Management skills articles

It was announced this week that Essex County Council plan to offer a job to the runner-up in reality TV series “The Apprentice”. In the show, 16 hopefuls from all walks of life have competed with one another to win a £100,000 a year position within businessman Sir Alan Sugar’s empire. Sugar calls the whole process “the interview from hell”. Essex County Council have indicated that the offer is unconditional although the job and salary remain to be confirmed. In this article we explore whether one can company can benefit from another company’s recruitment process.

With the BBC’s help, and borrowing a format from American TV, Sir Alan Sugar has certainly devised an unusual and comprehensive recruitment process. The candidates have had to perform tasks as diverse as renting luxury cars by the hour, devising and launching new flavours of ice-cream, and selling fish in a street market. They have also been subjected to gruelling interviews by three of Sugar’s trusted aides, as well as by successful businesswoman Karen Brady.

The process has been character-building as well as testing. Television viewers have not only been entertained, but have also watched the candidates develop over the course of the series, and have identified each one’s strengths and weaknesses. Claire, for example, started off as an over-confident loudmouth, guaranteed to annoy colleagues, subordinates and managers alike. After some typically direct advice from Sugar she has learnt to listen more and control what she says and when she says it. She has shown resilience and become a reliable member of any team.
Lee has demonstrated his large ego and supreme self-confidence, together with a quite revealing insecurity about his lack of formal education.

Meanwhile, Essex County Council leaders must have been watching, too. Their decision to make an unconditional offer to the person who ends up in runner-up spot is, on the face of it, a canny one. Clearly there is some PR value in this stunt (witness the column inches in print and online since the news release this Monday). Beyond that, you can almost hear the thought processes saying “if they’re good enough to get to the final of The Apprentice then they’re good enough for us”. At one level, that may be right - if (and it’s a big if) your job is the same as the one that they have been tested for, then why not piggy-back on someone else’s recruitment process and save yourself the costly and time-consuming effort of doing it yourself?

Herein lies the common pitfall. No two jobs, even if they have the same job title, are ever the same. For a start, job titles are misleading and do not have a common definition even within one industry, let alone across sectors. Even where the job role and responsibilities are similar, the culture and values of the employing organisation will have a strong impact on which candidate will be the best fit. For example, the Finance Director of Innocent Drinks and the Finance Director of a traditional law firm may well have very similar job descriptions. However, the FD that is the right fit culturally for Innocent Drinks will have to have the wit, willingness and vision to sign-off a budget to invest in dancing, grass-covered vans. The law firm’s FD, on the other hand, will probably be most valued for restraining frivolous expenditure. It seems very unlikely that Essex County Council and Sugar’s companies have the same culture and values.

This means that the “right” person for one job cannot be guaranteed to be the “right” person for another. Some years ago I worked for an organisation who wanted to grow its sales team and appoint a sales manager. It so happened that we heard on the grapevine that the sales manager of our biggest competitor was interested in a job change. The management team met internally and reasoned that as he clearly knew our industry, our competitors, our products and our customers, and since he must be successful as his current employer was achieving more than three times the revenue that our company made, he was clearly the perfect candidate for the job. We employed him with barely any further scrutiny.

I’m sure many of you have experienced similar stories. Such a move can be successful, but it is rare. In this case, the poor sales manager was dropped into an environment as different from his previous employer as it is possible to imagine. He was used to a hierarchical, command-and-control structure, whereas we operated in a flat structure with fluid roles and responsibilities. He was used to having a fully staffed sales-support team whereas we did all our own support and administration. His previous employer invested in large corporate entertaining and marketing events, whereas we worked on small-scale relationship-building efforts. And so on. He was an exceptional salesman, but there was no possible way he could fit into our organisation and be successful. The parting was difficult, but a relief on both sides.

So Essex County Council need to be careful that they are not left with a high-profile employee that does not fit into their environment. We would advise all organisations who are planning to appoint new staff to consider the following:

With good planning and an appropriately structured recruitment process, Essex County Council will doubtless find the right person. For Sir Alan Sugar’s reject to turn out to be the right person would be highly unlikely.