Hiring People to Fail?

I was amazed to find that a friend of mine used to hire people to amuse himself on their shortcomings and follies. He would make them feel miserable by pointing out their mistakes in front of others and then recount the mistakes to his friends and have a good laugh at the expense of his office staff.

I was intrigued to find a recruitment firm hiring recruitment executives every month only to fire them within a span of three months on the grounds of poor performance. It is quite inevitable that very soon the firm closed shop.

What was even more exasperating  was an organization that would place new hires in all its questionable projects and then retain only a fourth of them, while asking the rest to quit because of the closure of the projects they were executing.

A company providing home based documentation job work would send test files to the job aspirants for transcription and documentation and would report to the examinees that they had failed the test and encourage them to take the test again on a different test file, thus getting its documentation work done for free from the unsuspecting examinees.

Such unscrupulous means of meeting short term objectives do not help in setting up a credibly successful organization too.

Everyone is aware of the time and resource an organization has to expend to hire new hands for its functions. This makes it all the more important for the organization to ensure longevity of the new hires in the organization so that it can cut down on the hiring and attrition cost. This is only possible when:

• The functional objective aka the job description of the new hire is in tune with the operational vision and mission of the organization.
• The eligibility criteria (Knowledge, skill and experience) is well defined in terms of the job description of the portfolio for which the organization intends to hire a new hand.
• The induction process to help the new hire to align completely with the vision and work culture of the organization along with the functional objective of the portfolio he/she has to manage in the organization.
• Through regular mentor support, enable the new hire to align his/her career objective with the functional objective of the organization.
• Organization should have open door policy at all levels of its functional hierarchy so that a positive work environment can encourage free exchange of views, ideas and feedback that can encourage an individual to improve upon his or her performance to mutual benefit as this well help the organization to remain in tune with the changing trends in the market it is catering to.
• Organization should encourage integrity, honesty, an inquiring mind along with pragmatism in its work ethos in order to encourage its employees to remain in tune with changing market trends, change in technology to maintain the good will the organization has created for itself in the market.

• Organization should also encourage enhancement of knowledge and skill so that an employee can improve his or her performance. Should also encourage one-on-one coaching and mentoring to ensure success of succession planning from its shop floor level up to the summit of its functional hierarchy.

Therefore, it is time for every organization to ponder over its hiring policies and its work ethos to see how it is failing to achieve its functional vision and mission with the failure of each employee it hires to achieve its functional objective.