HR Undercover

We work with clients to hire for many different positions — from C-Level leadership all the way to production staff.

One of our assessments, commonly used for hourly positions, measures basic things like productivity, ability to get along with others, and likelihood of turnover. The assessment takes only 10 minutes to complete.

Our client had a candidate come in and apply for an hourly position. After they filled out the application, the candidate was asked to take the assessment, and then wait in the lobby. The results came through to the hiring manager immediately. The candidate scored a 1 out of 10 in the “getting along with others” category. The hiring manager invited the candidate back to ‘wrap up’ the process. When it was explained that they reviewed the application and felt that this role was not a good fit, the candidate literally lunged across the desk in anger at the hiring manager.

The hiring manager called us after the interview was over and expressed great relief at being able to predict this type of outcome before it was too late.

Not only was my manager in a mortgage company the worst leader of people I had worked for in my entire career, I was so happy I had already decided to leave my job when she was showing her direct reports how to forge customer signatures. You know, the complicated docs customers sometimes do not understand? Heck, in her case, maybe they neve even got to try and read them. So what was her great secet? She would simply take a doc the customer had signed, hold it up against a window and place the unsigned doc over it and trace the signature. So simplistic it’s stupid. But she was showing her staff how to do this!

I prep display windows in a department store. An executive on the merchandising and display team has a fixation with including live animals in the display window…. Really, what are they thinking?

It’s Easter – wouldn’t baby lambs be cute in the window with the merchandise? Well yes, they are adorable until that one gets sick with diarrhea – and rubs his rear all over the window! Ahh, the customers walking by thought it was so cute! It was loads of fun to clean up too.

Or Summer…. What could say summer better than a flock of Pink Flamingos? Do you know how tall Pink Flamingo’s are? Let me tell you. They are so tall, that when they poop it can – and it did – fall on the top of the kid size mannequins. Not the kind of image that the merchandising team was going for.

Sometimes it is the customer on display. In our store, the windows all connect to one another, so the crew can basically walk window to window for the whole block. One day, a woman walked past the first window. Unbeknownst to her, the back of her skirt was tucked into her panty hose – exposing a good portion of her butt – and yup, there was no underwear. Obviously a quick potty break gone bad. Of course all of us inside working on the window display were laughing hysterically, and some followed her all the way down the block trying to get her attention. She could not hear them – and do you know NO one on the sidewalk, or at the cross walk stopped to tell her about her “display”? Yes, they saw and were staring and laughing but no one said anything to her! I often wonder how she found out.

To appropriately answer if they are, I want to remind everyone of a Yogi Berra story. He was about to fly back to New York with the Yankees when one of his team-mates asked him “What time is it?” In typical Yogi fashion his answer was at first bewildering, and then funny. He responded, “Do you mean ‘now’? Of course poor Yogi meant, do you mean in New York or LA, but everyone got a kick out of the answer.
So are top executives compensated appropriately…do you mean ‘now’? Probably they were compensated appropriately according to past benchmarks, market acceleration and loose government/public awareness. But today, well, no they are probably not…but then again the only ones who are going to lead us out of this mess are going to be business leaders and investors…how that will play out is anyone’s guess…except of course if we socialize the whole economy…which will “cost much and produce little”.