142-05-04-2020

Human Kindness Means Doing the Hard Thing: Optics ARE Important

By W. Owen Thornton

A corporate executive sought a promotion in another branch of the conglomerate.  The position was open to the world community at large, including folk from within the company.  No promises were made to any internal candidates: what was desired was to hire the best candidate for the job – and sometimes that can mean hiring from outside.  The internal candidate did everything she could think of to create a winning portfolio.  She provided all the required materials and submitted them on time.  It turns out, she had even met the individual doing the hiring upon several occasions and she thought she had a bit of a personal relationship with her.  But when the response to the application came back it was a mass, impersonal rejection letter sent in the worst way possible: via email.

In today’s culture, where – at least in Canada – there are not enough qualified workers to fill the jobs, employee morale is critical.  I can think of fewer ways to demotivate a highly qualified individual than doing something this careless.  Human kindness sometimes means doing the hard thing: like calling the individual, or … mailing them a polite letter … or at the very least sending them a personal email rejection.  But to be treated the same as people outside of the organization whom the hiring committee didn’t even know … that’s just wrong.  Let’s look at the circumstances more closely, shall we?

In this case the position was rather a high level one.  That meant that from across the entire conglomerate there might have been between five and ten qualified candidates who could have applied … and not all of them would have applied due to the fact that they would have to move and uproot their family etc.  So the hiring committee didn’t have the worry that they were going to take hours and hours in order to send out hundreds of personalized rejections to their own staff.

There are a great many problems with receiving a rejection letter, especially one that is a bulk email letter.  First, it’s just demeaning in a general way.  But second the individual who applied is supposed to add some merit to the company via her current position, and this rejection has just indicated that their worth, perhaps … or at least the tone of this rejection could hint that … this person’s worth may not be as appreciated as she thinks.  But there are far greater problems with this kind of treatment should the employee do either one of two things: tell others how they were treated (likely) or leave the company (a chance).

In the case of telling others about the manner in which they were rejected, this shows everyone else in the company how the company brass treats people.  If this candidate, a solid person in every way, can be treated this way, there’s little hope for anyone else to be treated any better.  In other words overall morale could go down in this individual’s department.  But this type of rejection also smacks of a problematic corporate culture which may already have a negative trickle-down effect on employees: people are not stupid – they KNOW how the game is played.  They know the brass “just doesn’t care!”  And remember, we have already seen how MRI scans in conjunction with newly-found mirror neurons demonstrate that whatever emotion or feeling someone sees in others, they feel the same emotion or feeling to a lesser extent themselves.  So if I smile and you take a picture of me, and then you hang that picture up in an MRI machine, when the person being MRI scanned looks at my picture the same part of their brain glows as did the part of my brain when I actually smiled!  In other words, what we know about mirror neurons means that in rejecting anyone’s application in this way, you’ve rejected everyone else who learns about the rejection, to a lesser degree in the same way.  This leads to low morale and a lower through-put and that’s a far greater cost than it might have been to simply respond in a human kindness, or a professional manner.

And what’s worse, if the employee becomes too disenfranchised with a thoughtless organization that can’t step up and do the humanly kind thing, they could pick up their know-how and move to another company.  Now the company left behind suffers from brain-drain, a corporate competitor also picks up what the former employee knows of their operation (and how they treat people) and the company is on the hook for upwards of $60,000+ in job search and training costs for a new employee in a highly competitive market.  Now it seems unlikely that a company that treats people in the way that they did this individual would care about the money to search for someone new but in a shrinking marketplace – there are fewer people being born to buy goods that are being produced – the thing is the company should really care about their human resources costs!  In addition to the $60,000 lost in job search and training, they have a less effective employee for upwards of a year as the new person learns the ropes.  Last, if the new person doesn’t work out there is the risk of having to spend the money all over again, and waiting for another year to have a department or division brought back up to normal levels.  In narrow markets a thin black line might become a thin red line on the balance books: a situation no company wants to face.

The bottom line?  Optics matter because people matter!  Optics and people have always mattered.  It’s a fallacy to think that we can treat people in a negative way with mass rejection emails and think this doesn’t reflect badly on an organization.  There is a far larger cost to this kind of treatment of people than simply doing the hard thing and picking up the phone and calling them, or sending them a personal letter of thanks for applying.