Iffy Gobbledygook "Right Fit" Parameters

Talent acquisition!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What the hell is that???

“As the pressure to identify talent intensifies, companies need to address a more holistic view of every stage of the candidate’s journey, from candidate to applicant to new hire. Hiring is too important to get wrong, so bringing data together to predict where to find top talent, and which individuals will be successful within the organization is critical???????”

Really??? This is how we are obsessively "hiring" people today - as if the world will fall apart if we dare to let one decision go awry? No wonder everyone is becoming anxious and depressed.

Talent is an innate capacity to be enthralled by and to practice at a high level - in a specific subject which baffles many others who are not as "talented" or bedazzled by that activity or interest. Basically, talented people are different from others who are not. And THAT is what makes the a good fit in any organization. They have unique perspectives to offer instead of being just another "same" cog in a boringly irrelevant wheel.

Talent aquisition? Are we not, rather, talking skill acquisition here? Eerily, it doesn't seem so.

The solution in the discovery of who are the the talented individuals among us who are best equipped to fulfill a certain "corporate or group think task" is to drop the purported "accuracies" of modern mindshift determinants. Why? They seem to only pinpoint the bad boy concerns of a "clique mentality", those bordering on a fascist obsession for  sameness, for oneness, for homogeneity - today's requirements for acceptance and OKness - euphemistically describing a person as one who "fits in".

Basically, today we are increasingly destroying the diversities, the differences required to assure progress - and we increasingly do this through a virtual reality pinpointing of who the "right fit" persons are to work within "our" common goal environment - as if all co-workers should be clones of each other in order to be acceptable and, as a result, productive!

(Shades of the 19th century concept of assembly-line worker bee modules and models.)

Such attitudes "fit" right in with our contemporary "management beliefs" that everything must be quantitatively assessed rather than qualitatively measured. No longer is the goal excellence, but rather the impossibility (illusion?) of "perfection". And ironically, we don't seem to take much of a measure as to whom this right  fit profits most.

What we fail to see is that selecting only those who "fit in" encourages a densification of homogeneity which eventually eliminates the very possibility of difference, of problem solving, of creativity, of  progress, of success. Group think based on "purported" scientifically refined workforce data too often ends up creating an illusion of security through a specific think block committee mindset which eventually (in most cases) destroys the collective goals inherent in a specific purpose orientation.

In the end, we are screwing ourselves daily to achieve illusions rather than goals. We’re like obsessive “clean-nuts” needing to make sure we are perfectly sanitary in everything we do in order to be perfectly healthy (which is impossible) and who then only end up being “perfectly ill” because perfection only causes allergies, asthma and other environmentally based diseases born of the illusory perfect "state of being".

In the past 20 years I’ve seen fully functional, incredibly diverse and successful corporations go under because of the  "viral importation" of such a mind set. - this need to render perfectly homogenous (i.e.: the same as "moi")   that which is wondrously diverse. (Remember when everyone needed to have an MBA?) Take a look at some of those companies which put their futures in the hands of a “highly intelligent those” who may have had the brains to get their "papers" but had no wherewithal to implement the knowledge acquired. Like Midas, in the end they destroy everything they touch - for the sake of the sought after gold.

Even very recently, I have been witness to organizations increasingly eliminating everyone who, though highly skilled, functional and successful, are suddenly deemed to not “fit in” based on algorithm determinants of a more holistic (?) (read: pseudo-scientific) approach to "personnel selection".

Result? A swift decline into irrelevance. (Some of these institutions, after only a few months of implementing that “just right hiring process”, have already begun sliding out of view into oblivion.

If it sounds like we are becoming robots. . .  We are.   We obey the latest dictate when in fact to survive and thrive we should disobey more often.  

Just because someone fits in, in a populist sort of “data” formulation way, does not guarantee success of any kind in any area. Humans are much more complicated than that. and the day we poo-poo that truth is the day we become submissive to our own ignorance about the wonders of  being alive and creative and motivated. As in portraiture, to create "the just right face", each part must play its unique role, all the while seamlessly interconnecting which each other part. A cheek is never a nose, is not an ear, is not a chin. Yet, without each difference,  a "successful" face can never be made whole.