Engineers and Imagineers

Better part of my career was associated with the IT services industry in India. I feel good about this association as the industry placed a premium on learning and development for its employees and made significant investments in process innovation. The industry meticulously adopted ‘best practices’ from other industries, standardized bulk of its processes and made failure almost impossible in its core operations. Most companies in the industry boast of the best and latest global quality standards, compliance and security firewalls and what not. In other words, the need for thinking has been largely removed from the daily work of an engineer. 

Even for seniors who deal with clients and the external world there are strict guidelines and templates for presentations including font types and font sizes to be used in presentations. Deviations were strictly edited, audited and culled. Companies that achieved the latest quality standard be it six sigma, lean or CMMi or any other industry standard, claimed pioneer status. Even for the much paraded ‘global delivery model’ there are many parents among the top IT services firms of India. When other companies quickly copied these standards and models, people forgot who got it first and the advantage is lost. An industry that created many multi-billion dollar organizations, created millions of high paying jobs and made many millionaires and a few billionaires now finds its ‘butter scotch’ services ‘plain vanilla’.

The silver lining is that many leaders in the industry are aware of this ‘massification’ and ‘mathification’ of their service and the need for adding a dash of fresh imagination to the algorithm. For too long, critical decisions were based mostly on IQ and memory power. We get a job for our logical reasoning and possibly for the EQ assessed or perceived some way or other. All these have to do with our perceptive capability- observation, attention, listening and interpreting those perceived data in some logical manner to arrive at an appealing conclusion.

Nobody checked the power of one’s imagination.

The British Dictionary defines imagination as: ‘The faculty or action of producing ideas, especially mental images of what is not present or has not been experienced.’ Imagination gives one the power to create many things from nothing. Steve Jobs gained the power to ‘distort reality’. In some sense much of ‘reality’ as we see is probably less real than the real in terms of potential. Pablo Picasso said ‘everything you can imagine is real.’ If Michelangelo ‘saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free’ possibly there is a Michelangelo in every one of us.

Hordes of young entrepreneurs sprang up in the last decade and created start-ups and altogether new industries and challenged or destroyed some prevalent industries. They all used the power of imagination. They all went beyond bench-marking and imagined a new world for them and for millions of others. When the cash rich companies of the industry buy these start-ups they are paying a premium for imagination!

The multiplier effect of imagination is often underestimated. In our society someone with high imagination is in fact ridiculed. Every other person is looking for what is seen in the immediate context, immediate past and immediate future. In other words, only what is practical and what is limited and what is measurable is rewarded.

Should an IT company hire engineers or ‘imagineers’? Of course, companies need both. Companies can decide how many of these two categories they need. Most often these need not be people in two different buckets. A company cannot run its daily operations only with a team of imagineers and dreamers. Yet, it is the dreamers and imagineers who will probably charge the company into an unseen future, an untapped potential and enhance the organization capability to a new orbit.

The other way to look at is that every company has imagineers, but few get spotted. There are company cultures that stifle imagination and there are company cultures that encourage imagination.

Which one do you belong to?

Fake Encounters

In the words of Claudio Fernandez-Araoz, Senior Advisor, Egon Zehnder, ‘A typical job interview is a conversation between two liars.’ Most job interviews are fake encounters. The job seeker is trying to project certain aspects of her personality and capabilities while masking other aspects that may not be as much favorable to the situation. The interviewer presents the job in certain color and content to make it look attractive to the job seeker. Professional job seekers anticipate most of the typical interview questions and if one is not adept in anticipating these, there are professional sites which help one prepare for a job interview. Same way, experienced interviewers anticipate typical responses of candidates.

Even the best job interview carries a very low predictive validity. To appreciate this one needs to only look at the ever shortening average tenure of professional CEOs. It is logical to assume that most new CEOs are selected after several rounds of interviews by board members after the ‘research and espionage’ operations by a reputed executive search firm. Despite all that friendly encounters and fat search fees the success rate of senior appointees is much to be desired. Yet, most companies consider the job interview as the most critical and often the last hurdle before releasing a job offer.

Why is interview still the holy cow of selection process?

Nobody would want to kill an industry which thrives on this often very subjective process in the selection chain of events. I don’t know who invented this tool or when was it first used as a selection technique. It can safely be assumed that when the job seekers were mostly illiterate or semi-literate the easy way to get direct information regarding the candidate was probably a personal meeting. It is also safe to assume that in the pre-industrial era of gild system an able bodied youngster is taken as an apprentice or protégé and he is given a job based on successful learning on the machine or in the workshop. In this case a walk on the floor and a chat in the room were good last steps in the decision process.

What if we do away with job interviews altogether?

Based on all information provided by the candidate in her CV, data available in the social or public domain, the tests or questionnaires responded to by the candidate a company may offer a job to the candidate, skipping the fake encounters. Well this requires serious analysis of data by hiring managers and the recruitment managers.  My guess is that the end outcome may not be drastically different in most cases!

At the least, we will avoid many rounds of ‘hide and seek’ and reduce the recruitment cycle time. Experiment this no-interview selection for campus hires and then progressively try this for more and more senior profiles. Pick up more real life credentials from experienced candidates in multiple formats- audios, pictures and videos-match these with other information on the social networks, do serious reference checks and go ahead and take the decision.

Sounds far-fetched and utopian? Very much. Worth experimenting? May be.