RIGHT RECRUITING

Our recent White Papers have focused on broad issues. Topics have ranged from the lack of technology representation on executive row to the value of on-line degrees to the general state of the employment market. My original intention was to get back to practical advice with this White Paper. But then 3 things happened.

1) My wife wanted a new sofa. That led to shopping. People worked hard to satisfy my needs. Why? I was ready to buy.

2) I was on TV. I was interviewed a few times about long term unemployment. Afterwards, angry people called me. They were angry because they were out of work. It was unfair that no one wanted to hire them. No one would give them a job.

3) I met a teacher at the gym one day. When she discovered that I am a headhunter, she started complaining about the unfair nature of her new contract. It appears that some of the automatic raises she used to get when she acquired credentials were being eliminated. When I told her that no one in the private sector got automatic raises based on credentials, she was flabbergasted.

All of those things got me thinking. Those events represent data points that demonstrate differing views of the relationship between employer and employee. Imagine a graph. These views evolve around 2 different axis’s. To fully understand employment, your viewpoint needs to be in synch with society’s view of work. When there is friction between your view and your employer’s or society’s view of the relationship, it leads to anger and dissonance. Here is what I mean....

The first axis, the x axis, represents the relative importance and value between credentials and results. In some careers, like the aforementioned teacher's, people receive automatic raises when they get a certain educational degree or acquire a credential. They know that a Master’s degree, for example, will get them a $7,000 raise in their compensation, even if their job doesn’t change. Let’s put those people are on the far left of the axis. Other fields, like sales, generally are purely results oriented. The best example of this is commissioned sales. Salespeople are compensated on results. A salesperson with a PhD may make less than a high school dropout, for example, if they don’t generate results. An education or credential is only valuable as a tool to get better results in order to be useful. Let’s put those folks are on the far right end of the axis.

While most of us have jobs that lie somewhere in the middle of the axis, we can imagine the difficulty of someone who only worked in an environment at one end suddenly moving to a job that lies on the other end. That is made even more complicated when we consider that many companies themselves are at different spots on the x axis and that spot can change over time as larger trends take effect. It can also differ within companies from department to department.

For some, moving from one end of the graph to another is akin to entering an Alice in Wonderland type world in which previously understood rules do not apply. The world of business is trending to the right of the axis, towards performance based compensation. You see that in the increased use of bonuses as a part of compensation. There was a time when bonuses only went to executives. It trickled down to managers and now is common to all levels of employees.

Someone, like my teacher acquaintance, who grew up on the left side of the graph, can experience serious dissonance when faced with an employment situation on the right side of the graph. This dissonance has been most visible recently in the anger of some public sector workers facing downward compensation pressure for the first time in their lives. As a recruiter, I’ve also seen it in those have come from heavily unionized industries, where, even at the professional level, there is a highly quantifiable and precise compensation structure. If you work in a company that has a multiplicity of titles, like Associate Engineer, Engineer I, Engineer II, Senior Engineer, etc. your firm is on the left. Flat organizations tend to be on the right. Smaller firms are usually on the right side of the graph because results are more visible in a small firm. Large firms are on the left side. I’ve seen that manifested in my speeches to outplaced executive groups from Fortune 500 firms.

A person who gets an MBA and who then expects an immediate raise from their employer is on the left side. An employer who withholds the raise until the MBA demonstrates that the employee has new skills leading to better results is displaying a right side attitude. Last year we saw a candidate reject an offer from a client because the offer did not include an automatic increase triggered by an impending completion of a Master’s program. He exhibited left side behavior. Our client preferred to give increases based on performance, exhibiting right side behavior.

I occasionally get calls from salaried professionals interested in careers in sales because, in their company, salespeople make a lot of money. This interest often evaporates when faced with the knowledge that, if that professional has a $70,000 salary, they are only likely to get a $50,000 base salary as a salesperson with commission potential to reach $100,000. That’s a classical example of two different jobs, even within the same company, resting on different parts of the x-axis.

The x-axis is reasonably straightforward. It is the y-axis of the graph that is subtle. It can be said that the x-axis is the cause of friction for the employed but it's the y-axis that causes anger in the unemployed.

At the top of the y-axis is the idea that the individual is responsible for their own livelihood. You hear these people saying they have to “get a job”. At the bottom of the y-axis are those who think that a business has an obligation to society to provide employment for as many people as possible. Those people will say “no one will give me a job”. When you stop and think about it, those are profoundly different statements that reveal a major difference in expectations. The gulf between the passive recipient who is given a job and the active person who gets a job is huge.

The response from my last White Paper, the one about the long term unemployed, was interesting. Managers and employers called me to bemoan the lack of skilled and motivated candidates. Contrarily, the unemployed called me, mostly in anger, saying that I was “blaming the unemployed” and that there were no jobs out there. Some in the latter group believed that unemployment was the fault of employers not hiring. The former group, managers and executives, thought that unemployment was due to a lack of needed skills. The philosophical distance between employers and the long-term employed is staggering.

Earlier in this White Paper I alluded to my wife wanting a new sofa. How does that relate to employment? It’s a y-axis phenomenon. Picture two scenarios. In the first, someone walks into a furniture store to buy a sofa. People rush to them to help. “Do you want coffee? Please, what can do for you? Feel free to sit down or walk around to browse.” As a potential customer, they get treated very well.

Now imagine a second scenario. The same person walks into the same store, but, this time they are applying for a job. This is a different situation. “Here is an application. Fill it out in back and we will call you.” The same people in the same building, yet very different relationships and behavior. Why? Once again the answer depends on where you rest on the y-axis. People on the top of the y-axis see the company as the buyer of the candidate’s skills. Like the buyer of a sofa, they drive the relationship. To them, the candidate is selling their skills for a salary. In that world, like a furniture salesman, it is the candidate’s responsibility to have the right product.

People on the bottom of the y-axis reject that premise. They see the relationship as a partnership. Any attempt to portray it as a transaction strips it of dignity. It’s the difference between earning a job and being given a job. To lower y-axis people, there is an implicit societal agreement that obligates businesses to provide employment to as many people as possible. In that world view, businesses have an obligation to train the unqualified. Low y-axis people, like those that castigated me as uncaring, are angry because they think that contract has been broken. High y-axis people don't remember ever signing such a contract and scoff at the idea that one exists.

I am sure you’ve seen news footage of people picketing and demonstrating because of a lack of jobs. That’s low y-axis behavior. If you’ve seen those demonstrations, often on a weekday afternoon, and wondered why those people aren’t applying to the Wawa down the street with a help wanted sign, you are a high y-axis person.

There are a lot of points on the graph, each one representing a different relationship between employer and employee. It would be easy for someone a lot smarter than me to design a test that would show where an individual lies on the grid, much like the personality tests people take today. My guess is that I would be on the far upper right side. I began my career in a commission oriented business and now own a small business. Someone who worked for 30 years in teaching or for the government would, no doubt, lie on the far lower left side. Most people, depending on where they’ve worked and their general personal history, are probably more clustered in the middle than the two extremes I mentioned just now.

However, this little project can be an interesting tool, primarily for self-analysis. I am in a communications business in which I speak to scores of people daily about employment, both companies and candidates. After 30 years of straightforward conversations, over the last few years I’ve seen the dialog between the two get farther and farther apart. It sometimes appears to me that employers and employees are speaking two different languages, even though they are using the same words. Herein lies the problem.

I mentioned a few paragraphs ago that I thought the businesses in general are getting more results, as opposed to credentials, oriented. Once you get beyond the Bachelor’s degree, I think a Masters or MBA does not have the cache it did before, unless it demonstrably helps someone do their job better. That’s a movement to the right on the x-axis.

Companies are also less forgiving to average employees, even long-term employees, than they used to be. The concept of rewards for long term service and company loyalty is evaporating. Companies want to continually upgrade their professional staffs and are hungry for efficiency. That is a move upwards on the y-axis. Employers are drifting to the upper right hand quadrant.

However, 3 parts of society remain firmly in the bottom left hand quadrant. Government, academics and the media are all very left, lower quadrant sectors of society. All 3 put a high value on credentials, academic achievements or personal connections, all  of which are left x-axis mindsets. Also, all believe that fairness is an important value and all feel that should extend to the business world, a lower y-axis worldview.

With each side drifting apart, it’s no wonder that I am hearing from confused and angry people from both extreme quadrants. This is probably made worse when one realizes that those who are out of work are exposed to more people in the lower left quadrant (media, government, etc.) daily than those who are employed and are living in the upper right quadrant.

How can this exercise help? At least, it might help in giving perspective to someone else’s expectations. Also, a little self-analysis using this tool can help too. Long ago, I realized that I would never be a successful teacher or professor. Instead, rather than force my natural upper right quadrant tendencies into a lower left quadrant world, I went into business. Someone who has strong lower left quadrant tendencies probably should not go into sales either, on the other hand. To those frustrated by the current mismatched employment market, maybe this can put those frustrations into better perspective. That, in itself, would not be a bad thing.

As ever, thanks for getting this far.