Recruitment, Life and Death Decisions

Whilst doing some assessment centre work recently I was doing my usual second thoughts process of watching people.

One of the ideas of this particular brand of recruitment centre is that as they pass each stage we tell them the result.Obviously as it becomes more involved in the later stages it becomes really serious. When I was telling some of the candidates that it was time to go home I was crushing their dreams, they had almost not considered failure and who was I to tell them it was all over.

A "No" in these situations will remain a "No" and the only thing I can do is spend some time with them explain any feedback and de-brief them. For some it is still a great shock and disappointment.

My day consisted of going from "No" candidates to "Yes" candidates, so one minute I would be watching a face go from worried to full beam smile, and the next worried to despair.

Now that is not a good description of how the candidates were taking these decisions, so I came up with an analogy to describe the reactions.

Dead Cat / Resuscitated Cat

The idea is that instead of telling them Yes / No I can tell them a story to get the same reactions. Here are my two stories:

Dead Cat

I am sorry but your cat has died, there was nothing I could do.

Resuscitated Cat

Your cat is going to be fine, the operation was a complete success and we have managed to save her. She will be running around in no time.

I can imagine the reactions on the peoples faces would be the same that I have seen.

Of course the amazing things is the very variety of reactions that I get, especially when I tell them they have got the job offer. Some people barely react and it is always difficult to tell whether they are just really cool headed people or whether what I am saying has just not sunk in yet.

I guess it all goes to show that we are all individuals.

On another note if I were feeling like creating myself a new job title maybe I should call myself the "Death of Cats" making decisions of life and death.