Employee Bubble in the Making?

Employee Bubble in the Making?

If our economy was based solely on a meritocracy (the best of the most qualified people gets the job), then this kind of Darwinian economic system would work.

But, is this how our system really works today? Does the most qualified, skilled person always get the job? I argue no. Think about it…how many times have you been at your work place and thought to yourself “my boss does not know how to do my job, or have said to yourself, “how did that person become a manager, or who gave that person responsibility?”

More and more, our economic system is being turned into a bastardized form of a meritocracy where it’s not your skill at a particular job that is valued, but how well you are able to sell yourself at getting that job and move on to the next. Millennials, statistics report, change jobs every 2 years whereas baby boomers changed every 7 years. So job skill growth among millennials is questionable and worrisome.

For example, take a hiring situation. It’s natural for any employer to be impressed with someone who knows how to sell themselves. If that person can talk a good game and/or have a superficial working knowledge of the position and say the right buzz words, then he or she comes off as quite impressive as compared to someone who is not experienced at the art of job interviewing.

You can see the same thing happening in sports. For example, the NFL Combine is a week-long event where all the college football players with aspirations to play in the NFL go for their interviews. Here are some key “assessment” activities that take place during that week:

• They run several medical tests to see how healthy they are;
• Their personalities are evaluated during in 30 minute interview sessions;
• There are a series of physical challenges like the 40 year dash, bench press, and the long jump to see how athletic they are;
• Then, they conduct football drills to see how well they move.

Everything is timed, recorded, and compared to their peers. At the end of the week, players are given a rank and are sorted by who is the best all-around athlete.

What always happens is either the fastest or strongest player with the most physical gifts ranks at the top. He will be drafted in a higher position, because his perceived value has changed considerably, based on his stellar week long interview performance. However, the key words here are “perceived value”.

What a lot of teams and people forget is that their job is to “play football”, not to run fast or jump high or lift a lot of weight. Those are aspects of the game of football, but they are not the true measure of a football player.  The real “perceived value” should be how well you played the game during the 4 years of blood, sweat, and tears you invested during your collegiate career. Your accomplishments on the field and how well you played the game should be the major determining factors in football draft ranking.

Now what does football have to do with getting an account management position or the overall hiring practices in today’s economy? People are becoming so well trained in interview best practices and self-promotion these days that this first impression often overshadows a person’s real ability to do the actual job.

He or she might have the right look, talk the right game during the interview, or have the most perfectly formatted, scented resume, but all these things are just pure window dressing. In the end, they only provide you with a limited insight into a person’s real workplace performance capabilities.

In today’s highly competitive workplace environment, it seems that people have started to realize that they can start getting jobs that they might not be otherwise qualified for by engaging their exceptional interview skills (BS Skills), making that great first impression.

And if enough people get into positions that they are not necessarily prepared for or ready for, soon you start growing a potential cancer in your organization. You have a new generation of employees who are less than qualified, basically tossing out any chances to enhance workplace productivity.

If these people know that they are not qualified and/or skilled enough, but are able to fake it for either a couple of months or for as long as a year, they immediately start looking for another job. They move on before their limited skill sets catches up with them. If this is their strategy for developing a career, what does that really mean for the future of our economy?

As a matter of fact, what does that mean for the health of your company, if say even a third of the people they hire are like this? What does it mean for the larger economy if you have a subset of workers whose major skill set is to ace an interview and get hired? Think about it.

What happens if you start to have a generation of workers whose only goal in life is, in fact, to get hired and get promoted as fast as possible, not necessarily within the same company, but by bouncing from company to company, using their amazing interviewing skills.

What does that mean for employees who try to work through more traditional ways of advancement i.e. working hard, developing excellent interpersonal and interpersonal skills, getting promotions, etc.?

What would it mean for the company to have such a high turnover rate?

What does it say about the workers themselves when they finally reached a position where they have to do the actual work and do not have the necessary baseline skill sets to carry out their job responsibilities?

Ask yourself this question? Are we in an “employee bubble”? Have we reached a saturation point where pseudo “qualified” people now dominate the employment landscape? And what is the effect on the economy when that bubble pops.

Makes you think a little, doesn’t it.

By Philip Jackman