HowardWright.com

The role of the Head Hunter in post recessions employment

I was speaking to a friend in the US this weekend who has been looking for a new career now for the best part of a year. He has had so many interviews with head-hunters that I think he has lost count - it is rare that a week doesn't go by when he hasn't been contacted and interviewed for some role or other.

It got me thinking about what the role of the head-hunter is and question whether their role is still valid and important in todays world. I have been contacted many times by head-hunters but never felt the need to respond, however when I went across to the US to work the company I was with insisted on 'vetting' me with a headhunter before they employed my for some reason. It was a strange affair - as I recall the head-hunter himself was an elderly chap who, as we talked, had not worked in business for over 25 years. He had a young chap with him who wrote everything down and he also recorded the conversation I found out later without my permission - something I was not too happy about when I found out. The conversation was over breakfast and was slightly odd in that I clearly didn't fit whatever model he had decided was needed for the job.

Anyway to cut a long story short he didn't recommend me and they initially went with someone who he did recommend that lasted less than 3 days - I ended up with the job anyway as actually I had the right experience and skills for the role. The other candidate looked good on paper but probably was not the right man for the job. How had the head-hunter decided who was the right candidate, what criteria was he using? I found out afterwards that all he had been given was a one-page job description for the role - he had apparently not talked to anyone about skills, capabilities or charateristics - he was basing his judgement on the hastily written description of the role.

Anyway I guess everyone was happy in the end as he got paid a significant amount, I got the job and the company filled the post. But at what cost? What additional value did the head-hunter bring? Was the company just discharging responsibility for the hiring? Is this a an American thing or is it the same in the US?

 I did a bit of research around the head-hunting market and it appears to be an interesting area. Head-hunters typically have to find 3 - 5 candidates for any job and therefore do the initial sift of applications which in todays market can be in the hundreds for any role. Out of these hundreds of applications they have to select the ones to interview (which they get paid for) and then reduce those down to a managable number for the hiring company to interview - are these the best candidates? What about the ones that they have disgarded - are these all unsuitable- probably not and if my experience is anything to go by the ideal candidate is in there somwhere!

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5 Aug 2009

This morning sees me in Sheffield visiting family and revisiting a few old haunts in the peak district.

It is with interest I read and heat the results from the various UK banks which were 'reacued' by the British taxpayer. I wonder when I see the figures how much has been buried in these results - how much has been hidden at or expense?

I guess that I shouldn't be surprised as I remember a couple of companies I worked for doing similar things - piling lots of things into bad results - "if its going to be bad we might as well make it really bad and get it over with"

My question I guess is what is the moral position on this - is it right to do this when the UK taxpayer is finding the debt?

Re-introducing Noise

At TED Global last week I was speaking to a guy who was spending a considerable time understanding how to transfer his CD collection back onto Vinyl - a crazy thing some may say but for me it raised the issue of the digital/analogue debate - is one better than the other and if so why.

The argument he presented was that with analogue there are imperfections in the music - there is noise that is imperceptible to many but to him this 'noise' was important as it provided a human aspect to the music. Digital reproduction has become so good that it filtered out most of the human factor and the 'noise' that was there in the original and just created a 'perfect' version of the music.

Speaking to this guy got me thinking about whether this move from digital back to analogue was a potentially wider phenomena and - have we got too used to the digital aspects of our life and if we have what have we lost in this move - what are the human aspects of the world we have lost.

Is it time to re-introduce 'noise' into our increasingly digitally perfect world?

At TED we heard from a range of speakers on very diverse topics and this idea of the move to analogue kept coming through in a number of presentations - the group who are mimicking the brain with a number of parallel processes which rather than throw pure horsepower at the problem are mimicking the way neurons work to create, at some time in the future, a sentient thing (I won't call it a being at this stage!). Or the Cynetics guy who is using sound to create patterns and then look at how these could be used in a practical sense, the proposal to build a wall of sand dunes across the Sahara desert to stop erosion and create habitats - none of these are 'digital' in the way we understand it rely on analogue forms of design and interpretation.

The other thing I did whilst I was at the conference was to try and count the number of digital watches that people wore. If I went back 5 years there would have been a majority of people with them, however at the conference I guess that over 70% wore analogue watches. Now I know that this could be a style thing or a design thing, but my own view is that it is easier to read - we find the analogue face easier to interpret than the numbers - we like fuzziness.

I would be interested in your views.

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Another Monday morning - is our behaviour changing?

Another Monday morning brings a mix of optimism and despair as usual. The news on the Radio is of the threat of Nuclear weapons from Iran, a depressing forecast on house prices and more news of problems with financing the public purse. But in my little world today these problems seem inconsequential as the sun is shining, the coffee is good and people are going about there business as if none of it really matters.

One of the things I researched on whilst in the US was the inertia that society has. As someone interested in the Future we used to make radical predictions about how technology would change our lives, how things would be different under various Governments and Economic conditions. What you come to realize if you study this stuff is that although there will be consequences of these changes the impact on our day-to-day lives will be actually quite small. OK we will change some of our behaviors - the way we communicate, the was we access information etc., but these will not significantly change the way we live our lives.

The pattern of our lives is encoded somehow and the question becomes then is it nature or nurture - are we repeating a learned behavior or are is there something engineered into our genes. I am sure there is much research been undertaken in this area and I am not arrogant enough to have an answer, however what I am interested in is the consequences of this societal inertia - the things that keep us from significant behavioral change - our culture.

In the late 1990's I did some primary research into societal and organizational culture - what is culture and why is it important? the research focused on the passing of the culture - the rules by which we live and work which make up how we get by on a day to day basis. My conclusions at the time is that culture is, as it has been almost from the dawn of man, is passed on in stories - much of it is told and retold and passed on through the generations. In some cultures this is stronger and more formal than in others, but the passing on of what is acceptable or not forms the basis of how we live our lives.

From an early age we are told by our parents what we can and can't do - usually though some form of discipline and we learn what is acceptable behavior. Our years at school and college then provide new behavioral rules - again many not formally written down anywhere but passed on either as stories or through observed behavior - we watch what other people do and if it seems acceptable we emulate or not dependent on earlier conditioning. In business too stories are very much in evidence as people pass on 'how things are done' and what and what is not acceptable.

So the question then becomes why is this important? My research posed the question 'If culture is formed by stories, can culture be changed by seeding new stories?' The conclusion I came to after months of interviews, observations and discussions was a very strong yes. By 'seeding' new stories organizations can change the culture of the company and I guess society. Many governments around the world have tried to use negative stories - weapons of mass destruction, the fear of terrorism, swine flu etc. to 'control' the populous - I am not saying that these are not all important issues and need to be addressed, however the media coverage of these 'events' trigger a new set of stories - some real, some not so real. These stories then elicit a behavior change and the way we live our lives.

An example of this is a neighbour of mine who is panic struck by Swine Flu. This couple have 'heard' stories about how swine flu will impact them and how it is dangerous to go into public places. And yes to some degree these things are true, however it has significantly changed their behavior in so far that they have almost become recluses. They have friends and family doing their shopping and refuse to answer the door to strangers and are destroying the post as it may be contaminated. Is this behavior normal? Well of course not but to me it is an extreme example of how stories can effect people's behavior - there is little actual fact about the stories they have heard but just hearing tales of woe has radically changed their behavior - perception is reality!

So why am I interested. As we move out of recession and into a period of slow and steady growth we need to think about not only the hard and tangible things we need to do but also the stories we start to tell as these will probably have a greater impact on the way we live our lives than the economic metrics that govern the recovery.

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