By Lucia Mabasa
If jury duty is a key civic duty for an American citizen, then a vital corporate duty in South Africa is being asked to sit on a hiring panel. The stakes are just as high.
It goes without saying that hiring the right person is probably the most important thing a company can do, but it is incredible how often it goes wrong.
There’s a reason for that, there are a lot of moving parts for one, especially when it comes to a new job: the vacancy has to be identified, normally by the people at the operational sharp end; the ideal candidate has to be specced, in tandem with the human capital department, which will ensure that any job advertisement complies with the company’s and the country’s policies. Then the net must be cast.
Once the CVs are in, there’s the shortlisting process and then finally an interview in front of a panel. What we often forget though is that the selection and preparation of a panel is as vital as all the preceding steps.
The panel members need to know what their rights and their duties are – and what they are expected to do, which is to choose the best candidate according to the spec for the vacancy. Anything else is a miscarriage of the entire process: Just as an accused can only be acquitted or convicted on what is presented in court, not conjecture or previous history, so too should panels only judge what is in front of them. The problem is that far too few chairs of hiring panels intervene like the judges do on TV and overrule or call on the panel to disregard what they have been told. The entire purpose of a panel is to ensure objectivity and transparency, but it is also to unlock all the intellect in the room to ensure that the person being hired is the right fit, with the right skills and hasn’t somehow slipped through the inevitable cracks in the system.
Too often, the shortlist of candidates is nothing more that all the applicants who meet the minimum criteria as per the job description, rather than all the candidates who meet the criteria and want to work for the company in that role.
Getting it right is a long and arduous process and if the job description has been advertised, then compliance to those minimum requirements may not be compromised, because if they are, the entire process will become tainted.
The fact that wrong candidates do end up getting appointed is directly down to poor panel selection and management. Like jury selection it’s important to get the right blend, to select enquiring minds along with those who will follow protocol as if their lives depended on it. It’s important the human capital department ensures that each panel member is aware of what the criteria are on which the candidates are being selected and to understand the importance or otherwise of the post that is being filled. This is because sometimes the post is so critical and the skills are so rare, that normal transformation imperatives cannot apply – or that if override the skills imperative this might make getting the best candidate impossible. At best this might mean that no candidate is ultimately selected or at worst it might mean selecting someone who was not even in the top three.
It also happens in the reverse, where despite an injunction to hire the best candidate from a disadvantaged background – and where there is one who is head and shoulders above the rest – the panel allows itself to be swayed to appoint someone who does not belong to that category.
Once again, it’s about finding the equilibrium between those who know their own minds and those who will allow themselves to be guided by the chair. It’s a very fine balancing act. An overbearing chair can muzzle the voices of those when need to be heard, while a meek and mild chair will be unable to stop the process degenerating into open squabbles or disappearing down a rabbit hole of no consequence. It’s vital to be on the lookout for panel members who are deliberately being obtuse or disruptive, trying to destroy the process to get fulfil their own personal agendas.
The best chair knows their role as well as the panel members which is to maintain the integrity of the hiring chain by ensuring that the very best candidate is selected based on the criteria that have been laid out and to resolutely resist any bid to derail this
It sounds like the simplest thing to do, but all too often it can become a toxic mess of competing agendas and egos. If that happens, it is the company that suffers, but the rot can run far deeper. If something as vital as an appointment panel for candidates of this stature cannot set the standard for corporate conduct in the company, there is little hope that more junior functions will not become compromised too, because there is no accountability or consequence. Equally, panel members might start looking to either avoid serving on these committees altogether or do as little as possible, rendering the entire process nothing more than a rubber stamp.
The big difference between panels that fail and juries that are hung, is that there isn’t a do over like there can be in a trial. But the consequences of getting it wrong are just as stark; an unjust process that leads to the wrong person being appointed and the destruction of the company as a result with everything that entails, including loyal employees becoming unemployed. It doesn’t have to be like that – not if we take our duties and responsibilities seriously when we accept the invitation to sit on the panel.
* Lucia Mabasa is Chief Executive Officer of pinpoint one human resources, a proudly South African black women owned executive search firm. pinpoint one human resources provides executive search solutions in the demand for C suite, specialist and critical skills across industries and functional disciplines, in South Africa and across Africa. Visit www.pinpointone.co.za to find out more or read her previous columns on leadership; avoiding the pitfalls of the boardroom and becoming the best C-suite executive you can be.