Your Recruitment Standards: Good, or Merely Stable?
But that doesn’t mean that any of them are the best they can be—or not requiring or benefiting from any improvement.
Indeed, in the worst case scenario, each of them can be stable, yet catastrophic, irrational, risky (often needlessly) and therefore suboptimal, as the following categories and illustrations suggest:
- Destructive stability: a stable annual inflation rate of 100 % or a stable, but high infant mortality rate; and secure solitary confinement in prison can destroy economies, families and minds, respectively (i.e., create an “equilibrium” that is destructive). Note that this label identifies a consequence of stability, yet in doing so hints at forms of stability that are in some sense “self-destructive”.
Recruiting example: The practice of ignoring most job applicants after passing over their resumes is dismayingly stable, being destructive in its consequences and falling into several of the forms listed below, e.g., trade-off stability, to the extent that the stability of the practice seems worth the occasional negative feedback from some of the countless furious applicants who can smear your name.
The degree to which this is destructive stability depends on the costs of improving the system and actually responding to more or all applicants.
- Temporary stability: a stable, yet cracked and leaking nuclear reactor is temporarily stable, if its precarious stability is doomed to end. The temporariness is commonly a manifestation of precariousness, but need not be, since very stable systems can be destabilized by outside forces, e.g., buildings when swamped by a tsunami.
Recruiting example: The roundly criticized practice of pushing jobs or candidates that actually do not exist can succeed for a while and display temporary stability in terms of robust networking, databases and leads—and even create a positive reputation mirage. but will collapse when discovered.
It can be argued that many such temporary forms of stability sow the seeds of their own undoing by creating needless vulnerabilities to or formulas for destabilization. Not all temporary stability is like that, e.g.,, bailing sufficient water from a sinking canoe to slow the rate of sinking enough to keep the canoe afloat; the bailing does not cause the hole that may eventually sink the boat, whereas dubious business practices are likely to be self-scuttling.
- Trade-off stability: marriages that are unrewarding or jobs that pay too little, are dangerous, dirty and dull, yet very secure (stability at the expense of other essential unmet wants or needs).
Recruiting example: Giving a resume the now-legendary 6-second scan promotes the stability of the time-allocation processes and procedures that constitute vetting, but at the expense of a better-grounded, more comprehensive grasp of the complete applicant. Such a system is likely to remain stable indefinitely, because it usually goes hand-in-hand with another form of stability identified below: artificially insulated stability.
That’s because the type of error to which cursory scans are susceptible is the Type I error of statistics: rejecting something (a hypothesis, product or resume) you should accept—which is less likely to be exposed than the other type of error, viz., the Type II error of accepting something you should reject.
And that’s because the probability of this second kind of mistake is drastically reduced in virtue of all the follow-up careful vetting that follows the initial selection of resumes. even though it is quite possible that the “best one got away” because of the superficial scanning of resumes. Nonetheless, the ultimately selected candidate will very likely be suitable and maybe even optimal relative to the hiring standards, even if not optimal relative to the candidate pool.
- Narrow-range stability: a bridge that is stable, but only within a very narrow, low range of loads; crops that can thrive only within a narrow temperature range (i.e., the case of fragile, precarious stability), as opposed to a flat rock on a flat desert surface, whose structural and positional stability is guaranteed under virtually all conditions, unless it falls into an earthquake-created crevice.
- Recruiting example: the recruiting standard of setting appointments at precise times illustrates the role and vulnerabilities of narrow stability. This practice is stable only because applicants and recruiters generally observe the implied narrow time limits regarding late or early arrivals. “See you sometime next week!” or widespread tardiness would quickly destabilize the interviewing process.
Because most participants play by the rule, the question of whether there may be, from the standpoint of flexibility, a better rule never gets raised, e.g., an “interview on demand” or “just-in-time” system that an online or 24/7 telephone automated interviewing system could allow.
- Artificially insulated stability: An illustration of this is a society or religion that is stable, but only because of strict insulation of its ideas, practices, tools, etc., from dissent, debate, refutation, “heresy” and from infusion of new ideas or new groups (artificial stability maintained only by [enforced] isolation from all catalysts for change, growth, improvement and optimization).
Recruiting example: The refusal on the part of some employers or recruiters to hire or even accept resumes from the unemployed is a case in point. That exclusion perpetuates whatever negative (pre)conceptions and stereotypes that feed it, while insulating such biases from any counter-evidence and other challenges to them, e.g., by direct experience with the unemployed applicants rejected without a chance to prove themselves in an interview or on the job.
This exclusionary practice is stable in large part because it is self-perpetuating in this way.
- Coercive stability: The history of slavery, Nazism, the Inquisition, electric chairs, medieval torture tables, foot binding and genital mutilation of women (and men) amply illustrate how force and fear can perpetuate systems, customs and practices, making them appear stable and “normal” (if not also ideal).
Less barbarically, coercive stability can be achieved merely through the exercise of peer pressure that discourages any deviation from established practice, e.g., de rigueur workplace beards in Taliban-held Afghanistan territory and in trendy downtown Vancouver.
Recruiting example: Some recruitment and employment norms are stable only because of coercive stability and not because of their intrinsic merits, advantages or contributions to job performance, e.g., the mandatory sweltering men’s suit required for work as well as interviews in the broiling heat of Japan’s summers and the Middle Eastern women’s enveloping niqab.
- Irrational stability: In many instances, often also taking the form of one or more of the above-mentioned forms of stability, irrational stability exists and is maintained at the expense of reason—indeed at the expense of sanity. Delusional monomaniacs and megalomaniacs have a stable personality and belief system in the sense that nothing, but nothing can convince them they are not Jesus, reincarnated Napoleon or an alien radio transmitter.
Unlike religious fanatics and dogmatists whose claims of cosmic privilege, purpose or prediction cannot be falsified—and therefore constitute what Freud called “illusions”, what he called “delusions” of the sort some psychotics and neurotics are seized by can be falsified and revealed as irrational (by the rest of us).
That’s because the rest of us can conceive of and actually obtain disproof of those wild beliefs, to our satisfaction (the contrasting illusions and delusions having in common the characteristics of not being falsifiable by everyone, including the one possessed by them). For those beliefs or claims that everyone can disprove, Freud reserved the term “error”, e.g., the claim that today is March 5, 1837.
Recruiting example: If you believe that, because you wore your wife’s hand-knit birthday scarf the day you signed your biggest hiring score ever, you must wear it every day, including during the summer and despite the sweats, that belief will have irrational stability, if you also cannot be persuaded to ditch the scarf. Such superstitions are likely to be the most common manifestation of irrational stability—not only in the office, but also more broadly.
As for the other half of irrational OCD (obsessive-compulsive) syndromes, viz., compulsive rituals, they and other such behavior related to recruiting represent another form of irrational stability.
Hence, demoralized job seekers deserve sympathy for persisting in sending out resumes by the hundreds despite saying to themselves, “This is crazy!”, while suspecting that the process of submitting unanswered applications is going to be stable for an unfortunately very long time.