CareerLab® - Recruiting & Hiring
"When you're hiring, you're creating the future of your company." - Donn Lobdell, Senior Director, Alcon Surgical, Inc. Good hiring does not happen by accident. It is the result of careful planning. The purpose is to get away from hiring by "gut feel," or because we like someone, and to move to a more rational and structured selection process. A poor hiring decision can cause great harm to your company. For one thing, poor hires are hard to terminate. Employment law and circumstances, even in so-called "at will" states, may restrict your organization's ability to quickly terminate poor performers, so your company may be saddled with a poor performer indefinitely.
An increasing problem these days is trying to terminate potentially violent employees who should have been screened out in the hiring process. A poor hiring process can let disturbed or psychopathic people into your workplace - and then moving them out of the organization can be very difficult and dangerous, because they often make threats of physical violence to managers and workers. This is a problem your company should avoid at all costs.
A well-planned hiring project includes at least four (4) parts:
some form of PRE-EMPLOYMENT TESTING;
PROFESSIONAL INTERVIEWING, preferably by a team of different interviewers at different times, then a discussion as to consensus;
thorough REFERENCE CHECKING of previous employers and co-workers;
and in some cases, BACKGROUND CHECKS involving such things as civiland criminal history, credit history, worker's compensation claims, and whatever else might be pertinent to the job.
Hiring can be humbling
Good Hires Hard to Find
Hiring can be a humbling experience. And costly. Just ask the former editor of The New York Times. Or the former editor of USA Today. Both lost their jobs recently because of the misconduct of reporters who fabricated an incredible number of exclusive stories.
Someone thought these fictional journalists were not only good enough to hire but to hype as well. I sympathize with management's plight because, in truth, hiring has always been a crapshoot.
No matter how much you grill candidates, check their references or study their work samples, the final decision usually boils down to one thing - the feeling in your gut.
Lord knows I have been fooled often enough. There was the erstwhile sports editor who wore a toupee, which blew off during a baseball game. He was so embarrassed he never returned to work. Never even called. Then there was the young woman reporter who had a thing for sheriff's deputies. I'll just leave it at that.
The challenge to find good people actually gives the conscientious applicant a golden opportunity. Companies, it seems, are more anxious than ever to find quality people who have demonstrated a good work ethic.
But it seems that while employers have become more selective, too many jobseekers have become casual and cavalier in their approach to employment opportunities like job fairs. Karen Dawal, HIREvents' job fair coordinator, finds herself increasingly confronted by haughty jobseekers expecting to have a job handed to them simply because they showed up - often in jeans and tennies. It's as if Dawal were a fast-food clerk who should deliver up a job pronto.
"They have an attitude of entitlement," notes Dawal, who doesn't hesitate to remind jobseekers that such behavior will get them nowhere fast with prospective employers. It's as if they have it backwards - they are the ones who should be asking what they can do for an employer, not vice versa.
At other times, Dawal has encountered applicants with a chip on their shoulder. They are often highly educated professionals who have been laid off from upper-level positions. She turns them around quickly. One well-dressed, well-qualified accountant complained that there were no banks represented at a recent job fair. She pointed out that many of the companies still needed his financial skills. "I told him, if you want to find work, you can't limit yourself."
He followed her advice to be more persistent. He visited each booth and discovered Dawal was right. There indeed were companies looking to hire people with his talents and background.
Sometimes Dawal has to provide on-the-spot counseling to help applicants better articulate their goals. One fairgoer told her she wanted a sales job. Person-to-person sales, Dawal asked? No way said the applicant. Phone sales perhaps? Nope - she didn't want that either. What other type of sales was there? Finally, it came out that the person had worked the counter at a fast-food chain. Dawal counseled the jobseeker to go for a position in customer service, an opening easily found at most career fairs.
At other times, Dawal feels she should act as a fashion consultant. "I see some applicants and I want to say take that do-rag off and pull up your pants," she grumbles.
What final words of advice does Dawal have for those with plans to attend future job fairs? "Fairgoers should treat the event as if they were going on a job interview. Because that's what a job fair is."
The other thing to remember is that the ongoing employer quest to find good people should be welcome news for the qualified, presentable and positive job applicant. Apparently, your next employer can't wait to find you.
Human Nuclear Experiments
Soviet Human Nuclear Experiments Reported
According to recently released reports, some 45,000 people, mainly Soviet soldiers, were deliberately exposed in 1954 to radiation from a bomb twice as powerful as the one dropped on Hiroshima just nine years before. At 9:33 a.m. on 14 September 1954, a Soviet Tu-4 bomber dropped a 40,000-ton atomic weapon from 25,000 feet. The bomb exploded 1,200 feet above Totskoye testing range near the provincial town of Orenburg. Thousands are believed to have died in the immediate aftermath and in the years following. The pilot flying the Tu-4 bomber developed leukemia and his co-pilot developed bone cancer.
Marshal Georgi Zhukov, Stalin's most senior World War II Commander, safely witnessed the blast from an underground nuclear bunker. Moments after the blast, Zhukov ordered 600 tanks, 600 armored personnel carriers and 320 planes to move forward to the epicenter in order to stage a mock battle. The experiment was designed to test the performance of military hardware and soldiers in the event of a nuclear war.
There are no official figures showing how many of the 45,000 people sent to Totskoye testing range died as a result of the test. Tamara Zlotnikova, a former member of the Russian Duma, is helping survivors fight for compensation. She believes that the toll from the test was enormous. According to Zlotnikova, "Even today, the incidence of some cancers in Orenburg, a city 130 miles from the range, is double that of the people who suffered in Chernobyl. A study carried out by the health ministry on cities with the worst health problems puts Orenburg second out of 88. Thousands died. These people were used as guinea pigs, tested, and then left to die slowly of cancer. The state does not want their tragedy recognized, because it would cost money. Nobody wants to know." (source: The Sunday Times (UK), 24 June 2001)