Incompetency based Competency testing

Imagine, if you will, that you can sing.

You want to take this further and so you apply to the X Factor.  The day of your audition arrives and you are standing on stage in front of Simon Cowell and his team.  You are there to prove that your voice has the X Factor and that you can croon a good tune worthy of the public buying your records and coming to your concerts.

You walk nervously onto the X marked on the stage and then get asked to draw your ‘family shield’ onto a flip chart and then spend 3 or 4 minutes presenting the shield to the audience, explaining all the different pictures you’ve nervously drawn that supposedly encapsulate and explain your life.

Next, having been herded into a group with a dozen or so other hopefuls, you are given a joint exercise to complete.  Your imaginary task is the marketing a CD of songs to the public.  The fact that none of you have any marketing experience doesn’t matter.  Nor does it matter that all of you are only there to apply for a nice job that only involves singing and performing for the public.  Instead, this is your task, and the judges are watching you.  Oh, how they are watching you.  Looking for every hesitation, every word you speak.  They are scoring your every move on your ability to do something other than the job you are applying for.

After your allotted team deliberation time, and, armed with a whiteboard and a flip chart, your new team have to prepare to make a presentation to the judges about how you will be imaginarily marketing the imaginary CD.  Once again the judges are making furious notes as you work together to prepare the presentation, writing down every time each individual contributes to the collective task.  Not intimidating at all!

Between you, somehow, the presentation is muddled through, with the judges then interrogating the team making impossible to satisfy objections and comments about the pros and cons of the thrown together strategy you invented during the ten minutes you were allowed to prepare.

Still not having demonstrated your ability to sing or perform, you are then shepherded individually into a room and asked a number of every day questions like, “Tell me of a time when your objectives couldn’t be met in time and how you re-organised your processes in order to deal with the missed deadline.”

Following this you are presented with a 25 page long document full of words.  You have only 2 minutes to circle the words that best describe you, your grandparents or your relationship with your pets.

Back out on the stage somewhat dazed and confused you are advised it is finally time to sing but you have to sing for only ten seconds and only in a manner which will overcome the noise of a pneumatic drill being deliberately operated next to you on the stage, forcing you into a situation that strains your voice and completely misrepresents your actual abilities.

Inbetween all these stages of the, ahem, ‘competition’ process, Simon Cowell and his Company Executives have mind-bombed you and the other contestants with a huge quantity of corporate information, including the structure of the company, how it began, what its five year strategy is for branching off into Latvia, and an extensive almost day-by-day blow-by-blow description of the more mundane of the aspects of the routine the eventual winner will be involved in.  You are marked down for not asking intelligent and relevant questions about all the information you have been fed.

A buffet lunch is provided, during which you are also being monitored and marked for your ability to interact with the other contestants.

By the end of the long stressful day you leave confused and not really having been able to demonstrate your simple yet unique ability to sing or perform, which is ultimately the ‘talent’ you applied to the X Factor to be given a chance to use on a daily bass.

Stupid or what?  Ridiculous.  Cruel.

However, take this away from being an application for the X Factor and imagine it is the application process for a large organisation, maybe a bank, local Government, or any corporate organisation that has been stupidly conned into believing that ‘Competency based Assessment’ can in some way bring them the right employees.

Imagine if you will, that the job being applied for is that of a cleaner.  At no point is the applicant’s ability to perform day-to-day cleaning actually examined.  Decisions are being made on their ability to successfully survive through irrelevant mumbo jumbo rather than do the job they have applied for.

This mumbo-jumbo is slowly being rolled out to more and more organisations by the aggressive recruitment consultancy business who are able to perpetrate the lie that competency based interviewing and assessing somehow raises the quality of those employed.  It doesn’t.

Statistically of course, wastage (people leaving) remains the same or slightly worse in companies recruiting in this way compared to companies recruiting in a more realistic way.  Company loyalty isn’t increased, individuality is non-existent and there is nobody employed who can shine or bring something new to the table.  In fact, there appears to be absolutely nothing gained by the ritual humiliation of potential employees in this way.

Well, nothing gained by the potential employer.  A lot to be gained by those who sell-in and manage the ridiculous process, yes of course.  And, that’s what it’s all about.  It’s the usual “creating a solution to a non-problem” and then pretending there is a problem, technique.   That always works when presented to corporate fools near the top of an organisation who have no thoughts of their own and are usually confusing and strangling the success or efficiency of the company in the first place.

They conveniently neglect to say that the mumbo-jumbo methodology is highly discrimatory, possibly even against the law.  If we forget for a moment that the potential employee is not actually being tested on their ability to perform the actual job they are applying for, whether that be cleaning, answering the phone, or fixing the plumbing we have to look at the bigger picture.  There are members of our society who, despite being a brilliant cleaner, phone operator, or plumber, might appear slow and on the outside of any ‘team-working’ exercise.  Foreign language, partial sight, hard of hearing, a different age to the rest of the team being assessed; all will force an under-performance compared to other candidates, and so exclude them from employment in a role they are perfectly confident and capable of excelling within.

To me, if I am interviewing a cleaner, I only need them to show me that they can clean.  A phone operator only needs to show me they can talk on the phone, and a plumber only needs to show me he can look after pipes.  End of story.  Their abilities when it comes to answering competency based questions, or performing stupid pretend group tasks that have no relevance to their job are all irrelevant and completely bogus.

Asking them to try to perform outrageously bogus activities in this way is insulting and degrading.

This really must stop before it infects everywhere.  It is time all of this mumbo-jumbo was exposed for what it really is and the increasing number of corporate bodies stupid enough to implement it need to be prosecuted for their acts of discrimination.