Little known fact about me: I have a day job. A “real” job. And wow are those quotation marks merited. A lot about it is not real at all. It’s not where my heart lives.
Today I spent the day interviewing. And I couldn’t stop thinking about the conversation around Judith Warner’s post, between Ivy League Insecurities and the Elmo Wallpaper and me. Obviously there are a lot of different threads woven into that particular discussion. But one of the key ones, at least for me, is the paucity of information that most of us need to jump to massive conclusions about other people. Judith Warner’s specific point was about educated women and the ways that they are resented and muffled.
And today was, of course, a day where I worked through a list of people who had been pre-screened rigorously on these very dimensions. Not told to shut up, not told to stop whining, but selected and deemed worthy according to a very similar set of criteria than the ones that the rest of us are talking about. And yes, I do believe that things like education and former employer are good, albeit imperfect, screens with which to assess someone’s potential suitability as an employee. I also believe that there are many, many qualified – actually, exceptional – people out there who do not have these kinds of schools and companies on their resumes. The challenge, of course, is finding them. Ultimately these basic filters of education and employer are sufficiently efficacious that we are willing to live with the trade-off that we will miss some very strong candidates.
One of Aidan’s sentences in her comment on my post has really stuck with me – I think this is as resonant and wise as anything I’ve heard in a long time: Perhaps all we can do is own the fact that this is what we are doing – judging – and that each and every judgment says more about the judge than the judged.
I thought of this today as I met candidates, looked at resumes, and gathered feedback from my colleagues. How we react to other people ultimately says a lot more about who we are than about the other person. Taken to the extreme, I suppose, you could say that others are just a blank screen onto which we project our own issues, insecurities, fears, and assumptions. We know, for example, that it is true that the things that drive us insane in those close to us are almost always things we dislike in ourselves.
Anyway, back to work. I found myself today trying to be thoughtful about my own assumptions and to question those of my interviewers. An old recruiting adage is that people have a “like me” bias and I have seen this in action over and over again. It occurs to me that my tremendous enthusiasm for engineers probably reveals my own lack of pride in my very soft-and-fuzzy English degree. How insecure does one have to be to have a “not like me” preference? Conversation for another time, that one. (We’ll take a moment for a fun fact. When I lived in England, I was all signed up to take 4 A Level courses for 11th and 12th grade: Chemistry, Physics, Biology, and Math. It only took me a few years at American boarding school and college to roll all the way downhill to that “softest” of subjects, English.).
My personal preferences when it comes to evaluating resumes and candidates? As I said, I very much like engineers and hard scientists. I am very interested in GPA and not much in SAT and GMAT scores. I always read the “personal” line, am generally more impressed by someone who is #1 at a big state school than middle of the pack at Princeton, and deeply turned off by even the smallest typo (Worst I have ever seen? Goldman Sach’s. The person received a polite TBNT – thanks but no thanks – from me). My root system was definitely formed at BCG, where I grew up as a professional and learned to prize intellectual horsepower above all else. The preference to hire the smartest person you can find and train them in the specifics of the job is deeply ingrained in me.
Anyway. I tried extra hard today to unpack the feedback I received, to hear it in light of the teller, and to think hard about each of my instinctive reactions to candidates. I tried to be careful about the assumptions I drew. I realize we have to live with some bucketing of people; on some level, simple filters help us order an enormous universe of options. This is true, frankly, whether we are talking about candidates or jobs or potential life partners. But I think being aware of the screens we use, either consciously or unconsciously, and trying to be very deliberate about the ways our own life experiences and preferences shape the way we evaluate others (in a professional context or otherwise) are both worth the effort.