World Economic News (Mon 1st. Nov ’10)

I’ve got two conflicting answers to this.

In my case, I soon got sick of unskilled people telling me they were qualified to do the jobs I’ve been advertising – so I completely ignore the education part of people’s CVs and job applications – seriously. I just want to find out if candidates can actually do the job and I rule people out for not having any examples to demonstrate. The ironic part to my personal situation is I don’t have any qualifications – I’m a college dropout. Contrary to the statistics in your video, I’m the only person in any of my companies without a degree, yet I earn more than all the people I partner with or employ.

However, in large companies, it has been my experience that the people doing the hiring aren’t so much focused on finding the right candidate for the job as finding the candidate with the right qualifications. It’s a responsibility thing – if the candidate turns out to be a basket case or completely useless, the person hiring can remove themselves from any responsibility by claiming the candidate was correct on paper. It’s a bit of an arse-covering exercise and very much part of the “slopy shoulders” mentality (where responsibility is passed down rather than up) found in large organisations in both the public and private sector. I have a bit of an insight in to this from a friend who works in HR for local government and my own experience working in the recruitment industry.

I also have a poignant personal example of this in action. In the late 90′s I was called for what I thought was an interview for a technical IT job with Capital One – they were setting up shop in Nottingham in the former Boots headquarters. But when I got there, I found myself in a room with 40 graduates to sit a series of psychometric tests. It was soon obvious to me I was the least qualified and I was there because the agent at the recruitment firm I’d submitted my CV too had blagged me in. From what I could tell, most of these guys were fresh faced and straight out of university and had no experience of the job at all. Anyways, the next week I was the first one called back for a real interview, because I’d scored the best on the tests. But the interview didn’t go at all well – the first and only thing the chap (who was not in HR, but was going to be my direct boss in IT if I was hired) focused on was my qualifications. He couldn’t grock that I could actually understand the nature of the job I was applying for because I wasn’t qualified to do so – even when I answered technical questions he was posing to me. What dawned on me later, and has been confirmed by my experience in the recruitment industry, is that he was worried that I might be a direct liability to him and his career progression if I did or said the wrong thing on the job. He couldn’t deflect any responsibility for my actions by claiming he’d hired the best qualified candidates because I simply didn’t have the correct qualifications. The only reason I’d made it through to the real interviews – apart from performing well on the tests – was because the testing had been outsourced to a third-party company and they were focused purely on trying to find the cleverest / most adaptable candidates. When my CV landed on the desk of the chap from Capital One – along with the other candidates who scored well – I must have stood out like a sore thumb.