Matthew T Grant

A slightly different version of this post originally appeared on Aquent’s Talent Blog, February 16, 2009

This was one of my first posts on Aquent’s Talent Blog, November 3, 2006

What if you went into a job interview and asked all the questions?

The web is rife with tips on how to interview successfully. You can find them here and here and here. For the contrarians among you, there are even tips on interviewing unsuccessfully.

The tipsters all emphasize being prepared, which is unassailably sound advice, as any Boy Scout would tell you, but they don’t point out something that might make you rethink your entire approach to interviewing: Interviewers are often unprepared!

While some companies have thoroughly developed and well-defined processes for interviewing people (and will even provide you with a detailed overview of said processes beforehand), many companies do not. In fact, as these tips for interviewers from Monster imply, the interviewing process subjects interviewers themselves to a lot of stress.

So what does this mean to you as a marketing professional approaching an upcoming interview? It should encourage you to play an active role in the interview and work hard to make it a conversation rather than an interrogation. Don’t be afraid to take the lead and start off by asking questions, especially thoughtful, well-crafted questions that demonstrate your knowledge and experience while simultaneously conveying your interest in the position. As a kind of test, ask yourself, Could I get a job offer based solely on these questions I’m asking?

Asking questions, especially from the outset, will take some pressure off the interviewer and, ideally, provide you with insights that will allow you to present your own qualifications in the context of the role. This is key, for while the interviewer will inevitably ask you what you have done for others, she is most interested in discovering what you will do for her, her team, and her organization. There is no better way to do that then by peppering any discussion of your talents and triumphs with specific references to the challenges she is currently facing.

Ultimately, by engaging in a conversation about the role rather than submitting to an interview for it, you will accomplish two things. First, you will more readily be seen as a colleague or a peer than a candidate. In a sense, you will already have entered the interviewer’s world.

Secondly, and most importantly, if in this conversation you can project a sincere eagerness to learn and contribute to the success of the enterprise, you will send the message that every interviewer wants to hear: Not only can I do this job, I’m already thinking about how I’m going to get it done. Let’s get started right now!

Image Courtesy of Sean Dreilinger.

This post originally appeared on Aquent’s Talent Blog, February 23, 2009

This was my last official post for Aquent’s Talent Blog, March 4, 2009. I explored some of the implications of aleatoric design on Marketing Profs’ Daily Fix Blog.

As far as I can tell, the difference between Republicans and Democrats boils down to the following: Republicans think that government should be run by businessmen and Democrats think government should be run by lawyers.

I mentioned this once to a friend with Republican tendencies and she said, “That’s right. Government should be run like a business.”

My immediate response was, “But a government is not a business!” Which, of course, got me thinking about how governments and businesses differ.

For simplicity’s sake, I define a government as that organization responsible for establishing and maintaining order within set geographic borders, borders which it is also generally the responsibility of said organization to secure, if not necessarily establish.

By contrast, I define a business as a set of related processes which facilitate the delivery of a good or service within a larger macro-process of exchange which usually depends on an consensually accepted token of value (currency) and a set of rules enforced by a communal agency (which may be a mob or may be a government).

Now consider these definitions in light of Allen Weiss’ comment that most Web 2.0 “business geniuses” seem to ignore “what a business is supposed to do..namely, make a profit.” On the one hand, I find in this formulation one important differentiator between government and business: Making a profit does not enter into my or any definition of government or its purpose.

On the other hand, I must point out that I did not define business in terms of making a profit either. This was intentional because I do not believe that the purpose of any business is, in the first instance, to make a profit. Aside from delivering the good or service around which it is organized, the main purpose of any business is TO STAY IN BUSINESS. Making a profit may serve this end, but it is not an unqualified necessity.

Now, returning to the original question of government and business, would it be fair to say that the purpose of any government is to stay in power?

Image Courtesy of takomabibelot.

As an undergraduate I took a class on Russian literature. One of the books we read was Envy by Yury Olesha. As I recall, the professor, whose name I cannot recall, though I do recall her telling me that she was not a feminist, told us that Olesha’s motto was, “Not a day without a line.”

Is it better to do things because circumstances demand it, or because we impose on ourselves a certain discipline? My current motto is, “Do whatever the circumstances demand.” This is my attempt to enact an ideal of freedom conceived not as “do what thou wilt,” but as “do what is right” – “rightness” being defined as “what is most appropriate to the situation.”

Can one be a “fundamentalist” when it comes to relativism? If so, that’s what I am. More or less.

Blade Kotelly is an interesting guy. A product of the Human Factors program at Tufts University, he made a name for himself in the field of speech recognition and literally wrote the book on it. He is currently Chief Designer at Endeca Technologies, a provider of “Enterprise Search, Information Access, and Guided Navigation Solutions.”

I met Blade about a month ago. Because he had made his name designing machines that humans could talk to and currently works at a company which builds machines that help people sort through the avalanche of data that a simple web search can produce, I was curious to discover that he at times turns to recruiters to find design talent. I asked him, “Why don’t you just let the machines do it?”

His answer was not surprising, On the one hand, he explained, good designers are difficult to find so you need to enlist assistance when searching for them. On the other hand, a big part of recruitment involves recognizing fit, and, if I understood him correctly, teaching machines to match personality types with the idiosyncratic needs of hiring managers and the peculiar nuances of corporate cultures is difficult. (Blade, if you happen to be reading this and I’m misstating the case, please set me straight!)

Oddly enough, while reading an SAP/Accenture white paper, “BPM Technology Taxonomy: A Guided Tour to the Application of BPM,” I found this point reiterated, after a fashion. In order for a business process to be automated, it is ideal that it take place in a predictable, step-by-step manner. The authors of this study point out, however, that some business processes do not play out like that. The example they use, fittingly enough, is recruiting. Recruiting, they write, “starts with a job description and ends with a hire, but exactly how all the interviews, evaluations and meetings will go is not clear at the outset.”

It’s curious that they say that it’s not clear how the interviews, etc., “will go,” since each of these events has but two possible outcomes: either the candidate advances to the next stage, or the candidate is rejected. In that sense, modeling the process is fairly straightforward: A candidate applies by submitting an application and resume. Those documents are reviewed and the candidate is either invited in for an interview or the process ends. The candidate is interviewed and the interviewer either decides to recommend that the candidate be hired, or the process ends. Etc. That is, the process indeed lends itself to a binary, forking path description wherein each step results in a (1) or a (0). (Indeed, applicant tracking systems handle the process at this level.)

The problem however is not that there are only two possible outcomes at each stage. The problem is that, aside from certain kinds of testing that might be employed, the way the outcome is produced, how the interview “goes,” cannot be easily modeled and therefore automated. In fact, the psychological factors at play, as Malcolm Gladwell has described are so unconscious, so rapid, and so irrational, that they defy automation. For this reason, many organizations turn to so-called “structured interviewing,” which can take many forms but at its most refined reduces the impact of personality quirks and coincidental affinities between interviewer and interviewed by designing questions so that the anticipated responses will demonstrate clear compatibility or incompatibility with the requirements of a given position.

Humans are really good at certain things – pattern recognition, decoding facial expressions, fuzzy logic – that are difficult for machines to do. Machines are good at processing data (performing calculations, rendering images, etc.) by running algorithms really fast. Of course, machines can also learn, and putting a human “in the loop” can help machines learn even faster. The automation of processes such as the recruitment and hiring of new employees might not be realizable yet but such systems are not theoretically inconceivable. Indeed, everyday, they become more and more possible. [Update: For a more detailed and informed discussion of the difference between computers and brains, and the superiority of the latter to the former, check this New York Times op-ed piece.]

Which brings us to the real question, which is not, “Are there processes that we cannot automate?” Rather, the real question is, “Are there processes we don’t WANT to automate?”

Image Courtesy of The Alieness GiselaGiardino²³.