I am saddened to report the passing of Galba Bright who was a guest contributor to this newsletter about a year ago. He was an expert in Emotional Intelligence and lived in Jamaica. Condolences to his family.
If you, or anyone you know, would like to contribute relevant articles pertaining to recruitment or personal development or the I.T. industry in general, then I would be pleased to discuss this.
Hiring Friends
There’s been a lot of talk and news reports in recent times about transparency in business dealings and the high cost of corruption to a country. You probably skim over these reports thinking that all this is someone else’s experience and of course you wouldn’t behave in such an unethical way.
No doubt that is true when we’re talking about taking bribes and kickbacks on contract allocations, and major misdealings of that nature. Yet can you say that your recruitment practices are entirely above board? If you have ever been in the position to influence who gets hired for a job, and you have favoured a friend or a relative, then you might have been doing an injustice to your company by not hiring the best candidate.
A few years ago, I was asked to be on an interview panel to select an I.T. person for a large organisation. My recruiting company had selected the candidates and I was there on an advisory capacity. The interviews were proceeding well and the panel was interested in one particular lady when one of the more influential panelists realised he had a friend in this lady’s department who he felt would also be suited for the job. To cut an astounding story short, the next thing I knew was that the job was offered to the friend without going through the full interview panel process and my services were no longer required. To add injury to insult, my company didn’t get a sale!
Now the person hired may truly have been the best person for the job, but you could not tell from the process taken. The bias in her favour was extreme. I had a hard time explaining to the original candidate who saw her colleague, whom she thought wasn’t even applying, get the job.
I know there’s a great advantage to recruiting people you know – you know the personalities you’re dealing with, and their attitudes are in line with yours, and of course you can trust a friend, right? Well sometimes not so. It’s amazing how different a person can be in the workplace to how you know them socially.
It’s more important than ever that your friend is put through the same rigorous and open selection process as everyone else so that you can be sure that they are the best fit. You don’t want a mistake returning to haunt you, and this could harm your friendship with that person too.
Relatives are sometimes a different case as family companies may have to hire them even though they are clearly not the best choice. Some large companies like to have members of the same family working for them as that is their culture, and it helps staff retention. But these are known and accepted biases built into the recruitment process, and quite different from hiring the relative as a favour.
I’m not saying that it’s wrong to hire a friend or relative; just that you need to be open and transparent about it and consider other choices fairly too. Always ask yourself “will hiring my friend be the best thing for the company?”.
Tell Us What You Think
(Referring to our last newsletter “”Wait and See” Causes Downturn in Recruiting”)
Congratulations on 12 years of outstanding service.
In my opinion, IT jobs are more in demand in T&T than anywhere else in the Caribbean. The decline you are experiencing may be due to organizations adopting a more direct method of recruiting and/or recruiting from outside. In so doing they are also not doing due diligence regarding the recruitment process and in the end may not have the right candidate. This is particularly common in a booming economy where time is critical and money is not an issue… John
Thank you for this feedback, John. I have found that when times are booming, companies will spend the money to use an agency as they know they get better results. When money is tight they try to hire directly in a mistaken (I believe) attempt to save money. This is far more time consuming for them and they may still have to resort to an agency if they don’t get good enough candidates. We have noticed that the newspaper ads themselves are smaller than usual – a sign that companies are trying to recruit as cheaply as possible… Susan
We would love to hear what you think of this issue of CRS News. And of course, if you have any suggestions for upcoming issues that you would like to share with us, please send those too.