One of our applicants says: “Me, I’ll take twenty, I’ll do anything!” Another one states: “I’m looking to take home Kshs 300,000 and I know how many sales I need to achieve that.”
Which one would you hire?
These are real statements from real candidates for automotive sales positions. Variants on the former were much more prevalent than the latter. This just goes to show that poverty is not only a state of mind but deeply entrenched in the psyche of job seekers. I’ve got two different sets of concerns with this scenario.
First is the dilemma it presents to recruiters and employers. For this assignment, we had put in place a sophisticated automated screening mechanism. MS Outlook was programmed to look for keywords in the applications and send out e-mails to apparently suitable candidates.
These contained a link to an online psychometric profiling tool set up to know what characteristics sales people ought to possess. Faced with potentially hundreds of applications, this proved a massive relief on the usual burden of sieving through piles of CVs.
The trouble is that very few passed the screening and essentially none made it onto a short list of prospects. The rational advice would be to start again, rewrite the vacancy announcements, post them on different sites and seek out higher calibre people. But employers don’t always have the luxury of another three months’ lead-time.
But they should know that a wrong hire is an expensive mistake to back out of. In this case, they took another approach. They hired the entire long list of 12 people.
“We’ll try them out on the job and see who makes it”, they explained. This, I fear, is an even more expensive mistake. First, the costs of employing, training, deploying, supervising and supporting a dozen people, even on an apparently low fixed cost commission-only basis, are far higher than gut feel might suggest.
But it gets worse. Imagine sending out low-grade job seekers, with no relevant experience, to sell high-value items to high net worth individuals and corporations. This devalues the brand in the mind of potential customers, an expensive and possibly irreversible mistake.
And you still have to cover their costs of getting out and about as they destroy your reputation. A raw recruit came to me from a travel agency once, handed me a photocopied flyer and promptly clammed up through nerves or ignorance.
“What do you want me to do with this?” I asked. “We thought you could give us your business,” was the sum total of his sales pitch. If their service team and managers were any reflection of their sales rep, there’s no way I would have entrusted them with my travel schedule, let alone part with millions for a luxury car I don’t really need.
My other concern is what makes people who really need jobs behave in a way that guarantees they will never get one? To answer this, we need to delve not only into the morass of our education system, but think too about the parents who make choices that fail to give their children a useful start in life.
Education is one of the few remaining free markets. It hasn’t yet been legislated out of existence by politicians wielding an egalitarian axe. This is why there are so many private, equals commercial, schools. The state fails to deliver, so parents will dig into already stretched pockets to pay fees to private schools.
The state is incompetent to regulate the quality of such schools when it cannot run its own properly, though that, I am sure, is only a matter of time. In the UK, a powerful political lobby continues to deride fee-paying schools when all the evidence shows their students perform better in nearly every walk of life, and have a much better time getting there.
In the recent Olympics, one commentator observed that 70% of Team GB athletes came from fee-paying schools while only 7% of British kids attend such institutions. The calibre of schools is clearly an issue. Private schools generally deliver a better product than state schools.
Back home, the spectrum of quality is enormous and the choice is even more important. Here’s what I mean. Friends sent their 15-year-old daughter to one of the new breed of ‘academies’ outside Nairobi. She has to wake before 5am and rarely sleeps before 11pm. She doesn’t get enough to eat, never plays sports and the idea of learning things like horse riding or how to play a musical instrument is not an option. By the end of term, she’s physically and mentally exhausted.
The parents, like many others, have joined an unwinnable race. Their mission is to get the girl some decent grades, a sufficient score to give her a fighting chance of a place at university. There, in turn, she will be crammed full of irrelevant ‘knowledge’ before being thrown into the shark-infested waters of real world job hunting.
If six hours sleep for a teenager sounds a bit like child abuse, consider those ‘day bugs’ who also get up pre-dawn, spend a couple of hours on the road, study all day (having missed breakfast), get home around 7pm, fight over whether they eat first or do their homework, and then off to bed to start again.
And yet . . . there are schools where none of this happens. Where kids rise when the sun is already bright, enjoy a real education of proper subjects and activities, play sports most afternoons, visit new places and gain new skills. And guess what?
They come out with initiative, drive and character, go straight into university and launch confidently into grown-up life. They’ll be the ones you want to hire, in fact. So it’s not just that the education system is poor, but that parents don’t always make the best choices. In a free market, that’s critical.
But it seems to me there is something badly adrift when so many seem so unemployable.
