VirCIO Group

I have had the good fortune recently to be reading the book The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home by Dan Ariely (who has also written the wonderful book Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions which I recommend as well).

The book is all about Ariely’s research in the field of behavioral economics. For those of you who are not familiar with behavioral economics, it is concerned with what really happens by studying actual economic behavior instead of classic economics which relies on a whole host of unproven (and as behavioral economics proves, incorrect) assumptions. For example, classic economics assumes that all consumers will behave rationally and maximize utility. Behavioral economics has studied real-world examples and has proven this to be a ludicrous (and dangerous) assumption by which to base economic principals and policy.

One chapter I found particularly interesting dealt with the subject of online dating and how online dating sites are “market failures” unable to live up to their hype. I couldn’t help but think back to one of my pet peeves, online employment, and see how similar these two ventures are. Like dating, online employment web sites provide a means for two parties with specific needs and desires to find each other. Both are concerned with very serious, long-term relationships. And both fail most of the time. Ariely did not study online employment sites, but what he says about the very similar online dating sites is very instructive. As you read the quotes below, I suggest that you mentally substitute the words employment, jobs, perspective employer/employee where appropriate.

“So why do online dating sites demand that people describe themselves and their ideal partners according to quantifiable attributes? I suspect that they pick this modus operandi because it is relatively easy to translate words …into a searchable database. But could it be that, in their desire to make the system compatible with what computers can do well, online dating sites force our often nebulous conception of an ideal partner to conform to a set of simple parameters – and in the process make the whole system less than useful?.” (emphasis mine).

Does anyone else see the analogy between the online dating profile and the job profiles and automatic resume readers of jobs sites? As Ariely points out, “the fundamental problem is that online dating sites treat their users as searchable goods, but…in reality…they would be closer to what economists call ‘experience goods.’ Like dining experiences , perfumes, and art, people can’t be anatomized easily and effectively.”

I contend that a job, like a date, is experiential and that you cannot predict job success (or dating success) by looking for a set of searchable terms, but by honestly attempting to find out first if a person fits the organization, then making sure that a very small set of prerequisites are met. What we see today instead is an ever-increasing laundry list of searchable terms that grows in size to keep the “qualified” list manageable, but really just finds those folks who have won the game of employment buzz-word bingo. In other words, since online employment web sites do not work, instead of working with or creating better employment sites, users “game” the system by doing the very thing that makes the system dysfunctional (growing the list of “requirements” to keep the numbers low enough to manage).

Ariely found in his research that a much more effective online strategy for “experiential goods” was virtual dating where people would interact in in a virtual world that included images of people, items such as shoes, movie clips and abstract art. In this scenario users would not only chat about themselves but also interact together to discuss things they saw. I am not sure how this could be applied to employment sites, but at least there is a model that might provide hope for improvement. My friend Wes Zimmerman swears that he has the answer to the employment problem and can help any business make better (and easier to manage search process) hires. I am guessing that his process is successful because it relies more on finding better fits for an organization that arrogantly assuming a laundry list of searchable keywords will work.

Ariely sums up : “At the end of the day, people are the marketing-terminology equivalent of experienced goods. In the same way that the chemical composition of broccoli or pecan pie is not going to help us better understand what the real thing tastes like, breaking people into their individual attributes is not very helpful in figuring out what it might be like to spend time or live with them.” Nor is it helpful in figuring out what it might be like to employ or work with them.

What is Matrix Management?

Matrix management is a type of organizational management in which people with similar skills are pooled for work assignments. For example, all engineers may be in one engineering department and report to an engineering manager, but these same engineers may be assigned to different projects and report to a project manager while working on that project.

Why is Matrix Management used?

•Align your business with your customers

•Optimize (streamline) business processes & projects

•Increase cross-functional cooperation

•Allocate resources for the good of the enterprise instead of the good of the function

The new matrix management strategy to manage both vertically as well as horizontally allows businesses to effectively do business process monitoring (BPM) and business activity monitoring (BAM).

The VirCIO Group, through our assessment methodology, can transform your business structure into a matrix-organized structure.  You will immediately see results in efficiencies and accountability.  Most importantly, your business will be organized to satisfy your customers and create a goal-oriented workforce.

There are not many folks out there who would not agree with the statement that the IT hiring process is broken. The current process relies heavily on recruiting companies who solicit as many candidates as possible, but do not know the IT business well enough to properly screen candidates. Companies that have the jobs are not getting the talent that they need. Meanwhile, some very talented people are shut out of jobs they are properly qualified for. Frustration rages on all sides.

So if most agree that it is broken, what is my advice for fixing the problem? Below are just a few rational suggestions based on years of experience.

1. Fire the recruitment agencies and take back the hiring process. Recruiters do not understand your business – you do.  You know what you need so why dilute the lines of communication. In too many cases recruiters trash an applicant because they do not know that a person who has done OOP with Java is just as capable of doing OOP with .net.

2. No more making a laundry list of requirements. Boil down your requirements to just a few essential things. From the above example, do not ask for “10 years of .net experience.” I have seen this and it s ludicrous. If someone says they have 10 years of .net they are lying, but more importantly, this is not really what you need. What you need is someone capable of programming in .net. The true requirement is “substantial experience using OOP” because, as I stated above a Java programmer is very capable of learning .net and contributing quickly. You gain nothing by weeding out good people. You gain by weeding out unqualified people. (some will argue against this thinking but I have a great story of how this woks in a future blog).

3. Go with your gut and take a chance. Once you have the real requirements for the job, be willing to take a chance. In the state of Arizona we have employment “at will.” What does that mean to you? That means that you can basically let go of a worker at any time for any reason (short of discrimination).  Don’t think that you have some magic hiring process solution to find only great candidates. Hiring is a crapshoot where flipping a coin could be a better strategy then group interviews and personality assessments (at least you would save time and money). All too often a company will have multiple interviews and spend hours and hours and a great deal of money to select the right candidate only to set them adrift once they join the ranks. Spend less time with the hiring process. The key is to spend the time monitoring the new hire and if they are not working out to get rid of them quickly so that you can move to the next. The cost of keeping a bad hire because you are afraid to admit your “foolproof” system does not work is much greater than admitting a mistake and fixing it quickly.