e most popular sport in the country, Cricket is no less than a religion in India. The Cricket craze spanned throughout the country is so enormous that be it an IPL match or the World Cup, Indians associate a huge deal of their prestige with the victory or defeat of their team. With the mountain high expectations and emotions associated with the sport, the job of a selector is no less than a recruiter who strives to hunt for and attain the best talent out there. One wrong pick for the Cricket team may subsequently result in defeat, igniting a nationwide debate questioning your choice. Comparably, in the business world, although the fiasco of a bad hire may not make it to the newspapers, but it has detrimental impact on the performance and hence profits of an organisation which highlights the risk and responsibility associated with the job of a recruiter. Analysing the similitude between recruitment in the two worlds, here are a few lessons recruiters can learn from their counterparts in Cricket.
ACTIONS NOT WORDS:
PERFORMANCE BASED HIRING
Selection in the Indian cricket team is highly performance based. Selectors examine past performance records and charts, take trials to assess current performance and scrutinize every player be it a debutant or a well-established player, to make the best suitable pick to represent the country for a tournament.
Since the evaluation parameters are closely linked to how they will perform on the game field, this methodology enhances the accuracy of the Selector’s decision. The same approach can be adopted by recruiters to ensure that the people they hire are best fit for the job by looking at their performance rather than what they claim or put on paper.
‘Performance Based Hiring’, an idea postulated by Mr Lou Adler, President of the Adler Group and a Recruiting thought leader, is becoming increasingly popular among recruiters to improve their hiring practices. At the core of the idea are two important tasks, creating a performance based job description and conducting a performance based assessment or job interview.
Contrary to the basic job description enlisting the desired qualifications, academic background, desired level of experience etc., the performance based job description focuses more on the exact performance objectives the new hire is expected to achieve. Such a job description not only provides a greater clarity to the job seeker but also makes him/her evaluate whether or not he/she can complete the tasks specified. Hence, it leads to only those candidate applying who have the motivation to perform at the job specified. A performance based interview or assessment is focused on the suitability of the candidate for the job rather than just his impression. To test his/her suitability, the candidate may be asked problem solving questions related to the job in the interview or may be given an assignment to perform so as to check the validity of the skills he claims to possess.
“What the recruiter needs is a methodology that goes way beyond what is claimed by the candidate and towards more authentic proof of performance.”
IPL AND GIG ECONOMY :
A PARALLELISM
With 11 seasons so far, IPL is a Cricket success story. With a player contract term of one year, the IPL team owners fight every year at auctions to acquire the best talent for their team. But imagine how would IPL turn out to be if the players were hired permanently? It sure would be very different from the status quo as the team owners would no longer possess the flexibility to experiment with team composition.
This idea corresponds to the existence of gig economy in the business world. Contractual and freelancing opportunities have been gaining momentum in the employment market as these are highly beneficial to meet specific project requirements, mostly for short project based work requiring certain skill set which do not lie in the area of expertise of the permanent staff. Due to cost effectiveness and more efficient outcome of this kind of arrangement, the gig economy has been gaining momentum and is expected to be an even more important aspect of the employment market in the coming future.
However, a word of caution is that this idea depends upon the nature of work in question just like how one year contracts though crucial for championships like IPL might not work for specific events like World Cup which require the national team to be the one which is consistently playing for the country in various international tournaments and thereby have a good team balance .
CONCLUSION
Recruitment goes beyond the business world. We are moving into a world where things are not industry specific but multidisciplinary and hence recruiters must as well learn from various spheres and improve their hiring practices.
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