Passion vs Paisa
Hiring for Startups is a different ball game compared to HR practices in corporates, as is retaining talent.
A few years ago I had an HR consultant conduct a workshop at Ideafarms to align people to work together. That evening I was called in to wrap up the day-long session and one of our managers asked me,
“What do you think about favouritism?”
It took me quite by surprise since it was less a question and more an indirect allegation. There was an immediate impulse to refute it, deny it or to side-step it with a politically correct answer. But I found myself saying,
“I see nothing wrong with favouritism.”
My own answer surprised me. I went on to explain that the interest of the organisation was paramount and even favouritism was okay as long as the larger objectives were being furthered.
We are not machines.
We have feelings. We have likes and dislikes. As long as we have favourites, even amongst employees, but do them no special favours (notice the subtle difference), we are okay. We are most comfortable working with people we ‘like’ since all our energies can remain focused on what we collectively strive to achieve. I have always tried to tell managers to hire people they can get along well with. Which is not to say that skills or competence doesn’t matter, only that those are a given. Anyway I’m not the first to say that skills can be taught.
Which brings me back to the reason for this post …Hiring.
Interviewing is an art not a skill or a science. Having been in a perpetual startup mode for over a decade and a half, my experience with hiring shows that resumes are the worst measure of ‘fit’, followed by skills, which are almost equally bad. You can spend tons of money in creating the right recruitment process, create HR sound policies, invest tons of money in creating and tech enabling the whole performance appraisal process, get OD initiatives underway — the whole nine yards. But your paisa (money) will not be able to buy passion or purpose. And definitely money will never buy attitude.
Being part of a startup has been fun. There’s energy, enthusiasm and engagement. But somehow it is accompanied by a culture of entitlement. Which is why retaining employees soon becomes a nightmare. But
what if you don’t do things to ‘artificially’ retain people? What if you enable a culture where their passion is fuelled in ways that they want to stay?
Hire attitude.
Now, attitude is fuzzy and also prone to the vagaries of subjectivity. When I look at it from a Western viewpoint — and all our HR thnking + processes have been borrowed from the western industrial model — the only way to eliminate subjectivity is by making sure everything is logical, quantifiable and rational so it can be measured. That’s how we’ve always selected machines and ensured efficiency and productivity, haven’t we? Now we’re expecting employees to do the same. Become efficient, become productive.
What if all you need is for employees to just be able to pursue their own passion. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about retaining them. They would be productive on their own. And they would want to come to work day after day; they would always go beyond the call of duty. For it wouldn’t be duty then would it? And that’s the only way I can see for people reaching their true potential. Which is what they come to work for — to succeed.
Let’s hire people for what they want to do. Then let them do it.
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In reply to - It’s not the how or the what but who
