– Patrick Edward O’Toole –

Internal resource management is one of the most referenced and discussed topics in business today, coinciding with a growing awareness of the strategic value of corporate culture as a competitive advantage, which will generate and define long-term success.

This conversation reaches far beyond “fit” and requires a deeper understanding of personnel psychology and organizational dynamics. In an ideal environment, interviewing will involve a long-term relationship between both parties, with transparency and mutual well-being, as primary variables. The gaming, the stress, the struggle over money and status would largely disappear from corporate culture, as would many of the negative organizational dynamics which derail Corporate Mission and bottom-line objectives.

Properly conducted organizational psychology, which is to say, organizational human resource development (a.k.a. HR), would implement strategic, well-documented practices for the screening, hiring, training, developing, promoting, and releasing of internal resources, while tracking the results over time, to be reviewed and corrected, updated and re-worked, to increase life-cycle effectiveness.  As has been previously discussed in other Linkedin posts, there is a major and widely misunderstood difference between best practices (which promote organizational efficiency) and unique internal practices which create a real competitive advantage: i.e. that is long-term, and not simply and easily repeatable by your marketplace competition.

Without digressing into an academic exposé of evolutionary psychology, it is important to understand the psychology of human development regarding social interaction.

Humans are hard-wired to sense/feel/intuit beyond linear empirical knowing, and have shown via earliest extant historical records a desire and attempt to predict the future through the use of signs and signals believed to explain what might happen, and the future and fate of individuals. This need to know is as pertinent today as it was long years ago; our lives are composed of 1000’s of interactions with strangers and groups and organizations whose character and intentions are unverified, and we look for indicators to help us predict the behavior of the unknown; in this case, the unknown person.

Hiring involves interacting with the unknown, and as discussed in the introduction, is usually conducted with pressing time requirements. HR doesn’t have the luxury of long-term rapport building, the lengthy process so often recommended before any large purchase or remarkable event, like home-buying and getting married. To resolve this organizational dilemma, systems are created and instituted and soon become standardized, best practices, that are adopted throughout institutional fields. Specifically, culturally specific (fast becoming globally specific) signs and signals become the standard indicators used to predict the outcome of the unknown person. Credit score. GPA. Ranking of educational programs. Status of references. GRE/GMAT/LSAT/MCAT scores, ect. Predictability is conducted through character judgment based on descriptive statistics gathered in socially relevant domains to assess the quality, credibility, and potential performance of a new hire. No business can afford a trial-and-error process hoping that at some point, someone will stick and stay.

These standards and expectations have become so institutionalized that we observe the same “character requirements” described for applicants to Masters of Arts Programs as we do in top medical, business, and law schools. We observe that employers solicit a set of variables that describe a particular individual, that is somehow the ubiquitous everywoman-hero of the entire workforce.

What we are observing is the diffusion of current cultural beliefs that idealize the “right person” as the best candidate for most situations. In reality, HR is rarely conducted using scientifically tested and developed practices, relying instead on heuristic patterns that reflect internal-cultural beliefs systems and organizational patterns that survive through inertia and lethargy.

There is a wealth of well-vetted and scientifically tested practices and techniques available (Industrial-Organizational Psychology) to accurately determine the best people at the right time for the Firm. Do some digging and research, and find out the efficacy and limitations- the true validity- of standardized indicators before your HR department accepts them as universal truths. Many of the most widely accepted performance standards, from SAT/GRE/FICO/School Ranking to race, age, and gender- are highly sub-standard indicators of long-term performance yet are used as gold-standards in hiring and staffing, with very little substantive validity, to support the myths and belief-systems which hold them in place.

As long as Organizations use talent acquisition practices out of laziness, lack of ingenuity, a desire for legitimacy, or cultural lethargy and inertia, there will be no internal advantage available. There is no ideal person of the industrialized world, however convenient it may be to operate as if this is so. How many times will your business hire the wrong person because she met a set of watermarks on paper. How many times will the same set of assumptions, the same lack of firm-specific documentation and research, the same habitual organizational practices make the staffing decisions for your Firm, while better-fit candidates are screened out before they ever make an interview? If your HR Department does not actually know what the Firm actually needs, it has no idea who to look for, and relies on nothing less than popular myths to develop what many organizational strategists consider to be The competitive strategic advantage (don’t tell Porter) that any organization can have in the marketplace today.