Passing the Smell Test

A couple weeks ago I was at Indian School of Business to attend Khemka Foundation Forum on Social Enterprises and one of the panel discussions was on Tapping Alternative Talent Pool, and that panel discussion turned out to be quite interesting by sheer presence of personalities such as Deep Joshi, Manish Sabharwal (Team Lease) and Harish Hande (SELCO). The discussion which was supposed to focus on ‘alternative talent pool’ took an interesting turn and it went on to focus on how social sector organization recruit and what attributes they look into the candidates. Suddenly everyone was uttering words such passion, enthusiasm, motivation to do something for society… but most of social sector practitioner emphasized that they see whether a candidate would be a good fit in that particular organization’s culture. And, none of them come up with some concrete explanation as how they measure the ‘good fit for a particular organizational culture’.

This ’smell test’ was intensely debated as HR firm people putting a lot of emphasis on highlighting the flaws in this kind of selection process and they tried hard to sell the concept of template based, standardized recruitment process, but I could not see the social sector stalwarts buying in this idea. But I was intrigued and realized that what they call ‘passing the smell test’ or testing ‘the fit for organizational culture’ was nothing but an effort to find answer to the question ‘Ye banda yahan sahi se kaam kar payega ya nahi (would this guy be effective here in this organization)’. This aspect of the candidate is often assessed after ensuring that s/he matches the expectations of the organization on parameters like education, professional qualification and experience. For social sector organization, a few things become very crucial and these traits are very difficult to measure in a template based standardized selection process. For example, most of the social sector jobs require you to work in a different kind of work environment that is often unstructured, challenging and offer you considerable lesser pay (though the scenario is changing at least on this front) than a similar job profile in corporate sector.

In my opinion this kind of ’smell tests’ are quite common in any sector and very common in development sector and this phenomenon can be attributed to the fact that most of the flat structured development sector rely most on a visionary or charismatic leadership rather than relying on systems, processes and controls. Systems and processes are secondary, the visionary is the key in these kind of organization and for any person to flourish or even to work productively s/he has to be in sync with the visionary’s idea, work style and  work ethics. This is nothing new, this is very common in other jobs as well but the development sector organizations do not pay much attention to transferring the visionary’s idea of work style, work ethics and workplace culture into clearly defined systems and controls. This results in a recruitment process often being referred as ’smell test’. Though in fact they are based on quite logical, well thought indicators and parameters.

What makes an entrepreneur?

What are the traits and factors which decide whether somebody is going to be an entrepreneur or not? Are there some factors/traits which are more important than other for being a successful entrepreneur?

A research paper by a team of researchers from The World Bank, CEPR and CEFIR, provides good insight on above question on the basis of data collected on 400 random Brazilian Entrepreneurs.

Some interesting findings from the paper:

• Brazilian entrepreneurs are coming more from rural areas than urban areas and they are more likely to be married and less likely to be overweight. They are taller by one cm (approx) than non entrepreneurs.
• Entrepreneurs were more patient than non-entrepreneurs and they expect lower returns on their investment than non-entrepreneurs (18% against 24% expected by non entrepreneurs).
• Entrepreneurs put more value on children’s education than non-entrepreneurs.
• Entrepreneurs show more trust than failed entrepreneurs do.
• Exploring the sociological characteristics of entrepreneurs, the paper shows that entrepreneurs are more likely to come from a family of senior managers, officials than workers. They also have more relatives and friends running their own business compared to non-entrepreneurs have. Though the social network has some role in deciding whether one is going to be an entrepreneur, but does not affect whether one is going to be successful entrepreneur.
• Entrepreneurs are also more likely to come from a large family.
• Mother’s education seems to have some impact on entrepreneur’s success. The mothers of failed entrepreneurs were less highly educated than the mother of entrepreneurs.

I do not know to what extent we can generalize the findings of this report, but surely it makes an interesting read.