I recently answered a recommendation survey for a former employee who was applying for a job. He had been a good employee but was let go in a layoff because he was a recent hire. (I have since retired from the same company.)
The survey asked me to rate this person’s work traits compared to other people in his position. My response options were “not applicable,” “average,” “top 25 percent” and “top 10 percent.” Because I managed a staff of more than a dozen people, some for many years, I couldn’t rank him in the top 10 percent for most of the questions save for a few exceptions, like team building.
I later got a call from the hiring agency, asking why I hadn’t rated him higher on some of the questions. I explained that he was a more recent hire who had been laid off, but that he had been a great employee, and that I would hire him back in a heartbeat. I gave what I thought were useful details about how he had done a good job. I got the feeling, however, that the person I was talking to wasn’t convinced, and that the mathematical average of my answers meant they would not offer him the job.
If I’m asked to do similar surveys in the future, how should I handle it? Could I compare the employee to only those people who had been in the job for the same amount of time, and therefore give higher ratings? Is this just some kind of game? Should I rate good employees as outstanding?
JobAdvisor: There’s a time for grading on a curve and a time for boosting. If you want to help this guy land a job, you should be hyping him to the moon.
When you’re assessing multiple people all vying for the same limited resource — a promotion, raises on a tight budget — you have to be objective in weighing their contributions and strengths against one another. You need to fairly apportion that reward the same way Olympic judges distribute medals based on minute variations among uniformly excellent competitors. You want to be able to show your work and justify your decision if someone challenges it later.
In this case, the reward you were in charge of disbursing was your professional endorsement, and only one person was in the running for it. The hiring agency had you compare him with his former colleagues to make sure he wasn’t a weak link being quiet-fired under the cover of a convenient layoff.
But that wasn’t a fair comparison.
Your former employee wasn’t competing against his old colleagues for this new job. He was competing against a pool of unknown competitors on the open market. Weighing his performance against the full range of people he used to work with is as pointless as basing his prospective salary on what he used to earn. If yours is an employer that draws top performers, then it stands to reason that in a last-in, first-out layoff, even the workers it cuts loose would be any other employer’s first choice.
Another point: Because employers generally share only bare-bones information about bad employees to avoid legal trouble, a less-than-glowing assessment is often read between the lines as a thumbs-down. You were trying to give an objectively honest answer to the question you thought you were being asked. But the question seems to have been more subjective than you realized, and they interpreted your honesty as hesitation — especially since, as a retiree, you’re presumably free to be candid.
Next time, instead of playing into the prospective employer’s game of pitting a candidate against people irrelevant to his current standing, follow your instinct and rate him against his actual peers: The average employee who has been in the job the length of time he was. No one is going to demand a representative sampling of all the referrals you’ve given to make sure you’re being consistent. They just want to know if there’s any reason, spoken or implied, not to hire the candidate.
You can also view this as an opportunity to be a counterweight against the thumb of stigma tipping the scale against unemployed job seekers. As I have discussed before, hiring managers and recruiters harbor unemployment bias against candidates regardless of their skills and qualifications; the longer they go without a job, the less likely they are to be hired. Singing his praises without reservation and lamenting your employer’s loss of his skills would help mitigate that stigma.
You’re not boosting a golfing buddy’s undeserving kid above stronger but less well-connected candidates. You’re not pulling illicit strings. You’re not covering up bad behavior to help an unqualified person fail upward. You are simply telling the truth about a candidate’s qualifications as you perceive them. And when you are presented with an arbitrary, nonscientific opinion survey, it’s perfectly acceptable to supply your own arbitrary, nonscientific opinion.