I
just read Employer
Explains Why He Won't Hire the Unemployed, which honestly left me
dumbfounded. Before I tell you why, let me first thank the author, Claire Gordon,
and her interview subject, Alex Comana, who runs The Comana Company, in La
Mesa, California. Apparently Mr. Comana was the only business person willing
to speak to the writer on this topic, and for that I’m grateful.
But
that doesn’t let Mr. Comana off the hook completely—some of his ideas are naïve
at best. He states that employed
candidates “are proven to be valuable” and “will adjust quicker to a new job.” He
seems to think that being employed is evidence that an applicant
must be a great employee, because she wouldn’t
be employed if she were bad at her job, right? Hah! In my twenty-five years in
the workplace I’ve learned that nothing could be further from the truth. There
are lots of mediocre workers and many flat-out incompetent ones, too. Some are
great political animals, others are skilled at flying under the radar, some
are skilled at knowing when to do a
good job and when they can slack off, others work in organizations with low
standards, and still others work for bosses who hate conflict. Shoot, I just rattled
those reasons off the top of my head. I bet you know more. But the point is, none
of these screams “high-potential employee.”
Mr.
Comana states that an employed candidate has fresher job skills. Well, maybe. I’ve
known plenty of workers whose skills weren’t current, not necessarily because of
any fault of their own, but because their employers had outdated equipment or were
wedded to stale processes and procedures. An employee in such a workplace might
take the initiative and make sure to keep her skills up to date by exploring and
taking advantage of opportunities outside of work, and guess what? She’d do the
same even if unemployed—perhaps especially if
unemployed.
It
seems to me that employers with Mr. Comana’s viewpoint are looking for a hiring
shortcut, and there is none. There’s simply no substitute for thorough hiring
practices. If an employer wants good workers, he’s going to need to learn how
to assess talent, period. He’s going to need to learn how to ask good questions
and listen to the answers, do a thorough background and reference check, and perhaps
even develop an arsenal of tests to measure technical competency in certain
workplace skills, like the ability to perform basic math functions, or write a
sentence (or two) devoid of grammatical errors, or think critically. Making assumptions
isn’t going to cut it, and I bet a lot of good workers—and the businesses that
need them—are losing out as a result.
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