The 30 Day MBA (28 page)

Using your network
Organizations of every size and shape use contacts and networks when they are recruiting. This route is favoured because it is cheap, informal and can be pursued without the bother of writing a job description, which can in effect be infinitely varied to suit the candidates that may surface. Public sector bodies and many public companies are obliged either by law or convention to advertise vacancies, but that in no way inhibits drawing a potential candidate's attention to the opportunity.

Unfortunately, the statistics indicate that two out of five appointments made in this way fail within six months and the business is back in the recruiting game again. The reasons for this being an unsatisfactory route lie somewhere in the absence of rigour that the approach encourages; only if you can take a thorough approach and be sure of a genuine reason why
someone would want to recommend someone to you should you recruit in this way.

Hiring people

Once you have candidates for your vacancy, the next task is to interview, select and appoint. If you have done your homework the chances are that you will have a dozen or more applicants, too many to interview, so this process is somewhat like a funnel, narrowing down until you have your ideal candidate appointed.

Selecting a candidate
You need to find at least two and ideally three people who could fill your vacancy to a standard that you would be happy with; this gives you contrast, which is always helpful in clarifying your ideas on the job; and a reserve in case the first candidate drops by the wayside or turns you down. The stages in making your selection are as follows:

• Make a shortlist of the three or four candidates that best suit the criteria set out in your job definition.
  
• Interview each candidate, ideally on the same day so all the information is fresh in your mind. Plan your questions in advance but be sure to let them do most of the talking. Use your questions to plug any gaps in your knowledge about the candidate. Monster (
  www.hiring.monster.co.uk
  > Resource Centre > Recruiting and hiring advice) has a useful set of interview questions to ask, with some guidance on how to get the best out of the process.
  
• Use tests to assess aptitude and knowledge if the job is a senior one such as accountant or sales manager. You can find a test to measure almost any aspect of a candidate's skills, attitude, aptitude and almost anything else you care to name. Thousands of the most successful companies use them and claim to get better candidates and higher staff retention than they would otherwise achieve. Tests cost from £10 a candidate from companies such as Central Test (
  www.centraltest.co.uk
  ); the British Psychological Society (
  www.bps.org.uk
  ) and The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (
  www.cipd.co.uk
  ) list various types of test, their purpose and how to use them and interpret results.
  

Two tests most MBAs will come across both at business school and in job and promotion interviews that can be used in staff selection are the following:

The
16PF
(Personality Factor) Questionnaire
Developed in 1949 by Raymond Cattell who set out to measure the whole of human personality using a structure questionnaire assessed against a normative sample reflecting current census statistics on sex, age and race. The scores enable employers, among others, to predict human behaviour.

The 16PF Questionnaire measures levels of: Warmth; Reasoning; Emotional stability; Dominance; Liveliness; Rule consciousness; Social boldness; Sensitivity; Vigilance; Abstractedness; Privateness; Apprehensiveness; Openness to change; Self-reliance; Perfectionism and Tension.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (
www.myersbriggs.org
)
This is a personality inventory, based on the psychological types described by C G Jung, explaining how seemingly random variations in behaviour are actually normal, and due to basic differences in the ways people choose to use their perception and judgement. Developed by Katharine Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Myers, who initially created the indicator during the Second World War to help women working in industry for the first time find the sort of wartime jobs where they would best fit in.

The Indicator uses a battery of questions to identify how a person fits in with the 16 distinctive personality types that result from the interactions among preferences in these four areas:

• The world: Do you prefer to focus on the outer world (Extraversion – E) or on your own inner world (Introversion – I)?
  
• Information: Do you prefer to focus on the basic information you take in (Sensing – S) or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning (Intuition – N)?
  
• Decisions: When making decisions, do you prefer to look first at logic and consistency (Thinking – T) or look first at the people and circumstances (Feeling – F)?
  
• Structure: In dealing with events, do you prefer to get things decided (Judging – J) or do you like to keep an open mind to new information (Perceiving – P)?
  

Making job offers

Having found the ideal candidate, the next step is to get them hired and happy to work for you. However well the interview may have gone, resist making a job offer on the spot. Both you and the candidate need to sleep on it, giving you both the chance to discuss with your partners and consider what has come out of the interviews.

Take up references
Always take up references before offering the job. Use both the telephone and a written reference and check that any necessary qualifications are valid. This may take a little time and effort, but is essential as a protection against unsuitable or dishonest applicants.

Put the offer in writing
While you may make the job offer on the telephone, face-to-face or in an e-mail, always follow up with a written offer. The offer should contain all the important conditions of the job, salary, location, hours, holiday, work, responsibilities, targets and the all-important start
date. This in effect will be the backbone of the contract of employment you will have to provide shortly after they start working for you.

Make them welcome
When a new employee joins you, be on hand to meet them, show them the ropes and introduce them to anyone else they are likely to come into contact with. This is crucial if they are going to work in your home alongside you, and these introductions should extend to your spouse, even if they don't work in the business, your children, pets, the postman and neighbours.

They also need to know about the practical aspects of working for you; where they can eat inside and out, coffee making and any equipment they will be working with. If they will be in your home when it is otherwise empty then they need to know where the fuses are and whom to contact if, say, the internet or telephone goes down.

Dealing with unsuccessful candidates

By the very nature of the recruitment task, the person appointed is just the tip of a big iceberg of applicants and interviewees. These people have to be responded to, advising them that they do not have the job. For your first reserve list, those who you may call on if the appointment goes wrong for any reason, it is worth taking particular care with your reply. Here you can emphasize the strength of their application but that the background of another candidate was closer to your needs. You don't have to go into details as to specifically why a particular candidate got the job and they did not.

Aside from exuding professionalism and being plain good manners, the job-hunting world is big and deep and at some stage you and your organization will be fishing there again.

Motivation

As a subject for serious study motivation is a relatively new ‘science'. Thomas Hobbes, a 17th-century English philosopher, suggested that human nature could best be understood as self-interested cooperation. He claimed that motivation could be summarized as choices revolving around pain or pleasure. Sigmund Freud was equally frugal in suggesting only two basic needs: the life and the death instinct. These ideas were the first to seriously challenge the time-honoured ‘carrot and stick' method of motivation that pervaded every aspect of organizational life, from armies at war to weavers in Britain working through the Industrial Revolution.

The first hint, in the business world, that there might be more to motivation than rewards and redundancy came with Harvard Business School professor Elton Mayo's renowned Hawthorne Studies. These were conducted between 1927 and 1932 at the Western Electric Hawthorne Works in
Chicago. Starting out to see what effect illumination had on productivity, Mayo moved on to see how fatigue and monotony fitted into the equation by varying rest breaks, temperature, humidity and work hours, even providing a free meal at one point. Working with a team of six women, Mayo changed every parameter he could think of, including increasing and decreasing working hours and rest breaks; finally he returned to the original conditions. Every change resulted in an improvement in productivity, except when two 10-minute pauses morning and afternoon were expanded to six 5-minute pauses. These frequent work pauses, they felt, upset their work rhythm.

Mayo's conclusion was that showing ‘someone upstairs cares', engendering a sense of ownership and responsibility were important motivators that could be harnessed by management. After Mayo came a flurry of theories on motivation. William McDougall in his book
The Energies of Men
(1932, published by Methuen) listed 18 basic needs that he referred to as instincts (eg curiosity, self-assertions, submission). H A Murray, assistant director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic, catalogued 20 core psychological needs, including achievement, affiliation and power.

The motivation theories most studied and applied by business school graduates are those espoused by Maslow (see
Chapter 3
) and these below.

Theory X and Theory Y

Douglas McGregor, an American social psychologist who taught at two top schools, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), developed these theories to try to explain the assumptions about human behaviour that underlies management action.

Theory ‘X' makes the following assumptions:

• The average person has an inherent dislike of work and will avoid it if possible. So management needs to put emphasis on productivity, incentive schemes and the idea of a ‘fair day's work'.
  
• Because of this dislike of work, most people must be coerced, controlled, directed and threatened with punishment to get them to achieve the company's goals.
  
• People prefer to be directed, want to avoid responsibility, have little ambition and really want a secure life above all.
  

But, while Theory ‘X' does explain some human behaviour, it does not provide a framework for understanding behaviour in the best businesses. McGregor, and others, have proposed an alternative.

Theory ‘Y' has as its basis the belief that:

• Physical or mental effort at work is as natural as either rest or play. Under the right conditions, hard work can be a source of great satisfaction. Under the wrong conditions it can be a drudge, which will inspire little effort and less thought from those forced to participate.
  
• Once committed to a goal, most people at work are capable of a high degree of self-management.
  
• Job satisfaction and personal recognition are the highest ‘rewards' that can be given, and will result in the greatest level of commitment to the task in hand.
  
• Under the right conditions, most people will accept responsibility and even welcome more of it.
  
• Few people in business are being ‘used' to anything like their capacity. Neither are they contributing creatively towards solving problems.
  

A typical Theory-X boss is likely to keep away from their employees as much as possible. However small the business, for example, they may make sure that they have an office to themselves, and its door is kept tightly shut. Contact with others will be confined to giving instructions about work and complaining about poor performance. A Theory-Y approach will involve collaborating over decisions rather than issuing orders, and sharing feedback so that everyone can learn from both success and failures, rather than just reprimanding when things go wrong.

Hygiene and motivation theory

Frederick Hertzberg, professor of psychology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, United States, discovered that distinctly separate factors were the cause of job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction. His research revealed that five factors stood out as strong determinants of job satisfaction.

Motivators

• Achievement: People want to succeed, so if you can set goals that people can reach and better, they will be much more satisfied than if they are constantly missing targets.
  
• Recognition: Everyone likes their hard work to be acknowledged. Not everyone wants that recognition made in the same way, however.
  
• Responsibility: People like the opportunity to take responsibility for their own work and for the whole task. This helps them grow as individuals.
  
• Advancement: Promotion or at any rate progress are key motivators. In a small firm, providing career prospects for key staff can be a fundamental reason for growth.
  
• The attractiveness of work itself (job interest): There is no reason why a job should be dull. You need to make people's jobs interesting
  and give them a say in how their work is done. That will encourage new ideas on how things can be done better.
  

When the reasons for dissatisfaction were analysed they were found to be concerned with a different range of factors.

Hygiene factors

• Company policy: Rules, formal and informal, such as start and finish times, meal breaks, dress code.
  
• Supervision: To what extent are employees allowed to get on with the job, or do people have someone looking over their shoulders all day?
  
• Administration: Do things work well, or is paperwork in a muddle and supplies always come in late?
  
• Salary: Are employees getting at least the going rate and benefits comparable with others?
  
• Working conditions: Are people expected to work in substandard conditions with poor equipment and little job security?
  
• Interpersonal relationships: Is the atmosphere in work good or are people at daggers drawn?