The manager you really wanted to hire is not the one you employed

Human resource agencies which specialise in headhunting for companies sometimes have to battle almost endlessly with their client companies when the latter commission them to hire for them.

Often, the picture of the man in the mind of the client company in need of the service may not have been correctly scanned into the psyche of the recruitment agency and so as much as the recruitment team tries to match the ideal candidate from its perspective with the picture of the man in the mind of the company, wide discrepancies may arise between what the company had in mind and what they got at the end of the exercise. 

In trying to bridge this gap, some agencies either screen two or three more candidates for each position, so that the final choice of the ideal candidate lies with the client company. 

Another option is to make room for staff of the client company to be part of the final stages of the recruitment process.  

Cases such as these also arise in-house when hiring new personnel, because the person the marketing department has in mind is one whose personal characteristics and being are not easy to formalise and clearly categorised into any of the traditional skills-set typical of marketing officers. 

If a company needs a person in its marketing department to liaise with its advertising agencies in order to conceptualise, design, develop and help implement various advertising campaigns across the country, capturing this concept-crazy person with the exceptional knack to infuse the dynamic emotions of the clientele and adoration of its fans into one artwork is not going to be an easy task. 

The responsibility of helping conceptualise very compelling ads, intelligently critiquing art works for purposes of refining the work as it travels through the various stages towards perfection is a difficult, almost impossible ingenuity to capture in words and post on the website of a company. 

The quest for a new sales manager with vast amount of social capital, a winning spirit, emotional intelligence and a certain set of other rare soft skills that pass among the bulk of clients the newcomer will deal with, is also a difficult subject when it comes to reducing this into words. 

Forward-looking companies are the ones who, when they are designing the specifics of the person in a vacancy advertisement (ad), try as much as possible not to restrict the candidacy and in the process practically alienate some very useful materials. 

When the search for the above officer in the marketing department introduces very inflexible clauses such as the minimum length of experience the aspirant must possess, the level of education consistent with the position and other special academic disciplines the prospect must come in with, the marketing communication mix wizard whose duration in the industry is only twenty four months but whose output and work quality outmatches the decade-long so-called specialist, a hunt for excellence in talents could easily become a search for the most educated, longest serving and maybe, the greatest liability for the marketing department.

If the company seeking the officer insists that the ideal candidate must have a BA/BSc degree in business and preferably in marketing and does not stop there but insists also that an MBA/CIM may be an added advantage, the IMC whiz-kid with background in Psychology, Sociology, Philosophy, English, Computer Science, Mathematics, Classics or History with natural, awe-inspiring flairs in corporate communications has already been placed behind some hurdles. 

When the minimum number of years of experience comes to add to the list, this talent’s hands get tired further. By the time the whiz-kid reads through the announcement to the end, she knows there is no desk for her in this corporation. 

In the case of the sales manager who must be wired to the markets and possesses a huge amount of networks and other soft skills, the talent that is left behind the gate of the company may be a college dropout whose career span a dozen years during which she may have worked her way from a “mere” salesgirl to a territory manager. 

During this over-a-decade long practice, the woman may have made her mistakes, but by stumbling, falling and rising, she has lent the tricky trade of salesgirls, sales reps., territory managers, and just when she has to take a dream job, new criteria erect a barrier between her and the job. 

But she is the one with the knack to strike out a conversation even with the stranger, has vast amount of social capital through networking across the country and with the drive to deliver the expected results. 

In the opinion of the resident HR director, the degree this woman obtained two years ago is too young and not in the class awarded by the cream business schools in the country. 

Her age sets her below the minimum threshold and finally, she is a woman who may be nursing one or two children and have to share her attention and energies amongst her pressure-laden, highly challenging employment, selfishly demanding husband and children who may need their mother from time to time.

When advertising for a position that lies outside the mainstream bundle of skills-set, be modest in the announcement. 

Capture only the few basics and leave the rest to the intelligent discretion of the jobseeker, bearing in mind that that same ad must try to intimidate and scare off the dull-witted and entice the talented.  

For instance, the hunt for a person with the gift to run a little but glamorous café, an elite Internet hangout, a restaurant specialising in a certain set of rare dishes, a swimming pool that welcomes people of a certain class, a prestigious spa, sell or rent property usually patronised by bourgeois, the candidate specifics for persons with the magic to excel at these delicate little businesses may defy the standard text book case study and conventionally acclaimed methods.

So, when the hunt is for the outliers as in the delicate trades above, unless you adopt a selective invitation of those who fall in the 90 percentile and above, you will receive garbage in return for your vacancy announcement and your hunt may put you on a head-on collision course with the resident HR, the Agency or both. 

The writer is the Sales/Rental Manager at Alburadi Engineering & Trading Ltd., 

Sole dealer for Hyundai Heavy Industries.

jobinterviewcoachme@gmail.com.