"Blacklist"
Candidates
When people have a bad customer experience at a restaurant or an
automobile dealership, they naturally wish not to repeat the
experience. They make a mental note not to use the
services or products of the offending company again for a period
of time -- they "blacklist" it, in other words. The same
sensible response occurs when hiring managers have bad
experiences with candidates.
Most companies do not keep formal do-not-hire lists since many
countries have ambiguous legal regulations surrounding the
practice. The sharing of candidate
blacklists between companies, for instance, is outright illegal in many
countries.
But whatever well-meaning politicians do to limit the practice,
we can be sure that informal candidate blacklists will forever
be kept inside the minds (and sometimes the computers) of all
hiring managers. They logically desire to keep
liars, losers and misfits out of their organizations and so they
should. This noble
objective is especially important for senior management roles
that have much greater impact on the lives of other people and
society as a whole.
Below are some of the main reasons hiring managers could exclude
certain candidates from being considered for senior management
positions with organizations in Asia.
1. Past
Corruption Scandal
As economic progress continues upward across Asia, problems with
graft and corruption continue to decline. Multinational
companies that were active participants of corruption in the past have
become particularly diligent at eliminating all forms of sleaze
in their global operations because of regulations making
corruption a criminal offence in many countries.
That is all well and good but in emerging countries, being as they
are, corruption scandals will occur from time to time. Senior
managers in organizations where scandals are uncovered are
naturally tainted in the eyes of the business community. Those implicated
can have their careers severely disrupted because no credible
organization will consider hiring them.
2. Too
Closely Affiliated
In most emerging countries, elite families have large, sprawling conglomerates
with sizeable interests in various business sectors. In
the past, most senior positions in the enterprises were held by family members and
close friends of the patriarch. Today, however, non-family professional
managers are being promoted on a meritocratic basis and
occupying the most senior positions in many of these formerly
closed organizations.
The problem that occurs for these non-family managers has
to do with career growth and transferability. When people become
too closely associated with strong-willed patriarchs and their
family members, it can become impossible for them to move
outside the organization. The reasons behind this are very
interesting.
First of all, few in the local business community would believe
such people are legitimate candidates. Most would think they will eventually return to the patriarch's
enterprise and bring as much
confidential information as they can with them. Conspiracy theories will
even allege that the managers are specifically
sent by the patriarch for that very purpose. Such lack of trust
makes job change difficult to say the least.
The second concern is the probable likelihood of a severe
negative reaction by the patriarch and his family. The departure
of a senior manager in some organizations is treated like an act
of treason against the family. Some autocrats become inflamed with anger over the
potential loss of confidential business information and personal privacy,
and will do what they can to destroy the traitor's career and
the organization that hired him.
(To outsiders from genteel countries, this may sound far-fetched
and even grotesque but this author has dealt with similar
situations in the past. Gladly, it is becoming a less common
problem as economies continue to expand and become less
controlled by a small number of dominant players.)
The unfortunate result to all of this is that high quality
professional managers will usually spend the rest of their lives
reporting to family members and cronies of the patriarch. Their
only alternative is to migrate to another country and start a
new life.
3.
Argumentative with Hiring Managers
Some candidates can be overly aggressive in their demands for
employment terms, schedules and compensation. These people may
have an inflated view of their abilities and value in the market
or have a confrontational personality and enjoy the competitive
nature of arguments. Candidates displaying excessive arrogance
and/or combativeness toward the wrong people in Asia can find
themselves out of the interview process and onto the do-not-hire
list of the employer for years to come.
Asian candidates can usually be counted upon to be courteous and
diplomatic in most situations, and rarely create problems of
this kind for themselves. Candidates from other regions,
particularly the west, destroy their careers in Asia
on a regular basis by conducting themselves like ill-mannered
jerks or obnoxious know-it-alls.
4. Substance
Abuse
It is rare for senior Asian managers to be abusers of either alcohol or recreational drugs. However, most
experienced executive recruiters in Asia are aware of certain
expatriate groups whose members are considered to be at high risk of
alcohol addiction with the resulting severe decrease in work
performance over time.
In past decades, Asia was known for a business culture of
late-night "entertainment" and some expatriate groups relished
in it long after the practice had disappeared in their home
countries. Today, most hiring managers have come to the
conclusion that regular and excessive drunkenness is destructive
to the individual and the organization, and are less keen to put
up with it.
Executive recruiters and hiring managers in the region have come
up with various techniques to judge the risk profile of
candidates for
alcohol abuse. Interviews with candidates from high risk
communities should be scheduled late in the day or immediately
after lunch (when drinking may have occurred). Interviewers
manoeuvre to stand as close to candidates as possible to smell
their breadth. They look closely at skin tone to determine if
there is discolouration and dehydration (common conditions for
excessive alcoholism). As well, alcohol tends to dilate
capillaries creating blood-shot eyes and visible red and purple
veins around cheeks and nose (especially in fair skinned
people).
Similarly, interview questions are asked about the personal life
of the candidates: What clubs and sports do they participate in?
What do they do on weekends? Who do they spend time with?, and
so on.
Experienced recruiters will know which clubs and groups
are locally known for being of greater risk. (Team sports like
rugby and football are more conducive to alcohol abuse than
individual sports like long-distance running or mountain
climbing, for instance.)
Reference checking can also be very
helpful since candidates usually give the names of close
acquaintances who may be known alcoholics in the community --
birds of a feather...
5. Not
Showing Up
Senior managers are generally highly dependable and organized
people -- that's why they are called senior. Therefore, it is
considered a serious concern if one fails to show up on time for a
confirmed meeting without giving notice. If this occurs more
than once without extremely good explanations, most recruiters
and hiring managers will demote the candidate or eliminate his
or her file.
More serious are those people who accept positions and then
fail to turn up on the start-date. This happens much less rarely
at the senior level but it does happen more often than most
people would imagine. In such cases, candidates can be sure
their CV will be spending a lot of time in the do-not-hire bin
and more than one person will hear about it in the industry.
6. Becoming
Incommunicable
Candidates sometimes get enticed into an interview process
because they are flattered by the attention and curious about
what might offered in other organizations even if they have no sincere
desire to leave their current employers. After a period of
infatuation, most of these "tire-kickers" will give notice to
their recruiters to end the process in a ways that are
professional and polite.
However, a minority of between 5% and 10% behave in seemingly immature
ways for people in senior management positions.
Candidates can suddenly refuse all contact requests and seem to
disappear in a very late stage of the recruitment process
(sometimes even after receiving a job offer). The result
is they leave hiring managers in a difficult situation and
destroy months of other people's work.
Some candidates will use the job offer to negotiate an
increase at their current employer and have no interest to move.
More often though, they are sincere people with great fear of
saying the word "no."
The phenomenon is alleged to be more common in Asia than in
other regions because of the cultural stereotype that Asians
avoid confrontation. Whether it is more common in Asia is not
clear, but it is clear that the behaviour is dying out with the
current generation of Asian managers. Nevertheless, it occurs
enough that most active hiring managers have a dozen or so
executives on their personal blacklists because they were left
in the lurch in the past.
7. Previous
Failed Candidates
Candidates who were assessed in the past by one manager but
deemed unsuitable can usually be considered again by another
manager or department in the same company. The exception is when the candidate fails
the reference check, background confirmation or some other
important indicator of past performance or integrity. The result
can be a checkmark in the do-not-hire box beside the candidate's
name in the company's HR system.
8. Applying
for Unsuitable Positions
Submitting multiple CV's for positions a candidate clearly does
not qualify for is an obvious way for someone to be downgraded in the eyes of hiring managers. Senior executives are
supposed to have superior judgement and especially an ability to put the
right people into the right jobs. If
they are too desperate or dim-witted to determine their own
suitability, this is a serious black-mark indeed. If hiring
managers see resumes turn up too often for dissimilar positions,
they will understandably decline the candidate for current and
future positions.
9.
Overstating Qualifications
Candidates sometimes push the limit on exaggeration when trying
to fit into a position. Most hiring managers become alarmed
when a senior person twists a story to inflate his personal
success in a project or seniority in a department. By trying too
hard to take all the credit, candidates risk becoming designated
for the do-not-hire list of the recruiting professional, whether
they are otherwise qualified or not.
10. Stalker
Candidates
Most executive recruiters and hiring managers do not have enough
time to respond to all the email and telephone messages they
receive every day. A supposedly senior manager, who pesters a
hiring professional more than once per week on a regular basis,
is showing a lack of experience at dealing with other senior
professionals or his desperation for a job. This is another sure way to
severely downgrade the assessment of a candidate in the opinion
of a hiring manager.
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Getting Ready For The
Deluge: Outsourcing in Philippines
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[PDF
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The
Economist Intelligence Unit of the Economist magazine
asked Chalre Associates' Chairman, Richard Mills,
to write a chapter about the Philippine outsourcing sector
in its annual Business Guide Book. The material
provides a Executive Briefing on the progress and major
issues facing this industry that is certainly one of most
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Asia Pacific Mining
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The 7th Asia Pacific Mining Conference put on by the Asean
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State of BPO in Philippines: Dan Reyes Speaks
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Richard
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that Philippines is currently seen as the "Number 1" option by global
companies sending BPO work to offshore destinations.
Dan Reyes is easily one of most experienced Business Process
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is head of the extremely successful Philippine operations of Sitel, the
world's largest call center organization. Among other things, he is a
founder and former president of the Business Processing Association of
the Philippines. more
