Don’t Tell, Don’t Ask

Thirteen years ago, before I worked for myself, I worked at a large Fortune 50 company in a hybrid capacity. About 60 percent of the time, I worked in and with IT. The other 40 percent of my time was spent in corporate HR. It took me a little while to understand the vast differences between the groups and, in years since, I have witnessed first hand many other IT-business chasms.

I can remember one project on which I worked with the recruiting department. A director (call him Alex here) wanted an analysis performed on the schools at which the company currently recruited. He wanted to know whether targeting Ivy League schools made sense. You see, Alex had to justify expensive recruiting trips to Cornell, Harvard, and other elite institutions.

Disclaimer: I have a master’s in labor relations from Cornell University.

One of Alex’s direct reports (call her Lauren here) was much more functional than technical. That is, she understood the business needs of her department but wasn’t great at extracting and manipulating data. Added to the mix, our employer’s internal systems and data were, to put it bluntly, a mess. Perhaps I could help her try to make heads and tails of things.

Not a problem. Eager to lend a hand, I dug in to the data. I started with high level questions, such as:

1. Do hires from Ivy League schools perform better than those from other institutions?
2. Do hires from Ivy League schools remain with the company longer than those from other institutions?
3. Do hires from Ivy League schools justify their higher salaries–relative to those from other institutions?
4. Do the recruiting expenses required to hire these candidates justify their costs?
5. Ultimately, should our company be focusing on candidates from Ivy League schools?

Note that I did not have accurate information on many things, including internal recruiting costs, making definitively answering questions like number four impossible.

But not having completely accurate and comprehensive information should never stop you. I’ve always been able to use proxies when I lacked such information. For example, while I couldn’t tell you precisely how much Alex had spent on his plane ticket to Harvard, it wasn’t hard to approximate that expense–and others. Things like offer acceptance rate are also easy to estimate when you talk to others.

Among my findings, at our company, Ivy League employees (relative to non-Ivy League ones):

• were not appreciably better performers
• did not stay with the company for a longer period of time
• did not justify their expense

Even with significant limitations of our company’s data, the statistics were overwhelmingly clear. Brass tacks: the costs of recruiting at Ivy League schools did not remotely justify their benefits, even if my assumptions were off considerably.

Don’t Tell, Don’t Ask

Lauren was amazed at what I could do with a tool as simple (yet powerful) as Microsoft Excel. (Again, she wasn’t very technical.) However, she wasn’t an idiot: she saw the same trends that I did. She presented her findings to Alex, her boss. And here’s where the story gets interesting.

Alex would have none of it. He didn’t want the real answers to the questions: Should he be recruiting at Ivy League schools? Was the Ivy League strategy the best use of his department’s–and the company’s–money? Or would it be better to focus on state schools? He only wanted confirmation that he was already doing the right thing. He liked going to Harvard and Yale. He liked telling others (internally and externally) that he “bagged” a new MBA from Columbia. He dismissed the results of my analysis immediately upon learning the results.

And you wonder why HR doesn’t exactly have the best reputation in many organizations?

Simon Says

The bottom line of this little yarn: you shouldn’t ask the question if you don’t want the real answer.

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