The Man in the Shiny Suit

Let me present you with two scenarios:

Scenario 1

A hiring manager at a prestigious law firm is about to interview a graduate looking to join the firm. He briefly reviews the CV in front of him and flicks through some of the candidate’s details. There is a knock on the door and in walks the candidate. The hiring manager looks up and in front of him stands a man in an ill-fitting suit that has developed a shiny gleam to it from being pressed more times than the grapes that make your favourite wine.

Scenario 2

Much like scenario 1, a hiring manager at a prestigious law firm is about to interview a graduate looking to join the firm. He is joined by a recruitment agent and they are discussing the prospective candidate. In this brief discussion, the agent says something along the lines of:

“the person you are about to meet is a law graduate who has had a tough upbringing. Both of his parents passed away in a car accident before he was five years old. His grandparents and some aunts and uncles took him and his two siblings under their wing and raised them, but did not have the money to send them to decent schools. This person made the decision to work hard in order to receive academic grants each year. By doing so, he was able to support himself throughout his secondary education and was granted a bursary to attend a university to do a law degree. As a result of his academic achievements at university his bursary was renewed each year. He then applied for and received another academic bursary to complete his LLM at another university and was due to start there in two weeks’ time. However, he only received all the information about his bursary last week and the money offered only covered academic costs. As a result, he had to cancel his plans to complete his LLM, as he is unable to afford the living costs that come with studying full time.

When I last met with him, I really liked him. He has the tenacity to become a success within the legal sector and was also very personable. I must however prepare you for how he may dress. As a result of his financial situation, he only owns one suit and it has been pressed so many times that it has developed a shiny gleam to it and does not fit him well. Please try look past this and interview the person wearing the suit, and not the suit itself.

I would bet that in the first scenario, particularly in the professional services sector, that nine times out of ten the hiring manager would have formed a negative bias toward the candidate the moment he walked through the door. This is a common mistake in hiring and happens within seconds on a subconscious level.

I have recently been engaging with a trainer called Thomas de Brun of Wolfhound Associates and also completed the Lou Adler course on Performance Based Hiring. In both of these interactions it was relayed on to me how inaccurate a typical unstructured interview can be in predicting future performance of a candidate. Believe it or not, but the odds are not much better than a coin toss.

Generally, the approach by hiring managers and Human Resources alike is to assess the person’s personality and whether they are “a fit”, without drilling down to determine if the person can actually do the job. Now while everyone enjoys working with likeable people, employees are not paid to be liked, they are paid to perform the function they have been hired for. If they are also likeable that is first prize, but as a hiring manager you would rather have someone who performs than someone you can share a laugh with now and again, but leaves you in the lurch on the work front time and time again.

The second scenario was a real life one where, as a recruiter, I forewarned the hiring manager to look past the suit. To ignore his first impression and the immediate biases that he was likely to form and rather start asking real performance related questions in order to determine if the candidate will be able to do the job. The best accurate gauge of future performance is past performance.

To the hiring manager’s credit, he did, and the candidate was presented with an offer to join the firm, which he duly accepted. I am further pleased to report that the shiny suit has since been replaced with a new one and the candidate is coming up to his second successful anniversary with my client.

If you were the hiring manager in the first scenario, would you have looked past the suit and seen the potential of the person wearing it? 

Dale Verster is the Managing Director for GRMSearch in South Africa. GRM South Africa currently covers recruitment in the legal and insurance sectors and will be expanding into Information & Technology in 2017. If you would like to find out how we do things differently, contact Dale on d.verster@grmsearch.com