Category: human resources

mine for diamonds

How to mine a diamond in three steps.

Minimize inherent bias in recruiters or hiring managers.

Hire for skills. Move away from functions (and their titles) and embrace skills (hard-skills and soft-skills, combined) instead.

Provide a non-linear career perspective. Based on the hard-skills and soft-skills, combined with the talent’s willingness to learn, draw a roadmap with possible career choices within your company.

There is, however, one caveat to this approach. You can’t polish a gem if you’re not willing to dig up the diamond.

empowerment

The opposite of trauma is not help. It’s empowerment.

If an employee doesn’t receive enough validation, a new layer of trauma is inflicted with every day passing by. Stacking it on top of the already existing trauma.

Helping the employee dealing with the pain doesn’t fundamentally improve the situation. At all. The solution, in this case, is empowering the employee. Recognize and acknowledge that employee.

Empowerment through validation, or vice versa.

term gradation

Words have meaning, obviously. But how much meaning do they entail exactly? When someone says; I prefer direct communication. How direct? A little less indirect than very indirect? Adjectives aren’t all that helpful.

Describing personality traits and soft-skills, requires more than just words. It requires an added linguistic layer. An auxiliary semantical layer that provides a scale for words that are supposed to be clear. However, without a sense of gradation, the same word in the same language can mean something different altogether, depending on the interpretation.

meaningless is more

Less isn’t always more. Meaningless work or activities don’t contribute to anything. Deliberately pursuing meaningless activities, albeit temporarily, does fulfill a purpose. They might help to relax. Structural and prolonged meaningless activities, on the other hand, don’t really fulfill a purpose.

If it were possible for meaningfulness to be expressed on a scale, having a job with the maximum amount of meaningfulness might be unattainable.

What is, however attainable is, trying to maximize meaningfulness and increasing it day by day.

integrity in the end

Companies’ lifespans are becoming increasingly shorter. Beating this statistic is tough. Partly due to more and more companies being founded, and the battle for customers is rough.

Growth is a very long-term, never-ending process. If you’re in it for the long haul, working on — and investing in — growth is a daily activity.
Integrity is a crucial asset in this struggle. Not just a hollow word being carved into marble in your skyscraper lobby, actual, end-game integrity.

It starts with you, your first hire, your first team. Emphasize integrity from a company culture’s point of view. If not, growth and longevity will be compromised.

past performance

People often get promoted as a result of past performance. What’s true of investing is also true of talent. Past performance is no indicator of future results.

It’s slightly more nuanced than that. If a talent typically performed well over the past, chances are, they may continue to do so. Provided there are no fundamental changes regarding the job content, trauma is suffered, and the talent feels valued and appreciated.

However, as a result of a promotion, the talent might now be responsible for other people. The way the talent has to report has now completely changed. If reporting costs much effort, it might be the case that there was no desire to change job (content) or be promoted (within the company) for starters.

Here is a simple solution; ask. Cater to the expectations of talent and ask them what they want, rather than making an unsolicited decision for them.