Keep your biases off recruitment process
A man and his son were involved in a car crash. The father was killed and the son was taken to hospital with serious injuries. The examining doctor exclaims: "But, this is my son!" How can this be?”
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When the position of Managing Director in a prestigious private engineering company becomes vacant and an internal headhunting gets underway, there is the strong temptation to introduce clauses, sometimes subtly and unspoken though, that erect tall barriers in the way of some prospects. A lot of such foul choices may not be the dirty brainchild of the resident HR but may represent flawed decisions reached either by some of the contenders themselves or agents of the latter acting in concert with people who might miss the train if such unfair rules were not in place.
For those who are sure to benefit unfairly from such maneuvering, ethically filthy and professionally unacceptable rules may be instituted overnight in order to erect a barrier to the prospects whose participation will raise the game and dim the chances of the less prepared. To accomplish this, resident HRs, especially if they are not very firm, are used as tools in this regard. Age, education and sometimes gender are used to achieve these ends.
When capturing vacancy announcements, care must be taken not to entirely preclude persons with certain academic background. As much as some job openings require the applicant to have specific technical background as a precondition, a lot of the so-called technical labels that accompany certain set of vacancies are often unnecessary, especially if such vacancy announcements explicitly specify that persons from alien disciplines should desist from applying.
For instance, sales and marketing positions are usually dressed-up with BA/BSc, Business Administration, Economics, Marketing, CIM membership, MBA, etc. but when we care to look around us, some of the most accomplished sales/marketing professionals have come from backgrounds traditionally foreign to these trades. Persons with degrees in psychology, engineering, biochemistry, history, sociology, actuarial science and even mathematics and computer science have veered off their traditional trades and taken alien professions and have excelled in them, in few cases more than even the ones who were originally trained in sales/marketing.
Properly defining the roles of the sought-after in ways that do not alienate younger people even for positions generally reserved for older generation is an intelligent way of inviting younger but mature, mentally ripe and professionally savvy jobseekers.
A position of the newspaper editor can conveniently be occupied by someone below the age of 30 whose active years of practice of journalism may be in deficit of the ideal candidate by a decade or more yet whose output matches the older jobseeker.
If this young jobseeker had headed his university’s newspaper, been hired for the position of online editor, walked out of college to start real journalism, a candidate like this is one whose talents are so overwhelming that casting the hunting net such that they are disqualified can be considered a real crime against people of a certain age deficiencies.
The gender issue in recruitment is so burning that in some countries, (Ghana included in this list) refusing a candidate a job opportunity because of their gender has passed as a crime. Even if unpunishable, the figures around the world are evidence that in spite of some major biological differences, the intelligence we carry as human species may vary vastly but these variations are not positively correlated with our sex.
Every HR, whether man or woman or anyone in between, needs to take a mental tour of some of the near-celebrity, almost iconic professionals in this country. By the time this tour is over, you will be overwhelmed by a heavy traffic of profoundly accomplished ball-less individuals who are carrying out some of the intricately complicated surgeries in children born with one physical defects or the other.
You will find that some of the awe inspiring, almost impossible projects that catch every complex imagination may have been the brainchild of a woman who still finds time to raise children as naughty as any other’s.
Unfortunately, as much as men are blamable as women are, it is heartbreaking when a fellow woman is the vessel through which gender discrimination against her kind is perpetrated. Only last week, when I confronted a lady in one of the multinational banks operating in Ghana and complained about some unauthorised withdrawals in my bank account via the ATM, the first suspect, of all the many family members around me, was my wife; a woman. And you know what? It was a she who first asked if I had shared my PIN with my wife.
Part of getting it right will involve dealing with every jobseeker or prospect equally without the unreasonable bias of age, education and gender. Only then will the dream of a fair working environment be guaranteed all; only then will the accomplishments of younger people in positions traditionally reserved for older generations lose its silly argument that those few younger ones are an exception and not the rule.
It is by not allowing the distraction of those who insist that the vacancy announcement should set a limit of minimum education in certain disciplines, even in job openings that do not necessarily need such a discriminatory limitation, that you bring change, as an HR, and help destroy a culture that overly celebrates paper certificates and rubbishes talents and ingenuity.
Only then will the achievements of the multitudes in telecommunication businesses, petroleum enterprises, banking and finance careers, most of whom took a degree in courses unrelated to the above fields but have awed the entire nation in the above careers, have a meaning.
Resisting the pressures from above to play with the rules in order to favour one at the expense of another must be resisted as hard as possible. When the resident HR gets here, then the respect to be accorded the career of managing personnel and planning the human resource needs of the business will receive the homage it deserves.
But if you sit in the chair of the HR of your company, whatever be your sex, if you thought that the above riddle could possibly not be decoded, you suffer some amount of gender prejudice. Like the many millions walking the planet, a woman cannot be the medical specialist invited to attend to the accident victim. The doctor was a female and the victim was her own son!