We Have Some Good News & Some Bad News

There are some very interesting and informative articles on ERE as anyone who cruises the staffing world is keenly aware.

Saw one the other day written (extremely well I might add) by Lisa Calicchio, who is the Director of Recruiting for the Pharmaceuticals Team, for Johnson & Johnson. She calls the piece People Are People: Don't Fight It, Work With It. I am not going to reiterate all she had to say here (a) because you can read it for yourself and (b) because she certainly doesn't need me to speak for her at all.

After I read the article, however, it caused me to reflect on my own 45+ years experience in the HR world in general and the portions of that which were and to some degree still are focused on staffing. It also made me think of the number of "hiring tools" to which I have been exposed over that same period. Someday I am going to sit down and try to see how many I can write down!

While certainly progress has been made by both recruiters and candidates alike, it is still abundantly clear that given the number of hiring decisions that end up going South, we still have much to learn.

While it has been a while since I have seen some stats, it is still my perception that the failure rate in terms of hiring decisions that turn out to be successful, especially at the executive level, would compete well with the divorce rate.

You could give every applicant every test known to man plus a lobotomy and still end up with what amounts to a coin toss. Okay, maybe that's a bit extreme, but it still feels more right than wrong.

Of course, the big question is why, and if you are looking for the answer to that one, you might as well stop right here. If I knew, obviously I would apply it to our own company first and then bottle and sell it.

So maybe your experience has been different, but for me, it just seems that there are certain things in life that no matter how much you study, test, prepare, visualize in yoga class or whatever, you just don't know how it "feels" in the real world until you are there. Getting married is one; becoming a parent another. How it is really going to feel and turn out for both the employer and the employee is one more.

It may be frustrating, not to mention painful and expensive for all concerned, and that's the bad news.

On the other hand the fact that we are still searching for answers provides a living for a significant portion of the population, and that's the good news.