What One Does One Becomes!

What One Does One Becomes!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2005




I have written extensively on this subject of job interviews over the years, and have come to accept the unreality of hiring. We don't hire the best people for the job, and therefore it is a challenge for the prospective job seeker to have some understanding of why this is so, and what to do about it.

First of all, the good old boy and good old girl network has never died. It just went to Ivy League schools.

I was an "A" student at a state university. One of my peers, a girl who had spent two years at Harvard, and returned to graduate at Iowa to satisfy her grandmother, told me a truism that, at the time in my naiveté, I did not accept.

She said, "You'll never make it to the first echelon because you aren't graduating from a first or second echelon school." I scoffed at the idea, but in my professional life I have found her right on the money.

We are a classless society very much obsessed with class.

It is as true in engineering and science as in the arts and letters. At both Nalco and Honeywell, the fast trackers in the technical fields graduated from MIT, Cal Tech, and so on.

But even graduating from these schools, you still had to have another connection before getting an interview, whatever your qualifications. You had to have belonged to a certain fraternity or sorority, or have an uncle or aunt, father or mother, or some other relative with a connection to the firm as well. We take care of our own while preaching the democracy of our hiring.

Then once you are in the interview, there is a formula that I have seen demonstrated with universal consistency, a formula that I know well because I was often on the interviewing board of new hires. It goes like this in this chronology without exception:

(1) Am I comfortable with this individual?

(2) Will this individual fit on our team?

(3) Is this individual qualified to do the work?

If the interviewee passes muster on the first two, whatever his or her qualifications, he or she will be justified as having the third.

The irony is that I was always known as a touchy-feely person with enabling empathy. Yet, I always emphasized the third as of first importance in deference to its priority on this scale, and I was invariably overruled.

I have in my files countless cases of people who failed on the job "but were a good person" and "everybody liked them," erroneously assuming they would somehow be able to do the work.

Often, my colleagues on the selection board had impressive cognitive credentials in engineering, mathematics and technology. Yet, when it came to hiring people, they went with their gut, which is what they would say I always preached, but seldom with a close examination of the appropriate skills and requirements of the job in question.

To me, and this may sound coarse, we were hiring a machine to replace a worn part, or to meet the new requirements of the next iteration of that machine.

Should the person hired fail based on these evaluative criteria; would interviewers admit their error? Not likely.

Instead, they would see him or her placed in a much less demanding and critical position, but with the same salary and perks of the position originally hired, an accident of unintended consequences. This became a routine of one step forward, and two steps back, increasing rather than diminishing the load of the performers.

The other factor which never entered the interviewing process, but which was important to me, was the nature of the culture.

Nalco had a culture of contribution in my days with it, and its rapid growth and profitability reflected this. I have been away from it for more than thirty years, and I wonder what it is like today.

Honeywell had a culture of complacency with rhetoric of contribution. It has had over recent years a record of cyclic performance, punctuated by clever maneuvering, facility and cost accounting manipulation and spotty performance. Like other high tech companies in recent years, Honeywell's culture and performance is the rule rather than the exception.

High tech companies keep Wall Street happy by cutting costs and constant personnel redundancy exercises, using this as a gauge of performance, when it is actually a gauge of failure to address the problem of performance.

I worked in two tough cultures. You could call one common and the elitist; one was a performing culture, and the other cosmetic, meaning, it bought into all the fads as substitutes for performance and change management.

The corporation has been my laboratory.

It is also the reason I was tough on qualifications and suspect of interviewees with silk tongues and vapid minds. You could make a case that I was tough because I never fitted into any organization, as Charles Hayes has pointed out in one of his books. He found it interesting that I was an authority on organization and never found an organization in which I fitted.

But I had a deeper motivation. I wanted the new hire not only to survive but also to profit in his or her new job.

When you are really good at your job, despite all that I have written above, the organization caves in (pun intended) to your excellence. People may talk behind your back, may wish that you were elsewhere, never accept you as one of them, but they tolerate you because you are needed. It isn't the company politicians but its performers who signal a company's survival. Performers have little time to make nice. They are too busy doing.

A professor in graduate school once told me -- the course was advanced social psychology -- that nothing would give him more pleasure than to fail me, but to do that he would have to fail all the other members of the seminar. He gave me an "A."

So, the final factor in this most subjective business of interviewing for hire is that the interviewer invariably will be looking for something in the interviewee that is consistent with how one sees oneself.

In defense of form letters that wish the job seeker success elsewhere, "but regrettably, we have received more qualified applications," I have empathy for them as a one-man corporation. Yet, I receive almost daily resumes from people so highly qualified I wonder when they have had a chance to be performers. Did I mention I never advertise any positions?

It is not uncommon for me to receive resumes of people with technical and law degrees, and impressive titles in this and that job. What is missing, and it is consistently missing, is growth and development to satisfying fruition in a specific job or function.

If I would give the prospective job seeker advice, it would be to pursue something of a singular nature that (1) gives personal satisfaction; (2) is a needed skill; and (3) is job specific.

The Renaissance man is a good idea and may do well on "Jeopardy," but he or she is not likely the employee you would want to hire for a specific job.

While part of me abhors specialization, it is the nature of the extant beast. What one does one becomes. Those five simple words cover a philosophy of life and work as well.