The Golden Rule of Recruitment: You get the employees you deserve

Recruitment of new people or can be a stressful experience. Many organisations maintain extensive procedures to try to find the right person for the right job or even hire specialised consultants to do the job for them. Why go through these troubles if there was a golden rule of recruitment?

They ask strange questions that no reasonable person would ever dare to entertain: "What are your three trademarks?", "What are your biggest mistakes?" or "What is the meaning of life" and "What is the airspeed velocity of a laden swallow?". Some even resort to pseudo-scientific personality testing to throw some insights into these strangers across the table.

The problem recruiters have is that it is a lot easier not to hire someone than to fire them later, which leads to complicated processes to reduce this risk. Job interviews are thus a bizarre environment that often bears no resemblance to a real professional situation. The fear of taking a risk with a person and a lack of self-confidence in their people skills motivates recruiters to resort to pseudo-scientific tools and hiding behind bizarre interviewing techniques.