The Chick-Flick Recruiting Trick

INTIMATE RECRUITING/Image: Michael Moffa

It’s hard to imagine that sappy Hollywood romances could be instruction manuals on how to get a job, applicants or clients, but there is one ubiquitous noteworthy maneuver and variants thereof germane to recruiting that virtually all of them use to ignite relationships: the formulaic, pathetic sad story about a tragic, dysfunctional or merely poignant childhood and its equally predictable emotional regression to childhood innocence, if not outright infancy.

Although it is needless to cite multiple examples, since virtually every “chick flick” of the Hollywood romantic genre employs this ploy, the movie I stumbled across last night on Netflix will suffice to make the point and to show the way to apply the movie trick in recruiting.

Engineered Intimacy: Day Zero

“Day Zero”, a 2007 so-so and only slightly futuristic dark tale starring Elijah Wood focuses on the lives, loves and life dilemmas of three guys who’ve been drafted during wartime sometime in the near future, after the draft has been reinstated. At one point, one of them, “Dixon” (Jon Bernthal, a Christian Slater clone playing a cab driver) is having a heart-to-heart with his new sociologist girlfriend-in-the-making, when he dangles the bait: “You got any brothers and sisters?” What happened next was entirely and drearily predictable, even to non-sociologists.

Of course, after replying, she, falling for or welcoming the worm, asks her obligatory catechistic complement: “You?” Gotcha. He, of course, starts with “My mom died when I was seventeen. I don’t know who my dad is.” She, of course, is moved to say, “I’m sorry.” That elicits his seal-the-deal “You don’t have to be sorry for me”, which unleashes her conveniently now-disinhibited pseudo-maternal conflicted urges to simultaneously nurture and jump him, at which point she sidles up to him and whispers, “I’m going to kiss you.”—instead of applying her sociologist skills and going online to check DSM-IV for signs of clinical pathology arising from family dysfunctionality.

Naturally, he tries very hard to look like a surprised, vulnerable and puzzled puppy or baby just strapped into a stroller for a surprise stroll somewhere really nice.  They then take the Hollywood road most traveled—time-traveling, so to speak, back to infancy’s innocent state of tangled birthday suits and blissfully serene infant crib naps. Back to “Day Zero”, one might say, in a sense the script writers perhaps did not intend.

Desmond Morris Nails It

In his fast-paced insightful study of human intimacy, Intimate Behavior: a Zoologist’s Classic Study of Human Intimacy , renowned man-watcher and biologist, Desmond Morris, whose oeuvre includes chart-topping The Naked Ape, The Human Zooand Manwatching: a Field Guide to Human Behavior, identified important dimensions of the “remotivating regressive algorithm” I’ve outlined.

In his analysis, the process of becoming intimate is essentially an accelerated reversed time-lapse scenario that starts with conventional adult behavior and conversation, quickly regressing to and culminating in quintessentially infantile states of mind and behavior. Man-meets-woman segues back to boy-meets-girl to baby cuddles, through progressively regressive techniques such as emotional family talk, replicas of the mother-infant sustained stare, hand-holding (an infantile reassurance tactic), cooing and babyish-babble, birthday suit crib sharing and, ultimately, blissful sleep.

Oral Manipulation and Fun

A second, far more common—although no less ultimately infantile—way to accomplish the same thing and create a psychologically receptive and infantile regressive state—even if not as intensely as lovers do—is to ask and talk about food, since that puts both parties into a psychoanalytically “oral” frame of mind. That’s one reason why so much small talk—especially dinner talk—is about food, and why going out for dinner is the ritualized social and dating ice breaker that it is (food’s being a safe, common and obvious topic accounting for the rest of its frequency as a topic). Accordingly, “Have you tried the sushi next door?”, casually tossed off in an interview can steer the connection between applicant/client and recruiter back to childhood innocence, trust, commonality and to low-level “bonding”. The writers for The Simpsonsand Seinfeld are and were masters of that technique.

Karaoke works on the same principle, but at an extreme level, in that virtually all of its pleasures are oral: singing, talking, drinking, snacking, smoking (in some countries), and, of course, the hybrid sing-song sing-talk of “harmless” innuendo expressed in the pining lyrics of love songs directed at someone when it seems too risky or awkward to hit on him or her directly (to which kissing can be added, if the others, including the drinks, work).  Take a client or candidate to a karaoke bar and you’ll have at least six of these ways of launching the pseudo-baby-bonding algorithm—the full eight, if you don’t mind the attendant professional and personal complications and risks.

The Recruiting Game Algorithm

What are the recruiting lessons and implications in all of this? Apart from the unhelpful suggestion that getting an applicant, recruiter or client to fall in love with you can be a successful business technique (an exciting, but, alas, dicey maneuver), there is a level of abstraction at which the process employed by this couple can effectively be mirrored in conventional recruitment. Viewed more abstractly, the process involves the following sequenced manipulative steps:

1. The crafty (even if only unconsciously gamey) asking of a question that “remotivates” both the questioner and the questioned, by putting both into a psychologically regressive and receptive state requiring emotional recall—recollections of something that will overcome the inhibitions of one or both of the players.

2.  Disarming disinhibition facilitated by collaborative tale-telling by both players, with the mood, memories and moves of one mirroring that of the other.

3.   Consummation of the deal through what in “transactional analysis” is called  an “duplex ulterior transaction” in which the surface meaning of the interaction conceals a deeper, ulterior significance—ideally the superficial import being regression to a blissfully innocent child-like or other vulnerable state, the ulterior purpose being a very adult agenda, or vice versa. In TA talk this is an ostensible “child-child” transaction masking an “adult-adult” interaction—or possibly the reverse, depending on which message and agenda is primary.

The Challenge of Applying the Intimacy Algorithm to Recruiting

There’s the “algorithm”. Now the task is to apply it in recruiting.

Because interviewing rarely involves having an applicant or a recruiter in response asking the same question just asked of himself, the opportunities for engineering being asked a question by asking it oneself are limited in recruiting. Nonetheless, this technique is a hallmark of American communication.

To a greater degree than more inhibited cultures, American culture seems to encourage engagement with strangers, which, fundamentally, is precisely what job applicants are. Seated side-by-side on a bus, one stranger asks another, “So, what line of work are you in?”—which, although superficially a request for information, often is really also or instead a request for permission to “show-and-tell” and trumpet one’s own story. If this is not obvious, just consider two unacquainted gym jocks pumping iron, as one asks, “How much can you bench press?”—while being pretty sure it’s puny by the comparison he’s eager to make explicit.

Listen-and-Write vs. Show-and-Tell

It is in at least this sense that America is a “show-and-tell” culture. For example, the stereotypical visiting Japanese R&D team is seen as quietly taking notes, asking questions and learning in order to copy and improve, whereas the American counterpart would be portrayed as handing out white papers, telling how it’s all supposed to be done and teaching. This is, I believe, reflected in the fact that, and phenomenon of a generation ago, when a Japanese businessman asked a tough question would suck air, as though vacuuming up information, while his American counterpart would blow and sigh, as though disgorging the facts and advice—respiration patterns as icons of diametrically opposed “pull” and “push” cultures.

So, if, despite any unlikelihood, an applicant does ask you a question you cannot resist asking back, the chances are greater that you’ve been led into the aforementioned seductive algorithmic process, e.g., the applicant asks, “Do you hire people with expunged criminal records, exonerations or pardons?” or “Do Iraq combat PTSD flashbacks constitute a recognized and accommodated disability?”  (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), or “If an applicant is an abandoned mother of two on welfare, is there any chance of getting this job?” Who could resist asking, “Are you talking about yourself?”?—which, predictably, sets you up for the (nonetheless legitimate) sad story and the empathic hire.

Turning the Intimacy Tables

Conversely, you, the recruiter, can play the same game, to entice a perhaps reluctant star candidate or client. Here are some of the trigger questions you could use to elicit a mirror question and start the stroller rolling:

• Being careful to ask a question that makes a counter-question natural and non-invasive, you ask something that is also about the company you are representing, as well as about the candidate: “Have you ever worked for a company that put ethics above profit?” (Reply sought: “Oh, is this such a company?”) You then narrate the company’s struggle to take the high road at the expense of the bottom line—an excellent tactic if the candidate is looking for “meaningful” work. “Have you ever had days when you just can’t get anyone to see how right your advice is?” is a more abstract variant of this approach.
• Asking a purely personal question in order to create a personal bond that makes the applicant more amenable to hiring, you ask, but only as a “spontaneous” personal aside, “Have you ever wished job interviews could be as relaxed as a family dinner or as exciting as a kid’s first trip to the zoo?” (This one subtly links interviews, food, family and childhood pleasures to direct the mood back in time and ahead to the hire.)
• Ask a hesitant client, “Would you consider hiring a decorated combat veteran with mild PTSD?” If you are lucky, the client will reply, “Would you?”—allowing you to not only present such an applicant, but also  to take control of the decision-making sprinkled with empathy for the vulnerable.

In the back-and-forth of this line of questioning, there will generally, if not always, be two distinct levels of communication (per “duplex ulterior” transaction dynamics): the surface adult information exchange level and the warmer, fuzzier, collaborative, sympathetic level of engagement of the applicant, of you or of the client—even if only as a proxy, e.g., you as a proxy for the applicant you are sympathetically suggesting to the client in order to motivate a hire. Ideally, that sympathy will be similar to that shown an innocent and vulnerable child, as depicted in that“Day Zero”scene.

Pre-Interview Intimacy Triggers

The intimacy algorithm can be activated even well before the interview—in the resume or cover letter, if an applicant is bold or desperate enough to try, or clever enough to disguise it, e.g., “Military awards: Purple Heart”, “Address: Hope Anew Center for Battered Wives, 1440 Smithworthy Lane, Phoenix” (fictitious, so look elsewhere), or less obviously, “Community activities: Coordinator, Neighborhood Animal Rescue Patrol”.

Understanding vs. Application

The chick-flick intimacy trick is something to study as well as to apply.  In both recruiting and in one’s personal life, the benefits of utilizing the algorithm are amply matched by the benefits in recognizing it is being used—either to forestall or to facilitate its employment or that of the applicant. So, look for it and be prepared.

Unless, of course, you’d like your Hollywood movies to seem less predictable.