烂招聘之源：岗位职责描述

企业招聘环节中职位描述往往是最耳熟能详的。在职位描述中，最基本、最确定不变的一个组成部分就是对应聘者资质和技能的一系列要求。比如求职网站Monster.com上最近有一个销售高管岗位的职业描述，其中提到，应聘者必须拥有“学士学位、至少两年的医疗保健业信息技术或者相关领域工作经验、出色的沟通技巧，要有积极主动的团队合作精神。”

这些资质要求看上去已成常识。但凭借常识招聘的方式可能是招徕最佳人选的最大障碍。为什么？因为这样的职业描述来源于过时的员工评价方式。过时在哪呢，就是关注应聘者的共性，而非个性。

这种有误导性的观念起源于19世纪的欧洲，一位比利时的数学家首次提出“普通人”的概念，第一代社会学家由此开创了区分各色人等的做法，根据观察对象共有的基本特质分为“士兵型”、“罪犯型”和“钢铁工人型”。

一个世纪以来，企业也用同样的思路在职位描述中假定某类员工应具备的素质、比如典型的销售经理应该是什么样。但按类型甄选人才隐藏着极大的问题：企业的关注重心偏离，忽略应聘者个人的相关信息。

幸运的是，现在有一种更好的招聘方法，建立在人称“个性科学”新型跨领域学科基础上。这项科学不接受以“普通人”的观念，依靠21世纪数学领域的动态系统理论，而不是19世纪的统计学。

个性科学的一个关键概念是情境原理。情境原理认为，员工的绩效总是取决于特定个体和特定情境的互动。而且，如果不考虑个体行为所处的环境，评估某个员工的能力或者潜力就毫无意义。

情境原理已经改变了许多曾经依据共性分类的领域。肿瘤学家就改变了标准类型癌症的标准化治疗法，转为针对不同癌症特有生理情境的个性化治疗。生物学家也不再研究“标准化细胞”的模型，而是研究“特定环境下单个细胞”的动态变化。

但在所有领域之中，情境理论对企业招聘带来的影响可能最大。

情境理论主张，不要描述企业希望招聘哪一类员工，而是将重点放在岗位需要的特定绩效，以及员工工作时将身处的特定情境，然后挑出曾在类似情境下能达到类似绩效的求职者。

以上述销售高管的职位描述为例。这份工作要求应聘者具有学士学位，可能是因为销售高管通常都是本科毕业。另外，职位描述提到需要至少两年的经验，这也是企业假定类似的销售高管一般拥有的经历年限。最后，职位描述坚持应聘者要有“出色的沟通技巧”，看起来也是个不动脑子就加进去的要求，这又是基于共性的概括，并不明确，也没解释清楚。

以上职位要求没有一项提及求职者应有哪些具体能力。更重要的是，即便符合了所有要求，也没法判断求职者到底能不能在特定职业情境中完成既定绩效。

那么，要怎样改变职位描述中那些中规中矩的资质和技能要求？人才培训与猎头机构Lou Adler Group的创始人卢•阿德勒已经实践了侧重情境的招聘方式，开发了一种招聘和聘用员工的新方法，称为“基于绩效的招聘”。阿德勒解释说：“用人机构不要描述想要哪种员工，而是描述希望员工完成哪些工作。”

在转行做招聘以前，阿德勒为一家航空航天制造商设计零部件。作为工程师，他深谙要根据零部件未来使用环境挑选适合的原材料，这可能是他会以同样思路甄选员工的原因。

阿德勒举了一个例子，用来解释绩效招聘比一般的职业描述效果好在哪。英国一家社交媒体初创公司要招募市场营销团队主管。他们列出市场总监通常应具备的资质和技能，最后招到一名有多年营销经验，简历也非常出色的人。

然而这次招聘后来变成一场大灾难。怎么会这样？因为这位总监此前一直在大公司工作，手握大把预算，通晓层级分明的管理模式。但这家初创公司变化发展迅速，节奏快，营销预算较少，管理方式不正规。新情景和该总监此前成功的环境截然不同，因此他根本不适合。

这家初创公司只好求助阿德勒。他用基于绩效的招聘法帮助该公司锁定了一位让人非常意外的人选——一位毫无营销经验的药剂师。首席执行官起初将信将疑，但阿德勒向他解释了，变动大、节奏快、预算少、管理不正规的环境下，那位药剂师如何胜任营销总监。事实证明，药剂师获得了巨大的成功，现在已经成为公司最得力、影响最大的员工之一。

注重情境的招聘方式还有一个好处：让员工感到和本职工作的关系更密切，也更有成就感，进而提高员工的生产力和忠诚度。它也让企业更容易招到优秀的人才。

阿德勒的公司已经帮助上万名负责招聘的人事经理采用基于绩效的招聘方法，其中既有小本经营的初创公司，又有《财富》500强企业。“企业总是抱怨招不到人才，以为有技能差距，其实只是思考方式上有差距，”阿德勒说，“如果多花工夫明确工作岗位的具体情境，企业必有收获。”（财富中文网）

作者Todd Rose与Ogi Ogas合著有The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness一书（HarperOne出版社2016年出版）

译者：Pessy

校对：夏林

There are few recruiting practices in business as familiar as the job description, and one of its most basic and entrenched components is the list of candidate qualifications and skills. For instance, a recent job listing for a sales executive position on Monster.com said that applicants must have “a bachelor’s degree, a minimum of at least two years selling in healthcare IT or a related field, excellent communication skills, and be a team player with a positive attitude.”

This list of qualifications seems like common sense. And yet, this common sense approach to recruiting may be the single biggest obstacle to hiring the best person for a job. Why? Because such job descriptions are rooted in a flawed and obsolete way of thinking about employees. That is, they look at candidates as averages instead of individuals.

This misguided mindset originated in Europe in the 19th century with the invention of the “Average Man” by a Belgian mathematician, which led the first generation of social scientists to develop the practice of “typing” in which they averaged the qualities of each class of people to describe the essential traits of the “soldier type,” “criminal type,” or “ironworker type.”

For the past century, the same kind of thinking has led to job descriptions that identify the presumed essential qualities of a type of employee, such as a typical sales executive. There is a huge hidden problem with typing, however: it steers attention away from what is relevant and informative about an individual candidate.

Fortunately, there is a better approach to recruiting, one grounded in a new interdisciplinary science known as the Science of the Individual. This science rejects the entire notion of the “Average Man” and relies on the math of 21st century dynamic systems theory rather than 19th century statistics.

One of the key concepts of the science of the individual is the context principle, which holds that performance always depends on the interaction of a specific individual and a specific situation; it is meaningless to evaluate an individual’s ability or potential without referring to the environment in which the individual will be performing.

The context principle has already transformed many of the fields that once relied on typing. Oncologists have switched their emphasis from standardized treatments for standard types of cancer to personalized treatments that target the specific physiological contexts of individual cancer. And biologists no longer study models of “standard cells” but the dynamic activity of “individual cells in context.”

But the context principle holds the potential for the greatest impact in business hiring.

Instead of describing the type of employee you think you want to hire, the context principle suggests it is better to focus on the particular performance a job demands and the particular contexts where the employee will be performing, and then look for candidates who have successfully executed similar performances in similar contexts.

Consider the sale executive job description above. That job requires that candidates possess a Bachelor’s degree, probably because the typical sales executive possesses a bachelor’s degree. Next, the job description demands a minimum of two years of experience. Again, this is presumably the average amount of experience that similar sales executives possess. And finally, insisting upon “excellent communication skills” might seem like a no-brainer, but once again this is an average-based summary rather than something precise and explanatory.

None of these requirements provide insight into the actual constellation of a candidate’s abilities, and more importantly, fulfilling them provides almost no useful information about whether the candidate can execute the specific performance we need in the specific job contexts.

So what can replace the job description’s venerable list of qualifications and skills? One man who has pioneered a practical and effective context-focused method of recruiting is Lou Adler, founder of the Lou Adler Group. He developed a new way to recruit and hire employees that he calls “performance-based hiring.” Adler explains: “Instead of describing the person they want, employers describe the job they want done.”

Before switching to a career in recruiting, Adler designed parts for an aerospace manufacturer. This might be why he approaches the practice of selecting employees with the mindset of an engineer who knows that selecting the right material for a part depends on accurate knowledge of the environment where the part will be used.

Adler gives one example where performance-based hiring produced better results than the generic job description. A social media startup in Britain needed to hire someone to head their marketing team. They put out a listing of the qualifications and skills of a typical marketing director and ended up hiring someone with many years of marketing experience and an impressive resume.

Yet he turned out to be a complete disaster. Why? All of his experience was at large corporations with sizable budgets and hierarchical management. The startup, however, was much more dynamic and fast-paced, with a smaller marketing budget and a more informal approach to management. The new context was different from the ones where the marketing director had been successful, and as a result he was a terrible fit.

The start-up turned to Adler, who used performance-based hiring to help them identify a very counter-intuitive prospect, a pharmacist without any marketing experience. Though the CEO was skeptical at first, Adler showed how the pharmacist had actually performed the same kinds of tasks that the startup’s marketing director would need to do, in similarly dynamic, fast-paced, low-budget, informal settings. The pharmacist turned out to be a huge success and is now one of the company’s most effective and influential employees.

There is another benefit of context-aware hiring: it makes employees feel more connected and fulfilled by their jobs, which makes them more productive and loyal. It also makes it easier to recruit great candidates.

The Adler Group has helped more than 10,000 hiring managers adopt performance-based hiring at businesses ranging from shoestring startups to Fortune 500 companies. “Companies always lament there’s a shortage of talent, that there’s a skills gap. But really there’s just a thinking gap,” Adler says. “If you spend the effort thinking through the contextual details of the job, you’re going to be rewarded.”

Todd Rose and Ogi Ogas are the authors of The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness (HarperOne, 2016).