"You Think Too Broadly" - Hiring for Tasks Instead of Reality

Are employment candidates being rejected for the right reasons?

Illustration by shutterstock.com; modified by the author

The premise of this article: When interviewing, a hiring manager wants one thing: someone to make the pain of a vacancy go away now. A candidate whose experience is perfectly matched to a job’s tasks is the easiest, quickest way to restore productivity.

It’s also a bad way to hire.

“Perfect” hires with narrowly focused attention and ability are the wrong choice, and companies that continue hiring on this basis will be pushed aside by a smarter approach.

Too Broad…or Too Narrow?

The title of this essay came from the interviewer who concluded our discussion by telling me I “think too broadly” to be one of her buyers.

I propose that thinking broadly is not a liability, but a key ingredient in hiring employees who produce value in the real world.

Perhaps I am viewed as thinking too broadly because so many people are thinking far too narrowly. On another occasion I was presenting my qualifications to a temp agency recruiter including two short, fixed-term temp assignments: one as a receptionist that blossomed into a senior buyer role with a quadrupling of my salary, and another as a data entry clerk that evolved into an IT analyst role with a tripling of my salary. I therefore emphasized my willingness to consider any administrative position – being a receptionist has worked out exceptionally well before. Here’s how the conversation unfolded.

“Oh no, you couldn’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Well your resume doesn’t indicate that you’ve done reception before.”

“Are you telling me that because my last job wasn’t answering the phone, I’m not qualified to answer the phone?”

“That’s right. If our clients need a receptionist they want someone with that experience.”

I’ve been in administration all my life, I was a receptionist for three years, and I have more than 20 years serving internal clients, responding to their calls and emails, solving their problems and fulfilling their needs. And none of this is applicable experience for answering someone else’s phones? That’s narrow thinking taken to an extreme — and it reveals how badly some hiring processes confuse experience with capability.

The Wrong Fixation

What these two stories illustrate is a fixation on the wrong things in hiring — a fixation on task match rather than adaptive capacity. Borrowing from an earlier essay on employee engagement¹:

Most of my interviews have been a “closed box” based on a fixed set of tasks in a job description. Can you do these 10 tasks? Tick, tick, tick, tick, you're hired. If you don't get all the ticks, you’re not. Not one question about anything outside the box. Employers want broad thinking, problem solving and interest in the direction of the enterprise, they want real vision and enthusiasm and not just a bucket of technical skills, but they don’t interview and hire for it. They hire for narrowly focused people and then wonder why they’re only interested in one thing. They hire for “right now” support without a thought to what this person might – or might not – contribute in two to five years.

Choosing someone who can execute the tasks of the job is, of course, important. But when the focus on task-specific skills becomes so narrow that it excludes everything else, it becomes a problem.

Reality Doesn’t Respect Job Descriptions

Reality doesn’t care how finely you’ve tuned your job descriptions or how elegantly you’ve hired people who fit those jobs. It doesn’t care if you’re prepared for your world to be turned upside down. It doesn’t care if the people you’ve hired have the capacity, capabilities, and willingness to forget what they were hired for and give everything they’ve got to deal with an overnight change from calm stability to chaos.

So who have you hired? People who are up to the challenge of reality, or people who will “that’s not my job” you to death?

Reality Throws a Curve Ball – 3 Times

Two months into being a receptionist the employer was implementing SAP with the attendant, unavoidable problems. (SAP is possibly the most complex commercial software in the world, and therefore the most difficult to implement.²) Accounts payable was severely impacted and I was tasked with finessing our unpaid vendors and learning the procurement and accounts payable modules of SAP to get the money flowing again.

Years later, six weeks into being a data entry clerk, I wrote a program that automated the task, eliminating the bulk of my assignment and an equal amount of work being performed by the permanent staff. 18 months later the function was centralized across the enterprise, I adapted the code and it saved 2,300 labor hours valued at $180,000 per year.

After that I was hired to be a new product introductions (NPI) buyer. The chemistry buyer in our biotech manufacturing organization gave notice that week – and three weeks after I started employment I wasn’t an NPI buyer, I was purchasing chemistry and biological reagents.

In these three positions what the employer needed most was not what they hired me for. In fact in my whole career I have never been exactly, or sometimes even remotely, what the employer hired me to be, because their biggest concern after I arrived was not a good phone voice, getting another thousand lines of data entered or supporting a speculative product that wouldn’t be sold for three more years. All my employers had bigger issues than the one I was intended to address – and I became the solution to a problem larger than the one they’d hired me for.

It’s important to recognize that I didn’t ignore the tasks for which I was hired, nor did I strike out in some unexpected direction purely to satisfy my own desires. This is significant because, as J.T. O’Donnell of the job search service Work It Daily emphasizes, “Companies want specialists. They want to hire somebody to do a specific thing…They have a pain point…The more valuable your services are, the more they solve a problem or alleviate a pain, the more they’re the aspirin, the better.”³ We cannot fail to excel at the specific thing we’ve been hired for.

Why the Old Hiring Model Can’t Scale

The ability to think broadly, observe, adapt and step up to any problem, related or not to the job for which one was hired, is a critical ability. Not for the employee – for the employer. If you’re not hiring people who think broadly for all your positions, you’ll be overcome by your competition that is hiring these active problem solvers and solution creators.

Why won’t the old paradigm of “just do the job you were hired for” work any more? Two reasons.

First, managers and staff have traditionally assumed the fixed roles of leaders and followers. Staff didn’t make decisions that materially changed things or thought about much but getting the work done as defined by management. Staff followed. Vision, strategy, change, innovation – capacities and activities propelling the enterprise forward – were reserved, sometimes exclusively, to management.

With a typical 10-to-1 ratio of staff to managers, having only 10% of your employees actively driving change in the programs and projects that advance strategy is clearly less desirable than having the majority of your staff contributing energy to that forward motion. This would have been true 100 years ago, let alone today.

Second, rate of change. The accelerating pace of change has necessitated adjustments in the administrative environment already, pushing authority and decision making down from management to staff.

That pressure leads to an unavoidable conclusion: management alone can’t be responsible for amending every step of every process for every change flowing through the organization. Staff have to be responsible for changing increasingly significant portions of their own jobs. There simply isn’t anyone else available to do it.⁴

Are Your Staff Equipped For Reality?

Have you sought out and hired people who look for issues and jump on them with enthusiasm, or have you concerned yourself only with J.T. O’Donnell’s “specific thing” for each hire? Have you looked for people interested in advancing the organization as a whole and what that requires – or did you not want anyone “thinking too broadly”?

Have you hired people who can conceive a solution that eliminates 25%, 50% or 100% of their own work if that’s what’s right for the enterprise, and then advocate for it? (Not crazy: I’ve sought to eliminate my job twice by eliminating or relocating work to where it could be done more efficiently. I didn’t see it as a risk – there are always plenty of problems to solve.)

Hiring managers in the specific thing camp may be better at choosing robots than the change agents they need. But that might be unfair to robots, which are at least adaptable. When task “A” is no longer useful, a robot can be reprogrammed to perform task “B”. Try getting a human to give up one job and do another – when they were specifically hired for a narrow, doesn’t-think-broadly focus.

What’s one of the biggest challenges management and corporations face? Implementing change.

Why? Because people hate it. Why? Because they were hired to be that way.

Hire differently. The future depends on it.

¹   Challenged By Employee Engagement? That’s Not What You Hired Them For can be found on my website.

²   The Wall Street Journal ran a front page story on it: White, Joseph B., Clark, Don, and Ascarelli, S. Program of pain: This German software is complex, expensive and wildly popular. Wall Street Journal, 14 March 1997.

³   This quotation was taken from a web page located at https://www.workitdaily.com/webinar-recording-8-ways as it existed in 2018, when the original version of this essay was written. The page is no longer available live or at https://web.archive.org (aka the Wayback Machine).

⁴   This idea is explored more thoroughly in my essay Workplace 2050 on my website.

#Hiring #Interviewing