That attitude makes sense only if the procedure itself makes sense. And government being what it is, a lot of times the procedure does not make sense.
I have never seen your company’s application, so I can’t comment on it. However, I have seen a great many applications that asked for a whole bunch of unnecessary and/or irrelevant information. The hiring manager for an average retail store does not need to know what my hourly rate at my last three jobs was. And NO hiring manager for a typical company needs to know my SSN before they even decide whether or not to interview me. My resume gives you all the information you need in order to decide whether to interview me. Anybody (especially these days) who insists that a job seeker fill out a paper application in addition to a resume is stupid, inflexible, and hide-bound.
At my very first corporate job, one of our three Key Imperatives (or whatever they called the defining practices of the company) was “Practice Benefit of the Doubt.” That is, when it came to dealing with co-workers, you were always supposed to assume that they had the best intentions and knew how to do their job. It really did work pretty well; that company had the least interpersonal drama of any place I’ve ever worked.
This was also reflected in their recruiting philosophy: recruiters and managers were told to hire people who were: smart; hard-working; ambitious; and nice. You could be the best salesperson/actuary/consultant or whatever in the world; but if you weren’t nice you weren’t going to fit in at the company.
That was a long time ago, and I’m sure the company culture has changed somewhat, but I miss that attitude.
Yes, I used to work for Robert W. Baird & Co. in Milwaukee, a financial services firm. They have an explicit “no asshole” rule and they are frequently voted one of the best companies to work for in the US.
I was wary of joining a corporate culture like Baird, but I can honestly say it was the best company I’ve ever worked for. Treating a fellow employee like crap simply wasn’t tolerated, and there were no egos. Even though I was pretty low on the ladder and surrounded by corporate bigwigs, everyone made a point of making me feel welcome. I always felt like I was treated fairly and my concerns were heard.
I was brokenhearted when I moved and had to leave that job.
Yeah, I used to work at Hewlett Packard back in the golden era of the early '80s. There was no explicit “No assholes” rule, but everyone was pretty kind and team oriented. At that point in time, they had never laid off an employee.
They were extremely picky in recruiting, and the corporate culture was intrinsically supporting and positive. I’ve never worked at another company like it, even my own company though I tried to emulate it, however unsuccessfully.
Then, bluntly, you probably wouldn’t be someone I’d have hired, if you made an issue out of not filling out an application. No problem; like I said, you don’t have to fill out anything you don’t want to. But I also don’t have to hire you.
And keep in mind that this was a good 25 years ago, so ID theft wasn’t the issue it is toady. People routinely asked for SSN back then, and nobody much complained about giving it. And I can’t require you to tell me what you’ve made at your previous jobs, but, again, back then, that was a routine question, and people weren’t quite so sensitive about it. And I can assure you that refusing to fill out an application when asked, and even arguing with the manager about it, was a sure-fire way not to get hired for pretty much any job.
If you are willing to argue with me about something so simple, why would I think that you are suddenly going to become a cooperative person after I put you on the payroll? As manager, I’ve had years of experience with the company, and I know its procedures inside and out; I know why certain tasks have to be done, and I know the best way to do them. I’m not averse to sharing that information with my employees if it’s not of a confidential nature, but I’m not about to have a clerk with no experience in my business come in and think she’s now in charge and knows how things should be done better than I do. When you detect that sort of attitude in a person, the easiest solution is to hire someone else.
It’s also true that back in those days, people didn’t feel so entitled as they do today. You cooperated with the process if you wanted a job; you didn’t assume that you were entitled to be hired and could therefore dictate the terms of the hiring process. And as an applicant, you didn’t get to decide which information was unnecessary and/or irrelevant; if the hiring manager asked for it, you either provided it or you applied somewhere else. But frankly, there weren’t very many other places you could apply that wouldn’t ask for the same information.
Much depends, no doubt, on the state of the economy, too, both personally and nationally. In the early 90s, we were in a recession. Jobs weren’t that easy to come by. You wanted one, you played the game. I’m more independent about job seeking now, too, partly because I have enough financial independence that I don’t need a job ASAP to avoid homelessness and starvation, and partly because, over the last 15 years or so, at least, I’ve been sufficiently satisfied with my position most of the time that I wasn’t really looking. If a company approached me, then I certainly did feel entitled to dictate some of the terms, since I didn’t really need their job. If they didn’t hire me, I was no worse off than I had been before they called.
And for the record, my company’s application was pretty much standard for the time. I’m not even sure that it was company-specific, but if it was, it was substantially no different from generic apps you could buy at an office supply store.
Maybe I misunderstand your position. But you seem to be saying that you prefer workers who are too cowed by the system to protest anything, regardless of how stupid, inefficient, or unjust it may be.
Robert I. Sutton, a Stanford business prof, literally wrote the book, “The No Asshole Rule.” It is about bullying, not annoying behaviour. His criteria for being an asshole are 1. After encountering the person, do people feel oppressed, humiliated or otherwise worse about themselves?
2. Does the person target people who are less powerful than him/her?
Our company used to be kind of a “No Assholes” place, maybe I’d call it a “Don’t Be Too Big of an Asshole” company. Now it’s getting a lot more corporate so the assholery limit has been raised. It’s still pretty good though. The main thing is that nobody except the owner can get very far away from core goals. Getting the job done is our prime directive, and it takes a lot of cooperation to do that, and assholes are seen as an impediment to that. And just because assholery is avoided even the assholes get a lot of second chances before they get the ax.
I work in a department where communication, cooperation, and kindness are slightly more important than other core job skills, like efficiency and competence. Efficiency and competence can be trained to a degree, but we have excellent team harmony because our boss prefers to hire nice people.
The problem comes in when we’re interacting with other departments who aren’t held to such standards. Because unfortunately, niceness is not company-wide, and niceness isn’t always a desirable trait in this environment. Our sales guys can be REAL dicks, and their bosses are uber-dicks. At least we’re not prevented from venting!
Working with people who’d all rather be managers than underlings breeds drama like nothing else. I don’t like the phrase “cowed by the system” but every business needs compliant worker bees if anything is to be accomplished.
I do not trust the judgment of a person who’s been on the job for six weeks as to whether a procedure makes sense. They might be right, maybe it doesn’t make sense. But they also might not understand the company well enough to make that call. Maybe filling out section C of form 78A doesn’t help them but is of huge value to someone in a subsequent department. Maybe it’s an audit requirement and not filling it out will cause huge headaches for QA. And maybe it’s a good idea, during your probationary period, to be just a little bit humble and open to new things. A well-adjusted person does not assume themselves to be King of How It’s Done ten minutes after they walk in the door.
If you want to employ a “no assholes” policy, here’s a hint; someone who walks in the door of a place they have never been before and declares that the procedures don’t apply to them is probably a major league asshole.
If someone says “I think this procedure would be much easier if we changed it like this” that’s great. Sounds like a winner, the kind of person who wants to help out. Someone who says “I will defy orders and not follow this procedure, despite having been here all of a month, because I don’t want to” sounds like a big asshole, and there’s not a chance in hell I’d want a person like that past the probationary period. Maybe the person isn’t an asshole; it’s possible they are the smartest human alive. I know which one to bet on, though.
I’m a very smart guy, and I can think of innumerable examples where something I thought was unnecessary when I joined a new company proved to be much more necessary than I had previously believed, or where refusing to do it in the prescribed manner would have caused a lot of shit to roll downhill onto other people. Because I am not an asshole, however, I make it a policy to follow procedure my first few months, and ask questions and learn about the company before making changes, allowing my familiarity and comfort with the role to inform how much weight I’ll start throwing around.
I should probably clarify my first paragraph there… it’s not as coherent as I thought.
What I was trying to say is that people who are promoted from the ranks aren’t automatically shunned or ostracized- if anything, that’s typically a cause for celebration.
Instead, it’s the types whose entire goal IS to get promoted who tend to get shunned, mostly because they’re not good team players- not because they don’t work hard, but because they have a tendency to self-promote at the expense of the rest of the team, and typically have an attitude that this position is only temporary, and that they’re somehow better. They’re usually the ones who dress differently than the rest of the team, because they’re “dressing for the job they want, not the job they have”.
It’s not the desire to get promoted that usually wins them no friends; it’s the attitude that the job’s temporary and that they’re better than it. Which in most people’s minds translates into “I’m too good for this job, and I’m better than you.” The ones who are good team players and are still ambitious are fine- most people above a certain level are that way anyway. It’s the ones whose entire work goals revolve around personal status who are shunned, not the people who want to be promoted and who are still about working hard, being part of the team, and getting shit done.
I was reading another thread about Drill Instructors, and I came across a quote in that thread that applies to this thread.
Nava, and kiz, it sounds like you are having a hard time distinguishing between insisting on procedure when there’s a good reason for it, versus insisting on procedure for the sake of procedure.
To continue with the example of applying for a job–
When I have a resume that lists my work experience for the last 10 years, the names and locations of those companies, the dates I was at each company, and my duties at each company, and the skills that I have acquired, and any other information that is pertinent to the application–that is ALL the information that a hiring manager needs!
To insist that I fill out an application form to duplicate that information is both stupid and highly inefficient. That is “obedience over reason and common sense.” And it shows very, very clearly that many companies do NOT want people who know how to think. They want mindless drones who will do as they are told, and not cause trouble by asking questions. And it’s not necessarily a question of wanting to be a manager. It’s a question of stupidity vs. common sense. I am perfectly willing to follow any instructions given to me – IF those instructions make sense.
Now some companies that do their hiring online have software that reads your uploaded resume and automatically fills in a great many of the fields in the application form. That’s the only reasonable way to do it, if they’re going to insist on a form.
My current employer won’t accept a resume unless it’s for a upper managerial position. They expect everyone to fill out an application in person. HR briefly interviews you. If you do well, you go onto the actual interview with both management and HR. There is no online application portal.
OK, I get it – your application example is a great example of stupidity on part of the company. Yeah, I agree, I’d be bent out of shape about it too.
I’ve worked for companies where some duties didn’t make any sense to me whatsoever. At one employer things were the way they were, no matter how inefficient, because “that’s the way we’ve always done them and it’s too much of a PITA to change it”. I tried switching up a few things on my own just to make my own job easier. Even though my direct manager said it made sense, I couldn’t continue doing it because if upper management saw me doing whatever my way, my manager would get into trouble for letting me do it as such.
I worked for that company for close to 15 years. There was a reason why I preferred overnight shifts, tbh.
I don’t think it’s as nefarious as all that; more likely it’s some cretinous HR policy where EVERYONE has to fill out the job application, regardless of whether they’re a blue collar person who doesn’t have a resume or CV, or whether they’re a world-renowned authority in their field with a PhD and 25 years of experience. Basically pointless bureaucracy that populates a file cabinet or database somewhere, with data that rarely if ever is queried.
I know that where I work, that’s how it used to work- the hiring managers and interviewers just have copies of the resume, while the stupid-assed form vanishes into HR, never to be seen again.
To you that may make sense, but to a hiring manager who may get 100’s of applicants for an open position reading a standard application is MUCH more efficient than 100 resumes, all formatted differently. To repeat what has been said above, just because it doesn’t make sense to you does not mean that it does not make sense to the company.
I certainly agree with the sentence that says, “You need to understand where the exceptions to broad policies can be made.” As a manager, one needs to be flexible to a degree, but that doesn’t mean that every situation requires an exception or that every employee (or even non-employee applicant!) gets to dictate to me when exceptions need to be made. I am still the boss, and I am still responsible for getting the job done correctly. Yeah, I want to be reasonable, but I also want to pass my next internal audit by having all required documentation on hand. When I have 20 applicants at hand who have complied with my request to fill out an application, and one who wants to argue about it, what makes you think I should hire the total stranger who thinks she understands the requirements of my business better than I do? Can you really, honestly say to me that you don’t think there’s a fair chance she might be a problem employee if I hire her?
I think you are drawing a false dichotomy. Either I turn into a Big Brother-style bureaucrat, enforcing stupid, unjust and inefficient rules, or I allow employees, and even applicants, to be the decision-makers. I am running a business. Certain tasks need to be done, they need to be done on time, and they need to be done in a particular way. My job is to make sure that happens, and I can’t get it done if people are arguing with me about every assignment I give them. Now, if an established employee came to me and said something like, “Hey, I just don’t understand this task - is it really necessary, or couldn’t it be done in an easier way?”, then I’d be quite happy to take whatever time was necessary to hash it out with them, and possibly modify the assignment if it made sense. But, often, there are reasons that the employee isn’t aware of or simply hasn’t considered that require the more difficult process; in that case I will try to educate them. But the bottom line is still that the job has to be done, and done correctly. I can change policy if it makes sense to do so, but that is my decision, not the employee’s.
Pretty much, yes. Someone who wants to be in charge really ought to consider starting his or her own business. When you work for an employer, the employer calls the shots.
Again, right, as I pointed out in my comment above. I’m hiring because I need a particular job done. Nobody is entitled to be hired, and my goal is to find the person who can accomplish the job most effectively with the least drama.
Or, in the case I described, even before they get in the door. Innovation is good, but I’ve seen many, many people who wanted to “innovate” new ideas about how their job should be done, simply because it made things easier for them, without regard for how everyone else in the company was affected.
Amen to that.
Good point. The company that I worked for was a fairly large, national linen supply company (which operated under a different name back then than it does now). Besides being office manager, I had also worked for years as a service manager, supervising the delivery drivers. Getting the drivers to do on-site inventories at the clients’ locations was always difficult. Every driver had his own ideas about it, and because they were on the road all day pretty much unsupervised, some of them just wouldn’t do the inventories.
Now, the thing in linen supply is to get regular, consistent turnover of the product. I buy a napkin for, say $1.50 and rent it to clients for a dime per use. That means I need to turn the napkin over 15 times before I can even think about making a profit on it, and then I have laundry costs, delivery costs, office costs and all the other costs that normally occur in a business. If a driver doesn’t control the inventory tightly at each client, I can end up with tens of thousands of dollars in inventory sitting on clients’ shelves doing nothing. If the client thinks my napkins are grill cleaning rags, and the driver doesn’t call them out on it, even worse.
The problem is that, in order to do an inventory, the driver needs to count every piece of linen in the client’s location, including dumping and counting the bags of dirty linen. It’s dirty, it’s nasty, it’s time-consuming and it’s hard work. Everybody hated doing inventories, including me. But they had to be done, or we could easily end up out of business! Just the same, many drivers either didn’t understand or didn’t care, and would either fail to do the inventories, or, in some cases, approach me with creative arguments about why they didn’t have to be done. But they did have to be done; there was no alternative. I knew what the costs of uncontrolled inventory were; the drivers only knew that they didn’t want to work as hard and that they wanted to get home earlier. I’d have been the first to applaud if some driver had actually come up with a better system, but there was none. I had to enforce the procedure, and, at least on one occasion, actually fired a driver for uncontrolled inventories.
See my remarks above about false dichotomy. The fact that I enforce appropriate rules and that I, as the one with the greater understanding of the company’s systems, am the one who decides which rules are appropriate, doesn’t make me a drill sergeant.
You’re certainly entitled to your opinion. However, *you *are the one who is coming to *me *asking me to give you a job (and, remember, to make matters even worse, the situation I described happened during an economic recession when I had many, many eager applicants for every job I advertised). That being the case, you don’t get to decide what information I need - I do. If you don’t want to give me the information I asked for, then, I will hire someone else. No problem at all, for me. But maybe a problem for you, especially in a tight economy where jobs aren’t quite so easy to come by.
Again with the false dichotomy. I love employees who think for themselves and contribute thought and creativity to the workplace. I don’t want employees who think they know better than I do and give me a hard time about following standard procedures.
But, as I’ve pointed out, you are not the one who gets to decide which instructions make sense and which don’t. I know the business; you just walked in the door. I know why I’m asking you to do a certain task, and I generally have good reasons for asking. You don’t have the experience to know what those reasons are, so you either need to do the task I need done, or turn around and walk right back out the door.
Let’s simplify it. Let’s say you’re a teenager who needs to earn a few bucks and you come to me and ask whether I have any jobs you can do to make some money. I say that I have a pile of bricks over on the east side of my backyard, and I want it moved to the west side of the yard. I’ll give you $20 to move it for me, and it should only take about a half hour. Are you really going to start complaining that moving the bricks seems like a stupid idea, they look fine where they are, and you don’t think the west side of the yard is a good place for them to be, and shouldn’t we hire a forklift, and couldn’t I have gotten some lighter bricks because these are really heavy and…? You know what my response would be, right? “Kid, I need the bricks moved; I don’t have to tell you why and I didn’t ask whether you thought it was a good idea. You want the $20, move the bricks; if not, then move on and I’ll find a kid who will.” That’s a bit simplified, but I think it illustrates the point: I have a good reason, in my judgment, for wanting the bricks where I want them. That’s my goal, to get them there. If you want to help, I’ll pay you; if not, I’ll pay someone else, but you don’t get to tell me what I want and what I need in order to get the job done. Intelligent suggestions? Fine. Arguments and resistance? Don’t waste my time.
That’s now. 25 years ago that technology didn’t exist. But, again, it’s up to the company, not the applicant, to decide what hiring forms and procedures are necessary. Are you saying that you will refuse to apply to any company that doesn’t subscribe to your approved procedure? If so, you are undoubtedly cutting yourself out of a lot of potentially good jobs.
Suppose I decided that second and third interviews are a waste of time? Hey, they can get all the information they need to in one meeting; it’s just stupid and a waste of time for me to have to go back there more than once. How many jobs do you think I could get if I took that attitude and conveyed it to potential employers?
Finally, how long would you maintain that smugness if the economy crashed and unemployment again became double digit? And for every job you applied for, there were dozens or even hundreds of qualified applicants to compete with you? Would you still argue with the employer about filling out an application, or would you suck it up in the interest of having food to eat and a roof over your head?