Finding a job on your own or asking your parents to find you a job!!!

DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHICH IS BETTER?

As if you have to ask! However you will be surprised which way it works, and why it is NOT good, both for the job seeker and for the person who has agreed to help the job seeker, to ask someone else to fix you with one!

I am constantly involved in assisting people find jobs, and I am not in my best mood when I am asked to do so, and pestered in this regard to help. Why?

My worst fears have now been given added reinforcement. In my experience, when I have found a job for someone through a contact of mine as a favor to a friend, co-worker or member of my staff, usually for a job for that person’s relative, I want that person to perform well, so the employer who is helping me out will feel that my intervention actually helped him get a valuable employee! Further it will help me place another person who is similarly in need of employment.

The reality is somewhat different. There are some instances where the people performed well, and that too after a good hour or twos explanation of what the job entails and what is expected of them, should they get the job. I have also stressed their leaving the job without explanation, will only prevent another person from getting a job in that establishment from my recommendation. In most of the instances, where I personally did not know the recruit, they left it within a year.

So it was when I was at a Forces Camp the other day, and I was asking the recruitment person about his experience of getting quality recruits. Firstly, he said preference was given to people who come with letters from senior forces personnel or other VVIP, for them to accommodate their requests, out of deference, and ONLY the remaining are filled from the applications called for in the normal way.

Whilst the overall dropout rate in the first year of intake is about 30%, those who come with a letter drop out at double the rate or 60% .  Today, recruitment has to be more selective as the level of desperation of filling vacancies is less. Another factor is that the certificates presented to fulfill basic requirements are mostly bogus! 

Those who are chosen after an extensive interview process, and after questioning the aptitude of the person for the job or training period, have a much lower rate of dropping out, as they are more confident of what they want, and are sufficiently empowered to seek employment on their own, which shows a level of maturity. The huge cost to the Tri-forces, of lost training expenditure, as well as able recruits being denied entry due to this preference must be explained to the job seeker in advance, so that this practice can be reduced, if not eliminated entirely.

I am only too aware that even in the Private Sector, many people are recruited through recommendation of an employee, most often because some form of undertaking is given of the bona fides of the recruit, and his family background.

However we must have other means of evaluating the potential trustworthiness of a recruit selected cold! We may due to this preference prevent a capable person from joining our establishment, and only in desperate situations resort to “a friend of a friend of a friend syndrome!”

Elaborating further on the point made earlier where inadequate certificates of competence are shown, to get the job, one ends up with people recruited for the kitchen who cannot cook, electricians who could kill themselves and set fire to the whole camp by not knowing their “live from neutral” and so on! In short people lie to get the job, and are found out once recruited and the consequences there on can be even more embarrassing to the person who helped to get the job!

If one read my previous blog entry, one would realize how this is tied to that by the thread of the need for some kind of empowerment program to determine aptitude before anyone JUST seeks a job, any job etc. Anyone asking me to be given any job is a disaster waiting to happen. He cannot do anything in short, and is one who has NOT been weaned from his mother’s milk. (another word is Mama-tities)

This empowerment, this confidence building process MUST be done at schools before the person leaves. That is the ONLY point one can capture the person to engage him in understanding what it is he is capable of doing, and how he could go about getting what HE WANTS, not what his parents want or what he thinks he wants.

I have now resorted to speaking to potential employers when I send someone over for an interview, that it is they who are interviewing and they must use their own criteria of selection, and I am only sending an introduction so that this person MAY BE OF BENEFIT to their company, and the risks of recruitment are theirs. I therefore will not be disappointed if they are not suitable and don’t get the job!

Its funny I have written extensively on this topic of matching job vacancies with people who are capable of filling them, and a HUGE part of this process is for the STATE to spend some resources in LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT as part of a school leaving program that gives the tools necessary to make this MOST important lifestyle choice. This is a win win situation for all concerned. Lets do it!