I will be unusually short in this post. I have made the key points about hiring and firing a politician in my last post, so in case you missed it, it is a jolly good read before you digest this one. 

 

I watched last week as Nigerians having cast their votes a few days earlier, waited anxiously, biting their fingers and watching as the election results began to trickle in. People sat glued to their TV screens and radios were tuned to Nigerian airwaves like never before.  Situation rooms stretched from Lagos to Los Angeles, Calabar to Calgary, Maiduguri to Moscow, Port Harcourt to Port Elisabeth. Everyone became a mathematician; collating results on excel sheets as well as scrawny sheets of paper like their pensions depended on it. I was hard at work, but employing both sides of my brain to full capacity…one eye on my work and the other on the live feed, doing my own collating as well.  As the day wore on, it became increasingly obvious that the people had for the first time fired an incumbent President and hired a new one. The import of what they had succeeded in doing hit straight home when the incumbent made the honorable concession call. And then the euphoric celebrations commenced. 

 

I’ve also watched as the same drama okay itself out in the gubernatorial elections yesterday. But what comes after the euphoria?  That’s the key question.

You played the Recruiter’s role and you probably feel you did a fine job there. But the work of getting a business leader to deliver the goods and hold him or her accountable to certain deliverables does not stop at the hiring decision. The recruiter will carry the longer-term burden of proof that he made the right decision, which will only be alleviated when the new hire does a good job.  Only then is the Recruiter’s choice vindicated. This can be an incredibly difficult burden to bear and can haunt one for a long time. In my previous job, we had a nickname for those who were classified bad recruitmentdecisions. We called them Previously Unidentified Recruitment Errors (PUREs). No one wanted to be called a PURE.  Even more than that, no one wanted to be responsible for hiring a PURE.  Why? Because the PUREs left the system eventually, while the Recruiters usually remained to bear the ridicule of the error of their decision-making.

 

Let me share a personal experience.

 

I couple of years ago, I made a professional hiring decision, one I believed I had done with the utmost sense of professionalism.  Even though there were external whispers and gossips about the suitability of the person, I had blocked out my mind from such and done my job without allowing such information to distract from making an unbiased decision.  The individual in question performed well by assessment at the tests and interviewsand was eventually hired. It didn’t take long following the recruitment decision that it became obvious that though we had made the right professional choice, it was the wrong person.  How do you make a right decision and still end up with the wrong person?

 

Don’t get me wrong…I don’t regret my decision.  If you had a rare sneak peek into my interview reports, you would have concluded that the decision was objectively reached. But as I watched someone I had hired metamorphose into a PURE before my very eyes and all efforts to salvage the situation proved abortive, I couldn’t help but feel the pressure of the Recruiter’s burden. The pain deep in my gut questioning, “did I miss something?” “How could I have been so objectively right and so dangerously wrong at the same time?” I wished I had a sixth sense that could have changed my view…but then again, how do you objectively capture a sixth sense? Empirically impossible!

Several factors may be responsible for making someone who was otherwise the best pick for the job to become a completely disastrous hire. In my experience, most of those reasons relate to factors that are incredibly difficult to be spot during the hiring process, most of which are revealed or acquired after the hire. Some people are masters of pretense and can show you a side of themselves for as long as it required to get your approval and when they settle down, the real person rises to the surface. Some others simply learn new behaviors that set them off track. The same is true for our political hiring decisions. Some are sheep in wolves clothing, while some have good intentions but simply lose their way along the way. Either way, there’s a deep sense of regret for the recruiter if this happens.

 

Let’s bring it home. Now that you have played the Recruiter in the Presidential and gubernatorial elections, I thought I might inform you about this little malaise I have experienced as a recruiter.  If you’ve played your role with a clear conscience, knowing that you are taking an informed decision and not one that is directed by sentiments, then you absolve yourself of regret even if the person you hired does not live up to expectation.  Provided that you’re cast your vote with a personal convinction that they will live up to expectations based on what you have researched and found to be true, and you have investigated and questioned the red flags. But know that this does not guarantee that they will do a good job; that is left to them. It only means you have done your own job.  However, if your recruitment decisions have a history of producing PUREs, then the issue is really about the quality of your choices.

 

Elections now done and dusted, let’s hope we’ve made the right decisions, cross our fingers and hope the candidates turn out to be the right people.

 

Next week, we get back to crafting a winning CV.

 

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@deji_ogunnubi