You are talent, know it, act like it
Don’t dull! A mediocre recruitment process points to a mediocre workplace!
Every time I pass one of these job ads that are displayed on walls or gates or even dustbins (WHY!!!) I imagine that whoever calls the number on them may have a future as a yam or some other sinister, juju inspired, ending to a life.
I imagine this because I cannot understand why anyone would eschew using the internet, personal networks, job boards or even traditional job ads in newspapers to source for talent and think rather that they will have better luck getting people by splattering their ads on every available public surface using an A4 paper and mostly bad spelling.
The conclusion that I end up reaching every time is that those guys are probably not looking for TALENT. They probably just need BODIES to handle a monotonous task or the other.
If you are reading this, you are probably not that. YOU ARE TALENT! Know it! Act like it.
Nigeria has a habit of making people feel less than, especially, when they are lacking resources to preen and loudly declare their ‘somebodyness’.
For this reason, you may accept any treatment and indignity on the basis of your not having a job and needing one but everyone started out not having a job whether that lasted for 1 second or years; doesn’t make them any less of a human being.
A human being who has been trained and holds the solutions that one or more businesses will need, I think that’s a good way to look at things.
There are a couple of things you should look out for and make sure of as talent. I’ll just touch on three that are important to me.
How you should be treated at interviews
Back in school I remember how some guys (resource persons) who came to talk to us would paint some annoying scenarios about job interviews that made the entire process sound like pulling teeth.
One favorite scenario that they liked to paint was that of companies keeping applicants waiting for hours on end in a room, often in uncomfortable conditions, to see which ones cracked and started spilling negative beans about the company and the interviewers.
LMAO.
Lab rats much.
The point as it was explained to us was that the company was trying to get to the root of our character and possibly sieve out a few of us who were categorized as impatient for how we reacted to the situation.
I actually listened with rapt attention to those things then and I think the lessons have even been internalized but now I think of how truly underhanded such a move is and I’m not even sure I would want to work somewhere like that.
My first job interview after school was nothing like that, THANK GOD. All tests and interactions were conducted in a conducive atmosphere and on time.
Even if I had not been hired after that, I would have become a stan for the brand because of how important I was made to feel.
As talent, you should be treated as a customer during a recruitment process. I love the way Liz Ryan the CEO/founder of Human Workplace talks about smart recruitment;
“It helps no one and slows a business down to make recruiting a process of weeding people out. Smart recruiting is the opposite — a process about pulling people into your organization, reinforcing them at every step and making it easy and fun for them to meet the company and its representatives, whether they end up working for the company or not.”
Any company that treats you less than probably has a culture that you will not enjoy anyway when you are on the inside. How you are treated at interviews matters.
What companies owe you
If you scale a recruitment process and do get hired, it is not time for you or the company you are working for to forget that you are talent.
Talent should be nurtured.
This goes beyond just paying a salary, it means helping you expand on and hone your skills.
There are a variety of ways to do this chief among them being company sponsored training. If, however, that is not possible there is necessary and constructive feedback on your work, shuffling you to various departments so you can get an understanding of all parts of the business and allowing you time to develop personally.
The standards you should hold yourself to
If you know you are talent, you have to act like it. Hold yourself to certain standards of character and behavior.
Be productive, be punctual, work hard, read wide, take on side projects, self develop; always be better tomorrow than you were today.
