Have you ever wondered why your current or next bosses are more likely to be egomaniacs (think of Donald Trump)? That’s right, consider yourself lucky if your current or new bosses are not egocentric and not “me, me, me!” all the time but are decent human beings and lead by being mindful of what his /her subordinates want, what the customers want, and what the circumstances are before making decisions that bring higher benefits/welfare to the entities they are responsible of.
Think of Information Asymmetry
The answer is information asymmetry. That is, one party has more or better information than others in an exchange or transaction, such that the party can take the information comparative advantage to gain more from the exchange. This applies especially well to human resources. When making hiring decisions the hiring organizations are at an information disadvantage as they face more uncertainty about the candidates from whom the next leader has to be selected. The candidates on the other hand know themselves better than others and can manipulate that private information to boost their chances to be hired. There are many tricks they can play, but one of the most frequently used is to project an image that is self-confident, extremely capable, with a track record of one success after another in the past. The funny thing is, those who are egomaniacs tend to remember their past achievements better than others, and tend to tilt or color the story toward a self-serving propaganda. It is not that they are entirely lying about their achievements, but rather they are genuine believers of themselves more than others, of their own capabilities that made a big or pivotal difference during the course of actions.
And for an hiring organization pressed to find the best matching boss, these words, stories and accounts are just music to the ears!
The HR Practice Has Itself to Blame
Information asymmetry is just necessary but not sufficient for organizations to end up hiring a bunch of egomaniacs. The organization has itself to blame, because the current hiring practice places too much emphasis on the past, when it really matters is the future. This is especially true for creative and disruptive jobs but even for regular and old fashion jobs. The current “resume centered” practice gives egomaniacs a stage to play out. Meanwhile, organizations one after another have been sucked into believing this is the only way to get the best leader, and even though they may have sensed something not entirely right on the personality side, they are willing to risk hiring a jerk because the alternative of hiring an incompetent guy is too high a price to pay.
Not Equating Egomaniacs With Competence
Somehow and deep down, the current HR practice is equating self-confidence with capabilities, and egomaniacs with competence.
To be sure and to make things more complicated, some egomaniacs are better than the “Average Joe” in achieving things and in pushing for changes. For one reason, these people desire — not require — more achievements to keep their big egos going or flowing, and having a strong desire to win or success should help. This is why organizations would rather hire an egomaniacs to get jobs done. What they have erred is that a big ego is not required for achievements, and it in fact can make things worse. Instead of putting oneself first, the capability of empathy goes a long way, because it enables the true leader to see reality better, to place priority in the right places when they need, and to understand others and to put oneself in the shoes of others. Simple put, an organization needs someone who will place its interests first rather than his/her personal interests first, but the latter is exactly what egomaniacs tend to do.
The Big Problems Behind
The current human resources practice of hiring/recruiting is loaded with four problems. First of all, it has an exclusively past orientation, essentially seeking yesterday’s champions for the challenges of today and tomorrow. The whole system is built on the premise that past experiences and past performance completely drive future achievements. Past oriented hiring turns a blind eye to “change makers” who are highly motivated (and talented) to learn and to do things that genuinely interest them, who can think outside the box, and who can create knowledge/skills rather than repeatedly apply the existing ones. In order to win the new jobs under the current system, all job seekers have to do is to demonstrate they have “been there, done that” even though past experience is never the only thing that matters. This creates a real danger to encourage job candidates to stick to one business, one industry, or one job for an extended period of time, even though he or she hates the job and not good at it.
Secondly, it is biased toward self-serving as it relies exclusively on self-prepared resume/vita, providing limited means for check and balances against “resume lies.” I have discussed the bias for, not against, egomaniacs.
Thirdly, it is also highly subjective as evaluating and picking talents are all based on subjective impressions rather than objectifiable data.
Finally, the current practice recruits one individual at a time, ignoring the teamwork chemistry that works best when a few best matched individuals are hired simultaneously.
For the most part the current HR system has been seldom challenged, and most people simply pretend that it works fine. Some high-tech firms now integrate software tests into the hiring, but those tests are conducted only among those with a shining resume, and they only test the cognitive aspect of the candidates. New HR platforms like LinkedIn, Indeed.com and Ziprecruiter.com do not challenge the traditional ideas, only expedite the hiring processes by cutting times on face-to-face interviews, leaving the problems of past orientation, subjective evaluation, isolated hiring and self-serving bias unchanged. In a sense, these new platforms make things worse because they rely even more on resumes/vita for online screening.
A Bigger Problem for the New Economy
The new economy is all about creativity and entrepreneurship, about making meaningful changes to meet the numerous challenges from future uncertainties. This stands in sharp contrast to the old economy, in which a past oriented HR system would work just fine, and workers could survive with a single skill throughout careers, from first paycheck to retirement. Unlike the old economy that demands stably fixed sets of skills, new economy requires creativity, entrepreneurship, out-of-box thinking and entrepreneurial acting. While the old economy prefers talents who can best utilize past knowledge and skills, the new economy prefers talents who can constantly create new knowledge and skills.
Most importantly, while the old economy ties talents to fixed locations or entities, the new economy encourages free flow of human resources, as long as the flows make the better use of talents.
How to Fix the Problems
To match the hiring/recruiting practices with the requirements of new economy or, better yet to make hiring and recruiting an integrated part of the new economy, the key is to leverage modern technologies for better HR. LinkedIn and similar platforms represent the first but preliminary way of bringing high-tech on board, while the new solution here, dubbed “HR-VR,” goes deeper by combining elements of virtual reality (VR) with HR. The idea is to immerse job candidates in a real or virtual setting that simulates the “task environment” the candidates will encounter after hiring. The keys to setting up such a task environment are to mock the firm-specific reality (and their particular need for talent) and to cover both cognitive and emotional or personality (i.e., the EQ part) aspects.
Instead of listening to candidates talking about how great they were in the past, we invite them to a real or simulated “chatting” environment to see how they act when there is a clear goal of solving the real world problems facing the hiring firm. Depending on the level of new hires, the setting will be a mix of detail oriented versus big picture questions, close-ended versus open-ended, standard questions versus brain teaser questions, puzzles that currently bother the firm versus ideas for the future, competitor’s moves versus internal challenges. Candidates can ask questions to each other and to the “interviewers” played by HR-VR agents.
The key to the success of HR-VR is machine generated questions for screening and identifying best candidates. Such a system will have three modes of delivery: All human, all virtual and hybrid, although they all depend on machine learned VR questions and scenarios to work. They only differ in how the questions and scenarios are delivered. The system must do its homework to familiarize the hiring firm, its tasks/challenges, and the personalities of the current employees to ask good questions and provide background information for the candidates, also to help make the scenario more believable and creditable.
Private Sector Stands to Gain
Private sector will be the crucial player and major beneficiary. First of all, there will be many HR-VR firms for simulated candidate tests, when future recruiting will be mostly run through HR-VR, at least for screening purposes. Furthermore, to make the simulation more realistic, industry-specific HR-VR firms will be established to serve different industries better. Future recruiting will be outsourced to these third-party HR-VR firms, thus avoiding internal biases.
Secondly, the software industry, especially the machine learning sector, will be busy creating HR-VR task environments, again according to specific requirements by the hiring firms.
Finally, training focused startups will work to train job candidates to get used to the new game. As an extra bonus, private sector not only will add new jobs but higher quality of jobs. More specifically, firms will feel more confident in getting the right human resources they need, at a lower cost and short time span. These advantages will encourage firms to form and update new teams, instead of being stuck to the same old teams that have been underperforming.
Creating More Social Goods
Moving the private sector forward clearly has public benefits, such as new jobs created. Another even more important social consequence is free flow of talents, as firms /entities will have lower cost of replacing or updating workforce. Another advantage is a level playing field in hiring, fighting against job related biases and stereotypes. For example, HR-VR will be the first step toward new hires, anyone can participate in simulated tests without worrying about lacking past experiences getting in the way of career advances. Future related performance, not past experiences summarized in a shining resume, will be the top priority for picking new hires. Furthermore, HR-VR tests will generate scientific and objective data for better processing (by the way, some startups will help firms analyze the HR-VR data to come out with best picks.) The speed of hiring will be faster, because industry-specific HR-VR software will arise that only need minor modification to reflect the special needs of the hiring firms. Either way, the important step is for the HR-VR firms to familiarize the needs and demands of hiring firms and then prepare questions and evaluation criteria that fit the firm best, using machine learning algorithm.
Final Thoughts
The old HR system has been driven by safety or liability concerns in the sense that HR just wanted to reduce their liability by finding those with shining resumes, rather than with real matching skills. This way, if anything goes wrong, HR can avoid the potential blame by simply claiming that they had a legitimate reason to hire the problematic candidate. With HR-VR test scores, firms and HR will have scientific data to prove, which are more reliable than subjective impressions.
The old HR recruiting system encourages job candidates to simply accumulate “seniority capital” by sitting in similar jobs for the longest time possible to reap handsome seniority bonus from past experiences. The new HR-VR walks away from that protocol and helps the society become innovation oriented, creativity focused, and entrepreneurship emphasized.
The danger of old HR is to promote fixed skill set as well as fixed mind set throughout one’s career life.
It is wrong to think that the new HR process just think of the future. It combines past and future, cognition and emotion, individual and teams so that they are better prepared for changing the world. In order to come up with the best solution for the future, one must do the homework to understand the past, for example.
Organizations or entities should not hire just because they have the budget for filling up additional positions, but because new talents are needed to help bring new ideas/thoughts/perspectives to solve problems /tasks/ challenges. Here the key word is “solution” because in the future, data, analytics and even information are no longer in short supply, not as scarce as before. What is in short supply now is solutions, which require talents to connect dots — bits and pieces of isolated information — to come up with a holistic and targeted system of thoughts for solving particular problems.