Corporate Mentality vs Common Sense

Over the years I have served as a consultant to many Fortune 500 companies. The areas I have covered usually have been within the scope of legal compliance with such things as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), OSHA (Occupational Health and Safety), a host of human resource issues and the psychological responses of those dealing with the public, as well as stress relief for employees.

In today's society, being so computer dependent and litigatious conscious, it seems corporations have become so dependent on various computer-assisted interview (CAI) tools they fail to rely on interview skills and personal observations. The reliance on non-personal assessments instead of common sense, which may not be so common anymore, has more and more qualified people slipping though the cracks instead of becoming assets to a company.

Twenty years ago I began consulting as a favor to some friends out of the den of our house. Within months I discovered this was not going to work, I needed an office. But an office means employees and overhead. I found an office, or more appropriately, half of an office complex. To run it with some semblance of efficiency I needed someone to help ... an assistant capable of juggling administrative, secretarial and other assorted tasks.

A classified ad was placed and dozens of potential employees interviewed. They ranged from individuals with M.B.A.s to a girl whose only experience was working at a cookie place in a mall. Combing over resumes and applications one person kept rising to the top of the list. It was the girl from the mall. She hand an innate quality that could not be defined. When I asked her why she thought she could do the job she answered: "Why do you think you can?" I hired her.

Two years later the firm had grown to encompass 23 offices in 17 states. The girl from the mall? She and two others,  who had been hired when I didn't know if I would make payroll, were the cornerstones of the corporation, even with many personnel having degrees on the payroll.

Call it intuition or gut-feeling but without them I would not have been nearly as successful. And all without the aid of CAI. Incidentally, according to a study from a prominent industrial and organizational psychologist, such computer-assisted interviews and assessments show, on average, less than a 50 percent validity compared to traditional methods.

In every business the bottom line is the defining factor for many decisions. Perhaps, in this one person's view, the added expense of the time consuming interviews and personal interaction between prospective employees and a company would end up, in the long run, saving them money and increasing a more viable and productive workforce.