reviewed in Bloomberg BusinessWeek (talk about branding…Bloomberg??).  And, of course, he’ll soon be on Oprah.  


I won’t try to debate the premise.  What I will do is ask us to look back, first, about 5,000 years.  That was the time that the Jews were thought to be writing texts.  (The Mayans could have had hieroglyphics by then, too.) 


I’m guessing that, at that time, there were those who thought that a book was a revelation of a demon deity.  I’ll bet there were even people who could have been quoted as saying something similar to neuroscientist Michael Merzenich: we are “training our brains to pay attention to the crap.”  


Excuse me?  May I beg your pardon: not my brain: my brain pays attention to both the good stuff and the crap.   (And, by the way, Mr. Merzenich, from an atmospheric perspective, isn’t it all crap?  What has getting to the moon done for me…lately?)


Gutenberg?  Some thought he was the devil.  Polio, may I remind you, was the result of a naturally occurring virus but we applied technology on that one, too.


The Point, with a capital “P,” that I’m trying to make — after four or five paragraphs, sorry — is that there are always detractors to the new technologies.  Technology will always advance ahead of society’s ability to understand how to use it (true for the stone axe? hmm).  Stem cell research is finally coming close to its potential after W’s moratoriums.  


And, finally, try not to pontificate while one is the middle of a tech revolution: the view is in the shallows.  Only time will allow a more balanced view.



High Anxiety Makes Sense: What Model is Next, Emerging?

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Macro View Creates Grave Concerns: Is Society Viable?

Phillip Blond is a senior lecturer in theology and philosophy at the University of Cumbria. He is currently writing Red Tory, a book on radical conservatism. He writes frequently for the mainstream press on economics, politics and religion

“Look at the society we have become: We are a bi-polar nation, a bureaucratic, centralised state that presides dysfunctionally over an increasingly fragmented, disempowered and isolated citizenry.” 

– Phillip Blond, British author, lecturer at U of Cumbria

So, tell me: how does one run a business — for- or non-profit — in times like these?  When the model that should be steering behaviors and strategies seems…absent or no longer applicable?  No rudder?


Phillip Blond’s acute analysis, referenced in a David Brooks New York Times Editorial, displays one of the great difficulties of the times that mirrors the incessant reminders of fiscal betrayal by Goldman Sachs and the like: We’ve been duped!  Where does one go from there?  A retreat seems likely.


How to make sense of this twisted situation? Blond would argue that we need to come back to our human associations, to our original sovereign station of “the people.”


Because of the inherent flexibility of organizations — they’re more nimble than governments and…more responsive —   these institutions can assist in the movement quite effectively.  Ironic yes and true, too: here’s the reality: your company can be the agent of change in the world: a focus on community, association, service above self.

“The welfare state and the market state are now two defunct and mutually supporting failures.” — essay by British writer Phillip Blond.  

If Blond is right, we’re in a limbo period, waiting for a more effective model to emerge.  While we’re waiting, he would argue that we could be the creators of that new model: should we give it a try?  First step?  Try listening a bit more and talking a bit less: humans like that.







For the New Year: Be Yourself, Upset the Experts

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We Crave Connectedness But We Settle for Transactions

I’ve got a new thought for the New Year: tell the experts they’re nuts.  Well, on just one subject: explaining yourself…in business.  For the New Year, commit to “be yourself” and to hell with the so-called authorities and all their fancy “service platform explanations.”  (Does that make any sense?  I didn’t think so either.)

In the process, you just might find that you like yourself, and others, just a wee bit better.  And, that you’re not always measuring yourself against an untenable yardstick of “professionalism” and “propriety.” 

OK, if someone is explaining his/her business service to you, hang in for a minute: you can do it.  Don’t assume s/he will get it all laid out quickly, efficiently and elegantly; sometimes, the smart ones need time, you know.  And, this is how we build connections: what we crave.  We listen.  (Ask the expert, pensive, in the picture; he knows.)

If you’re in the professional service business, you’ve been told — how many times? — how important your “elevator speech” is to promoting your business.  (I’ve got news for you: you could be the Bill Gates of Consultants right now: you ain’t gonna sell nothin’ because no one’s buying nothin’.  Just the way it is.  [Excuse all of my colloquial double negatives, please.]  Well, they’re not buying much!)

What spurred this counter-revolutionary theme? (Some think it was my birth!)  I got to hear an “award-winnng” journalist and consultant speak recently on the subject of partnerships. The talk was a “blur” but I seem to recall a strong emphasis on the “message;” saying what one does in a specific format so that she, the speaker, or some prospective partner, could understand quickly.  Transactions not relationships: isolated vs connecting.  The old industrial model: we are “units of labor.”  Not my cup of tea.

From now on, I’m going to revolt against this type of “packaging:” I really don’t need someone to explain to me his/her business to know whether or not I’m going to like that person and can possibly do business with him or her.  (You know that language is less than 10% about words?)

Some call it the “elevator speech” or “escalator speech.”  I call it “deadsville” because it seeks to package what is hard to wrap: my passions, my expertise, my life. 

So, if the experts suggest you have ten seconds, tell ‘em off and use thirty, hell, use sixty, instead.  I’ll listen and if I don’t, I’m not being respectful.  How’s that for a New Year’s resolution: I will behave more respectfully in 2010.  Towards others, the planet, my clients/customers, my colleagues.  I’ll listen: I’ll make more of an effort to connect.

I’m being encouraged, no coerced, to commoditize myself so that you can understand, in an instant, whether or not I have anything to offer you, as another business person, potential partner, etc.  How have we arrived here?  Slick commercialism?  Greed?  Fear?  Whatever it is, I don’t want to buy it: if you want to tell me about your work, your livelihood, I’ll wait to hear what you’ve got to say: I’ve got plenty of time: I am interested in connecting.

So, when I’m told that I have to explain my work in the “right format,” (What do you offer?…To Whom?…How do they hear about it?…) I’m being told to state my rank and serial number.  I’m being told I’m a “thing.”  Corn, soybeans, crude oil: I’m a commodity.  Trade me on the Mercantile Exchange.  That’s not connecting!  But…it is safe.  (We crave safety, too.)

If I’m a “thing” to you, a tool of some sort that seems to fit your current conundrum, don’t buy me.  If you want to know who I am, great.  I’ll tell you.  But, it will take more than ten seconds.  Sorry, just the way it goes if…you’re interested in connecting.  How’s that for a New Year’s resolution?  We’re not in an economic crisis…we’re in an emotional crisis: a lack of meaningful connection.

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