Month: August 2010

Thanks partly to the economic downturn, employee theft is up big time.  I don’t know for sure if people are so strapped financially they make desperate moves by stealing property databases, cash, and serious amount of inventory, or if there is a trendy concept floating about that that declares we should forget about ethics and grab what we can.  Either way there is some pretty ugly stuff going out there and employee theft has gone far beyond a few pens and a stapler.

In fact, The Australian Associated Press reports in one article that in one case in Australia, the prosecutor intoned that the serious theft by one of its former employees forced a prominent retailer to go out of business.  That seems like a whole lot of stealing.   the accused was a bank signatory and had access to the company funds.  She allegedly transferred some $20 Million out of the company account and into her own.    She then allegedly used the money to buy property, cars, jewelry, and clothes.

The woman has pleaded guilty to the charges.  She said she committed the theft because it was easy to do.  She may be looking at eight and twelve years in prison.  But her former  employer, retailer Clive Peters,  has been put into bankruptcy,  the results of both the theft and an economic downturn.

If you are an employer the last thing you need are employers who consider themselves stealth partners who will rob and steal their unfair share.  while background checks are no guarantee you will filter out all the potential office thieves, they do go a long way in determining the ones with unsavory pasts.   There is the matter of previous criminal records, and then there are the professional reference verifications that may flag any potential trouble.  there is also the background check where you run the social security trace to see if the new job candidate is actually working under his real name and social security number.   Credit reports may determine who may be in desperate straits enough to consider stealing.   While credit reports may not be relevant to most employees, they may determine your best employment candidates for the financial roles or those who have access to your sensitive proprietary databases.

I realize these are tough economic times and decent people have bad credit and most would never consider stealing to make up their losses.  But some will. And some will do so anyway, if only to aggrandize themselves with the finery they believe they so richly deserve.  I have written about employee theft on several occasions.  It is a subject that constantly pops up int he new releases.  On such article I published was entitled, Employee Theft Can Get Out of Hand.   Run background checks for your preemployment screening needs.  Call references.  Perform due diligence.  Check them out before you hire.  Or you may regret it after.

Over time recruiters have been pressed to be increasingly stringent about their employment candidates and their respective college degrees.  Be it undergraduate degrees or graduate degrees,  a great many companies want their job applicants to have graduated from he top ten schools at the top of their class with the top references and ratings.    Even those employers recruiting from the bulk of private  and public colleges and universities require grade point averages 3.0 or better.   But then there is reality, which like in a great many cases the hard facts of life are often avoided.

Michael Brandt of Bright Move makes some interesting points on his blog article entitled, C’s Make Degrees, Are you Filtering Good Candidates With GPAs Below 3.0? He writes that the National Association of Colleges and Employers claim in a recent survey that 63% of the recruiters used 3.0 GPA as the cutoff point for interviewing candidates.   He writes that  while good grades may be necessary in math and science areas, do they really indicate how well a graduate would do working as a sales person.    He notes that the graduate with a 2.5 at Harvard may be a lot smarter than the graduate with a 4.0 graduating for the local community college.    He writes of community and business networking involvement and how the leaders are usually highly invested in joining clubs and organizations.

I tend to agree with Brandt.   Like Brandt, I base my perspective on personal experiences.  Over my own career I see how grades may favorably impact some industries while they have little or nothing to do with others.  In conducting education verification background checks for quite some time, I have gotten a sense of how many 3.0 GPAs may actually exist in this world and what that means at the end of the day.   I have read enough history and the biographies of world class performers to understand that more than a fair share were, frankly, terrible in school.  Some of the more notable names in American industry were high school dropouts.   Some were college drop outs.   Bill Gates comes to mind off the top of my head, and he fared pretty well, all things considered.

Conversely, I see people with excellent grades who are everything from ineffective to incompetent out in the real world.     You see a lot of people who have excelled at academics but he falter in the trenches.   To take a test, that may be one thing.  To sell a product or to lobby someone or move them around, that may be quite another.  Sometimes you need the brightest kid in the class, and sometimes you need the one who can wield the ax.  Sometimes you need the one who may appear the slacker of all time but can in his daydreaming conceive of that one great idea that becomes the game changer in your industry.   In this case, Thomas Edison or Albert Einstein comes to mind.  Two academic slackers who managed to make a small dent in history.

In some ways that the recruiters set the bar for a 3.0 GPA show more their own conformity to pigeonhole than anything else.   Dumb in many ways.  Now most recruiters are under pressure from their managers or their clients, the end employer, to search according to a given criteria.   But at the end of the day it reflects more on the lack of imagination or more so the lack of determination to drill deeper to find a recruit.    It is largely paint by numbers, where true performers and natural creatives may be passed over in favor of the same-same kind of employment candidate.    This one has almonds, this one doesn’t.

So the issue becomes, despite all common theory and practice, does recruiting graduates with only a 3.0GPA or better really assure you of the top candidates with the greatest ability and the great potential?   Or does it just show you that someone knew how to take tests better than some of the others?  Good question.  Or maybe not.  Maybe for the sake of expedience, for convenience and so not to further burden or empower–depending how you look at it– the human resources managers or recruiters we process job applicants much the same way we process chickens or anything else in our mass production lines.

I would love to hear from those out there who dig deeper to find their finer candidates.    Maybe there are still some who do not filter out potential job candidates because of a C average.  Employers who look for character and personality, the ability to makes friends and network.   Employers who look for the creative types, the innovators and the rest who are maybe not the safest choices but at the end of the day may be the best of choices.    Like anything else, recruiting according to the total package may take more work, but then it may be much more rewarding.