Unemployable Trio

In one of his recent articles, “How NOT to Hire Tiger Woods!”, Dr. John Sullivan discussed 10 recruiting errors that would prevent a company from hiring exceptional talents like Tiger Woods. Sullivan defines Woods as a game-changer, meaning top caliber talent, top performer, or innovator.

The article mentions several interesting points in every recruiting error raised while using a truly exceptional example. In reality, such an individual is more likely to turn to entrepreneurialism rather than the route of an employee.

Nevertheless, looking at turnover from the recruitment perspective, recruiters not only fail to hire Tiger Woods but frequently overlook a bunch of interesting candidates, including:

Candidates with too much education
Education is the key to opening up doors for an applicant interested in a corporate career. But too much education is not welcomed either. Few companies build their businesses around highly qualified talents (knowledge-intensive businesses and high-tech companies) and even fewer focus predominantly on post-grads. Review of non-managerial posts will leave you with the impression that a bachelor degree will suffice for the longevity of most white collar jobs.

The recruiters detect instantly that a higher level of education can have an adverse impact on a manager-subordinate relationship, team dynamics, and a favorable impact on job expectations. Not surprisingly, job satisfaction is more important for those employees with high cognitive ability, education, and vocation-specific training (who, presumably, would tend to be better performers).*

Candidates with multidisciplinary work experience
In today’s “war for talent”, employers increasingly implement job rotation programs as part of their retention strategy or succession planning. Job rotation programs are highly valuable initiatives to provide qualified employees with the breadth of exposure of an entire operation, facilitate changes in thinking and perspective, and increase job satisfaction. However, from the performance perspective, these programs cause high inefficiencies due to continuous learning curves. Strangely enough, these companies do not value applicants with the know-how and experience in more than one functional area and rarely take the risk to engage such a candidate in a new role in the first place. Even though the glamour of transferable skills continues, working sideways and wearing different hats ought to be left out from the CV.

The recruiters view multidisciplinary work experience with suspicion, are confused over the candidate’s expertise and skills, and thereby favor a candidate with an overly linear profile in terms of their career path and competencies.

Candidates with entrepreneurial experience
Self-employment (entrepreneurial track) is probably the biggest hurdle to overcome by the applicant while seeking out employment opportunities. After all, an entrepreneur is the one who left an employer years or months before to make it happen for him/her. Given the nature of entrepreneurship, major reasons for going back to corporate life include push factors like failure of the entrepreneurial venture, soaring profitability, poor work-life balance, high level of uncertainty, and one could even argue too much accountability and thus stress. While big companies can provide a significant shelter for low-performers in particular, there is no place to hide in a start-up or small organization; the trail is very clear. On the whole, entrepreneurial experience is most valued in the U.S. with self-employed applicants being able to receive higher compensation packages vis-à-vis candidates with an employee work history only (provided certain circumstances of course). In European countries, the opposite is true and I also believe that Asia tends to be more in line with Europe on these aspects.

The recruiters are probably never interested in the entrepreneurs in the first place since these candidates tend to exhibit strong self-directing skills, require flexibility, and may experience difficulties adjusting to the corporate environment. Ironically, while entrepreneurial spirit is a much sought after aptitude among employers, the entrepreneurs can challenge companies fixed and stable processes and top-down decision making. Furthermore, even though entrepreneurs regularly leverage teams and resources, from the corporate perspective, this group is perceived as “lone rangers” rather than team players.

* Trevor, C.O. (2001). Interactions among actual ease-of-movement determinants and job satisfaction in the prediction of voluntary turnover. Academy of Management Journal, 44, 621-638.