Resourcing

The inside track

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So we talk a lot about ethics in HR and recruitment, and rightly so.  Ethical behaviour should be at our core in business, whatever area we work in (whether it is, or isn’t, is another matter). At the same time, we’ve heard a lot recently about social mobility, the way in which connections at work and in industry can be used to help people with the right contacts progress more quickly than others. It goes without saying, that doesn’t seem fair.

But a couple of questions have been running through my head recently and I wanted to test them out. Those of us who are connected with others, either through formal or informal networks, will often come up against others asking about or applying for opportunities that we may have within our organisations, or for third party recruiters, that we are working on. What are the ethics that apply here?

If someone you knew, a friend or acquaintance, applied for a role. What would be the appropriate thing to do?

Do you accept that they are just another candidate and let the best person win.  Is it ever acceptable to help them understand the role and the organisation more than other candidates? I’m not talking about giving them a heads up on specific interview questions, or giving them privileged information that would provide them with a significant advantage, or even giving them a job just because you know them. But is it ok to coach them on the areas that they might be asked about, or the subjects that they might specifically want to think about or mention? Does it make a difference whether you are personally part of the recruitment process yourself?

I’ve had people from my team apply for jobs in the past and I’ve spent significant time coaching them for the selection process. I’ve talked to them about the approach they might want to take and the issues that they might want to address.  I’ve seen that as part of helping them develop and progress their careers within the organisation, but in reality it could be seen as giving them an unnatural advantage. Somehow, because they were internal, this seemed to be deemed acceptable.

Does it really matter whether they are an internal or an external candidate? If you could give someone you knew and valued the inside track, would you do so? And is that ok?

Should we be seen to be whiter than white or, as I expect, are there shades of grey?

Recruiters: Stop playing God

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Sometimes it is the small things that remind you of a bigger issue.  I was in my hotel room in Berlin on Wednesday night when I saw a tweet from Katie McNab, Recruiter for PepsiCo about women who use their partner’s email addresses on job applications. In her words,

“It makes them look like children who can’t be trusted with their own comms”

We had a bit of back and forth over the subject and I think it is fair to say that there was little or no common ground (you can see some of the conversation here).  Katie was firm to her view that this was “inappropriate” and given that she is a recruiter, speaks at conferences and well regarded, I guess I have to bow to her superior knowledge – again in her words,

“placing judgment on people is part of the job”

and according to Katie, I was in the minority (although looking through the timeline there was only one person who agreed and one who didn’t – which is a kind of soviet democracy!).

But it has been niggling away at me. I did a little interview with DriveThru HR where we talked about the skills gaps that we are facing in the global economy.  Manpower, BCG and the CIPD have recently reported that managers were finding it more difficult to attract the right talent.  Good candidates are staying put and have a world of opportunities at their feet should they wish to move. Put simply, recruiting “talent” is going to get harder.

If you listened to the twittersphere and blogosphere you’d understandably be mistaken for believing that the answer is to “go social” and of course that is an element of changing attraction strategies.  But it seems to me we also need to challenge some of the institutional slothfulness of in-house recruiters. Katie is right, we all make assumptions about people, that is human, but we need to be challenging these and minimising them – not celebrating them in public.

Recruitment isn’t about judging people, it is about discovering people.

And recruiters need to stop playing God.

As well as being quasi-discriminatory (although I am sure not in intent) diminishing an application because of a candidate’s CHOSEN means of communication is either naïve, arrogant or idiotic in the extreme – I really can’t decide which.  There is absolutely no legal, morale, organisational or rational argument behind doing so. There could be a million reasons that an individual chooses to include a partner’s email on an application but that is their choice.

Increasingly we will need to be searching for talent, lifting up rocks, thinking creatively about how we bring people in, how we train them, how we help them to meet the requirements of the job and leave our own prejudices and judgments at the door.  The good companies and recruiters will get this and make a name or career for themselves. The bad ones? Well they’ll keep talking the talk in public, but failing to walk the walk where it really matters.

Which, let’s be honest, is no bad thing really.

It just makes it easier for the rest of us.