Tim Platt Ph.D. kindly sent us this piece on when recruitment meets ‘fit’. It raises some good questions around the way in which employers test for ‘fit’, and how they then treat the results…
“We are a social species and fit is the recognition of that in our dealings with others, whether in business or non-work settings. Much of what goes into fit and determining whether it is good or not takes place in unconscious and unexamined assumptions and conclusions, and the logical evaluation parts of that can and do take place after the fact, and sometimes more as rationalizations than as logically sound evaluations. We like to work and deal with people who we are comfortable with and that in and of itself is not logically based as much as emotionally. When this aligns with logic and with strategic and operational judgement fit works. When decisions of fit are made out of alignment with the business and its needs problems arise.
This is not to argue against the legitimacy, relevance or importance of good fit. It is an acknowledgement of the simple fact that reconciling fit and how it is arrived at with the business and its reasoning can seem complex and convoluted because that often involves connecting dots that do not in fact connect, making assumptions as to what fit is and how it is determined that do not in practice apply.
The above is too abstracted to ongoing experience to really address this issue so I would add an example from my own experience to flesh it out. This involves a job interview process I went through as a candidate.
I alternate between working full time as an in-house employee and working as a consultant and this time I was applying to work for an online business that needed to have their web analytics and a number of other functions more effectively set up and managed. I submitted my resume and exchanged emails and had a phone conversation with the hiring manager and that went well. Then I went to the corporate offices of this business and met with the hiring manager face to face and that went well. Then I was given a standardized third part-provided test, this more or less explicitly explained as following a model that Google uses as part of its hiring process. The test was, it turns out 50 questions long and it had pattern and number puzzles, word and logic questions and none of them were multiple choice. Answering required determining the correct answers for these questions and writing them out. And to make it more interesting, candidates were given 10 minutes for the entire test or what ever parts of it they could complete.
I was told very explicitly that a key requirement for the job was strong analytical skills and that ability to work fast and to multitask were crucially important. I took that advise into this test and I worked as quickly as I could, answering 31 questions. Then I waited to find out how I had done and I quickly learned I was not a good fit. I answered 31 questions and got 30 correct, and then found out that no one there had ever answered more than 17 with several wrong, and most people only tried answering 12 or so. So this company had a long list of high priority analytical skills-requiring tasks on their wish list for this new hire to take care of. But they wanted someone with the same skills and speed for doing analytical work that their current staff had, that was not getting this done. And fit collided with skills requirements and fit always wins in that type of conflict because people want and need to work with others they can interact with and engage with comfortably and smoothly. People need to be able to work together to collectively carry out tasks requiring shared effort or those tasks will fail.
I did not get that job. I did get the next assignment I tried for. I did remember this one, however, as it highlighted how fit has to be understood analytically and with reason, as to how it is determined and how it connects into the logical, cognitive parts of the business and how that is run. Fit is not analytical and much of it is not logical but it has to be understood for what it is and for the positive and negative consequences of how it is arrived at. A failure to see how fit is determined and how that process supports or fails to support the business can have as profound an effect as a failure to take fit into account at all. The right people are not hired or advanced and the wrong ones are, and in both cases to the detriment of all.
It is vital that everyone involved in the hiring process with an organization be on the same page with both shared tools and resources for making hiring decisions, and transparency and training in how they are applied and in results thereof.
That means seeing fit for what it is and understanding what it is not, and it means determining fit consistently and with a real understanding of consequences.”
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Beverly Mann adds….From my experience of working with the boards and senior teams of large corporations and smaller entrepreneurial companies Fit is something that executives often think they have but intervention will highlight that this is not the actual case.
I have yet to work with an organisation where the board is truly aligned in vision, mission, values, objectives, strategy to achieve those objectives and the selection of suitable companies or personnel to support strategy realisation. The non- alignment is always a huge shock when highlighted in my workshops. Yet the board meet regularly and plans are often in place. Why then is non Fit so often the case? Several reasons come to mind.
Firstly organisations often do not invest the time to truly debate non- alignment and when they do this is not usually a managed process with external representation. The result is that non-alignment is left unresolved or consensus is ‘apparently achieved’ in the open whilst privately concerns remain and fester with disastrous consequences. Secondly many organisations do not really have a true grasp of vision and mistake vision for mission or reduce vision to a three to five year focus. Thirdly whilst organisations will state their values they have not usually explicitly explored how those values translate in terms of culture and human behaviours. Espoused values are not lived and rarely are they measured. Whilst a high degree of emphasis is placed on psychological profiling little emphasis is placed on profiling emotional intelligence. Cultural Fit and people Fit therefore remain subjective and limited to a narrow band of functional decision makers who often project their understanding and interpretation of culture, values and Fit. If organisations struggle to measure and achieve Fit internally it is hardly surprising that Fit externally via acquisition and merger adds further strain and damage potential resulting in lowering even further the overall Fit-ness of the organisation. External Fit due diligence usually focuses on hard metrics yet it is so often the soft factors- people/personalities/values that make Fit constructive.
I would translate Fit-ness within an organisation to be:
▲ High degree of individual and collective emotional intelligence
▲ Shared values uniting diverse groups generating collective values
▲ The organisational environment is conducive and dedicated to the release of creativity, innovation, high performance and talent attraction
▲ Clarity and articulation of ultimate vision and regular communication of steps achieved towards vision to all stakeholders
▲ Recognition, mutual ecology and respect of mission
▲ Cross functional alignment –understanding of, agreement in and focus on strategy
▲ Collective motivated and rewarded performance towards objectives
My experience is that many organisations approach this set of criteria bottom up rather than top down asserting their effort into communicating objectives and motivating performance – usually not utilising optimal values! – and reward is limited to a narrow strata of personnel.
The Fit-ness of an organisation operates both at the individual and collective unconscious level as well as at the individual and collective conscious level.
To achieve Fit-ness with an organisation every individual needs to operate at a level of peak Fit-ness – emotionally, mentally, physically and creatively. My experience has been that organisations are quite capable of depleting the physical and mental energies of individuals, imbalancing the emotional and creative energies at the same time as dedicating little investment into the replenishment of the physical and mental energies and the re-balancing and strengthening of the emotional and creative energies.
Talent attraction is becoming a reduced Fit due to technological intervention forcing applicants to follow on-line processes of box ticking, and drop down menus, with little human intervention, lack of creativity in defining role and lack of alignment with wider organisational vision. Positions are being advertised for posts whereby the preferred candidate has been performing the exact same role for a competitor or within a similar organisation within the same vertical industry. Candidates are first interviewed by external recruiters who seek safe options, do not necessarily share the organisation’s values and may not fully understand or believe in the organisation’s vision. Once a candidate ‘passes’ this stage a series of interviews are conducted by incumbent personnel many of whom may feel more comfortable with people who will ‘Fit into the status quo. This approach stifles creativity and innovation in talent attraction and reinforces the existing competency and Fit-ness levels of an organisation.
Thank you for the wonderful response Beverly, much appreciated!
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[...] reflected on the discussion and given a piece we were sent by Tim Platt, the idea of exploring the lived experience of fit seems to appeal. Likewise, if [...]