We Consider Attitude More Than Skills During Recruitment - Perita Kimeng

Mrs. Perita Kimeng is the Executive Director of StreSERT Services Limited, a human resource firm. She speaks about the approaches to recruiting employees and the need to regulate HR practice in this interview with Ife Adedapo.

How can an employee be made productive?

Some organisations give orientation to new recruits while some do not consider such training and orientation as important. Our environment is such that people don’t work with their qualifications anymore. Graduates of philosophy are working in the banks and people who studied history are working in the manufacturing industry. Some people just study whatever course they are offered in the university and when they graduate, they are at a dilemma as regards the kind of job they can do.

What I have observed is that individuals have certain makeup outside their course of study. For example if there are 25 people studying music in the higher institution, you find out that only five have passion for it while the others don’t have the passion for the course. Therefore, they will probably look at other career options after graduation. They won’t have the drive to practise what they studied at school.

Sometimes underperfor-mance can be attributed to an error in recruitment process. They are likely to perform better if they had the right kind of orientation in training school. A probation period of six months is also given to them, where the recruits are given a chance to show if they are cut out for the job, where the person now shows certain improvements.

As we know, not all people show improvement at the same level at the same time. In HR, we hire for attitude and not for skills because anyone can be trained. Even without going to the university, you can train someone computer and the person would perform well. Young people want to get rich quick nowadays, and that is the approach with which they go into the job market, while some want to be like their colleagues who have worked in a bank or riding cars.

Such an attitude that is focused on how much will be earned from the job is wrong. But if the person is determined to learn, that is the right approach. Some learn fast, while others are in-between – not too fast and too slow – and they get by. We try to avoid writing people off.

What are the procedures required for recruiting people?

The primary motive is to fill positions because every company will look at their need by conducting a needs assessment. They must have a clear focus as to what the business was set up to achieve. They will now determine the kind of personnel they will require because no company can operate on its own without manpower; they will require different categories of personnel to fill available positions in the company.

After doing its need analysis, they would come up with what they would want each of them to perform, be it administrative department, human resource department, logistics or even in its core area. Decisions in terms of who heads the department, the type of qualification the person should have and the years of experience the person should come on to the job with. We have to come up with job specifications because we have different levels of people with specific qualifications to carry on the business.

And based on our educational system, some organisations emphasise on candidates with second class upper. They are the calibre of people they are looking for because they have certain level of competence they want, in terms of personality and the use of their initiative, to be able to work without much supervision. Those are candidates companies are looking for and other people with lower grades don’t stand a chance unless the company is open to training their personnel although very few companies are open to that kind of approach of recruiting. There are some banks that employ people as fresh graduates and they set them up for training because they want certain standards; they put some money down to train them.

Why do some organisations opt for internal recruitment?

Because some people have been in the industry for a while, they know the kind of players out there who are fit for top positions in the company. They understand the kind of skills in the labour market and they understand that some skills are limited to certain people therefore, they could use that approach. There are different approaches to recruitment, it could be head hunt, most especially if it is a position in which there is no particular set skills, this can involve placing advert, and the company has to bring them on and train them; such offer is opened up for people to apply. As people go up the managerial ladder, there are limited people that would apply for some positions so they make use of internal recruitment, unless the company is a new one that comes into Nigeria and they don’t know anyone and they are trying to put up manpower in various positions, they would in that case, advertise.

Are there practices by some organisations that affect HR profession?

We have a situation where all kinds of people are into HR recruiting. We have come to see in our practice that some people who want to leave paid employment, always think that one of the easiest jobs they can take up and do on their own is HR. We find all kinds of people coming into it. There has been a call to regulate this practice and that is the challenge that an organisation like Human Capital Providers Association of Nigeria is trying to meet. That has been on for a while now.

What the organisation is trying to do is to streamline the process of having people who come onto HR practice and for the whole system to be standardised so that those who don’t have the skills should not be practitioners. The challenge we have now is that everybody wants to be in it. They believe it is a ‘no-brainer’ business that requires minimum skills, but then, they also know that there is so much unemployment and people are in the job market too.

What we have is that there are people who are claiming to be HR professionals and are extorting money from applicants which is against the labour law. What professional HR organisations do is to actually place them in companies and those companies pay for them.

There are regulations but there is no effective monitoring in place to check all those practices and these unlicensed organisations just carry on. They collect money from applicants and they don’t get recruited. Sometimes they go to the company they are posted to and they discover it is a residential home. This is how applicants are exploited.

Source: Punch