Imagine when you were in elementary school. It is a warm summer day, everyone is outside playing on the playground. Some children play on the swings, others on the bars, while others decide they want to play kickball. After choosing the captains, they begin to choose who will be on their winning team. Captains quickly pick their friends, which goes fast, and then there are the few remaining geeks or nerds to choose from. Not being as popular as a child, I was one of the last children to be picked up. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to play kickball, but I wasn’t an outgoing person in my childhood.
But how do personal, organizational and cultural values come into play with my position as manager and recruiter of a bank call center? How can past experiences help or hinder future events?
Personal values
As the years went by, I started opening up and started making friends in high school. I tried to be with the “crowd” at the same time trying to be nice to the other not-so-popular students. Many times I felt an “instinctive” feeling about doing the right thing, other times I made the popular decision; right or wrong. But as I got older, I began to realize that the right decision was always the best one for me. It helped me to be ethical not only in my personal life, but also in my professional life. He began to define my personal values and has guided me through difficult decisions, popular or not, that I have not regretted.
Personal values are something that I think you learn. It goes back to the ongoing debate about nature versus nurture. I think my values come from both. I grew up in a two-parent house with an older brother. My parents worked for a living and I learned most of my values from them. They welcomed me to be respectful, hard-working, and honest, and above all, we treat everyone the way we want to be treated. I learned not to take money for granted because we didn’t have much. I put on clothes of my friends and relatives. He taught me that money is not what makes you happy, but that you should like yourself for what you are and not for what you have.
Now, as a hiring manager for Compass Bank, I look for similar values in potential employees. I ask them questions about their childhood, past experiences that changed their values, and what they are looking for in their career. I also like to share my values about who I am and how I advanced in my career. Finally I ask you what are some of the values you are looking for in an organization?
Organizational values
Every organization, large or small, has a set of organizational values. Some of these values are in line with our own values and are clearly defined, others are vague.
Finding Talent: A Study of Contacts and Careers (Hines, 2003) shows four different methods used to recruit employees from entry-level to executive positions. Each of the interviewees stated that they do not follow their organizational values when interviewing and hiring employees. For entry-level positions, 80% use newspaper or internet job postings, career fairs, and employee referrals. For mid-level to senior management, more than 50% say rent is based on word of mouth and not so much on past experience. Still others said they are trying to hire previous employees they previously worked with at other corporations. Are these personal values of these individuals? Does the organization endorse these types of securities? Or do cultural values come into play?
Cultural values
Cultural values are part of what constitutes the world. The United States has been called the “melting pot” since it became independent from the British in the 1700 & # 39; s. Many people came to the United States in search of a new beginning at the same time that they bought their cultures or traditions with them. As we become more of a multicultural society, some of the traditions that dominated during the early periods of American history are not so clear today. In the early years, Italians only married other Italians, Germans only married other Germans, and so on. Now, cultural or traditions are not a factor.
I see cultural values as a great way to understand someone’s values. Reveal some of your personal values and the potential employees they bring. I grew up in two different parts of the country. I was born in western Pennsylvania and raised in West Palm Beach, Florida. Both parts of the country have different cultural values. In Pennsylvania, cultural values were placed in tradition. My grandmother on my father’s family side was a skilled craftsman. He was very skilled in his trade for which he used to support his family. He built his own houses. He worked very hard every day in manual labor. On the other hand, raised in Florida, cultural values were different in the respect of not maintaining traditions. They wanted to be different and to be at the forefront of new things.
As an adult, I like to learn about different cultures and the values they give people. It gives me an idea of what kind of person they were in the past and, hopefully, what kind of employees they will be in the future. But are cultural values a good tool to use when hiring?
Based on reading The Role of Literacy in Individuals and Nations (Berryman, 1994), some cultures view experience and education in different ways. The emphasis on continuing education or continuing heritage depends on your culture. It could also depend on anything you know about the company that can help you get hired or promoted. For example, in the former USSR, only gifted students were given the opportunity to continue their education past the eighth grade. Those who did not show exceptional intelligence entered the military academy or continued a necessary exchange or skill in the economy. This is an opportunity from our own culture and the opportunities provided to all.
Ethical dilemmas
As I mentioned at the beginning of the document, it is still difficult for me to try to recruit candidates for vacant positions at Compass Bank. We try to hold regular job fairs every month with the Maricopa Economic Security Department. During these job fairs, I have the opportunity to speak to people from all walks of life. Most of them are middle-aged to older workers who lost their jobs because they couldn’t keep up with changing technology. I spend about fifteen minutes with these people to see if their personal values and past work experience will be appropriate for our organization. It is a very difficult ethical dilemma trying to look beyond perhaps the way they are dressed or how many jobs they have had in the past. But my personal values help guide me in those decisions. Generally, I have the feeling that someone is not telling me the truth or that they will not fit into our organizational culture. It is difficult to see these people sitting in front of me knowing that they need a job to support their families. It removes my emotions, but knowing that I had the opportunity to let them know that I would not give up and share the same experiences that I had when I was out of work, helping them to continue their search for work.
conclusion
In conclusion, our personal, organizational and cultural values play an important role in our daily life. By trying to align your personal values with your organization’s values and not so much with cultural values, it provides a roadmap to help you make ethical decisions. Until someone writes a book that is 100% accurate in hiring the right person for the job, we will have to depend on our values.
