Getting People Right

CHAPTER 1

Why Use Profiling Systems?

To recruit the wrong person can easily cost a year's salary. According to calculations done by a globally active business-consulting firm, the search for a new employee costs approximately $65,000, just to find an employee who seems to be the right one for the job. That means it will cost another $65,000 if it later turns out that the new recruit was actually not the right one. These calculations do not take into account the internal interviews with the senior consultants who make the final decisions on hiring.

From a business standpoint, however, these costs must be added in. What this means is that a bad decision when hiring could result in double the costs specified above. And still not all of the costs have been considered. It can become quite expensive to have an employee in the wrong position. Not because they are a bad person, but because it was not adequately taken into account when hiring them, whether, in addition to their professional qualifications, they also had the soft skills to fulfil the responsibilities assigned to them.

It is likewise not good for the applicant to take on a position to which they are not suited. Changing jobs too soon or failing to make it through the probationary period will leave behind indications on their résumé which could hinder their later career. Furthermore, a bad fit between a person and a job will cause stress for the job-holder. Usually this stress will spread to their colleagues, as they must deal with the job-holder's poor disposition. They will have to take on the portion of the job-holder's work that the job-holder will not be able to handle, as well as endure other consequences of the bad hiring decision. Before an applicant decides to take a job, they should always ask themselves, "Is this the right job for me?" Sadly, in times of high unemployment, this happens far too seldom. When there is a shortage of skilled professionals, it is a different story.

With a good competence profiling system, it can be determined beforehand to what extent an applicant is suited to a job, or, conversely, how well the job suits the applicant.

1.1 "How Do You Operate an Employee?"

This is a provocative question. If you ask this of an employer, they will typically respond by saying, "What? Operating employees? They should be doing their jobs; that's what I pay them for. That's that." Then if you say, "Yes, I understand. Then how do you operate a machine that is worth $75,000?" Quite typically the answer will be, "First the service people come, and they install the machine before anyone ever turns it on. And of course, every employee receives instruction in its use, perhaps two or three days of training. Only trained personnel are allowed to operate the machine, and naturally there is a maintenance contract for it. Certainly, you must safeguard that kind of investment."

When an employer tells you this, you might reply with, "In your company I would rather be a machine than an employee, because you really take care of your machines. But what about your employees?" Most likely this person will then stop and realise, "There is truth in what you say." Incidentally, you will also get the same kind of answers about machines that are worth only $10,000 or $20,000.

1.2 Safeguarding the Investment in Employees

This shows the importance of safeguarding the investment in employees. One way to do this is by examining professional qualifications, mostly in the form of references and letters of recommendation. These days, however, the significance of employer recommendations is sometimes very dubious. Since the late 1970s, in any case, I have always written recommendations for myself upon leaving a job, and my superiors or personnel departments have merely signed them. Another factor is the crucial importance of the personal competencies necessary to accomplish a task. My grandmother used to say, "You can't see what's inside a person's head." That is correct. Still, there is a need to quickly and reliably identify an employee's personal competencies.

So, what do we mean by personal competencies? Among them, for example, are flexibility, interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, leadership skills, communication skills and the ability to deal with conflict, either in teams or with customers or superiors. These competencies also include personal working style and emotional intelligence.

This raises the question of how long professional and personal competence can remain consistent. This is what we mean when we ask, "After leaving a job, how long will my skills and qualifications remain valid? When I find a new position doing the same job, will I be able to start working right away?" Depending on the field, professional competencies may remain consistent for between a couple of months and five years.

This couple-of-months-period applies in the computer industry. Products in this industry are developed for the production span of three months. After that, these products have already been overtaken by further technological developments and are replaced by newer models. At a computer trade show some years ago in March, I saw a computer that I liked very much, and I ordered it. I received it in June. In November, a colleague of mine decided to buy exactly the same computer. By then, the computer was no longer available; it had long since become outdated.

Speaking of computers, they have a longer production cycle than their individual components. For example, today's hard disks are being produced only for a couple of months, after which they will be obsolete.

At the end of the 1970s, when I first started using computers, rumours were circulating about large-capacity disk drives. In those days, they were not called hard disks, but "Winchester drives" or "rigid disks" - and they were said to have the unbelievably large capacity of 1 MB on a 5¼-inch drive. Today we shake our heads in amazement and disbelief to think how little capacity that was.

It was calculated at the end of the 1970s that in perhaps ten to fifteen years we would have reached the absolute limit of memory size. This would have meant that it would no longer be possible, technologically or physically, to fit more and more data into increasingly smaller chips. This limit was estimated to be one megabit per chip. By now (2022) we have long since had chips with several gigabits (one gigabit = one thousand megabits). Hard disks, incidentally, have by this time exceeded the limit of 16 terabytes (one terabyte = one million megabytes) - not, however, on a 5¼-inch drive, but on a 2.5-inch drive. That works out, at the outside, to be about 50 times smaller.

Today there is still no end in sight to this development. Moore's Law, dating from the 1970s and applying to the computer field, holds that every 18 months twice the capacity becomes available at half the price. Time and again for over forty years this law has proven to be true. It's coming to its end right now, until we get Quantum computing off the ground. So, if someone were to leave employment in this field and stay out of it for a full eighteen months, they would have to learn their job all over again.

And this strikes a chord with everything I have heard from people who are already established in their career. They often say, "At some point in the past I learned how to do something, and now I am doing something different, because my profession is changing so much." Things are no longer the way they were one hundred years ago, when someone would enter into a profession, learn it and practice it in the same way for the rest of their life.

What did you learn to do when you first started? And what are you doing now? How much did you learn that was new? How many new things did you have to learn because of the pressure of change? So much for the idea of professional education.

Such a rate of change makes things more exciting, but then again, it also makes things much more complicated. Personal competence, on the other hand, does not change in just three months. If you happen to meet someone again after not having seen them for three months, they have not suddenly become a different person. That can happen after five years, after twentyfive years, or perhaps not at all. People do not change so quickly. It may be that in the meantime they have undergone a trauma or had some other defining experience, a divorce, for instance, or an accident or illness - something that produced significant changes in their personality. However, such things are not the norm, and they cannot be predicted. Once you have determined a person's personal competencies, you can depend on them much more so than on their professional competencies.

In many departments of a company, the work is so specialised that new employees, however well-qualified they may be, must still spend several months learning new skills. Thus, it can only be in the best interests of the company to select employees who are suited to the organisation in terms of their personal competence. This calls for a good profiling system, one that can ascertain the personality characteristics and behavioural tendencies of applicants and that can verify their suitability for a position. Such a profiling system would be a great benefit to any company. And the range of choices on the market is extremely confusing. Which of the many profiling systems would be the best choice? What are the most important things an...