Okay continuing on with our series about the hiring process and achieving personal fit
within the organization, I want to talk now about some of the touchy subject or a subject
that can be in some ways offensive or taboo and that is the hurdles to achieving personal
fit.
Generally, with individuals, we have prejudices.
We have biases that are generally from past experience.
One of my favorite quotations from Albert Einstein is that "Our understanding of common
sense is nothing more than a collection of our prejudices that we typically establish
by at a young age, about the age of 18."
Well if you think about it, we all have this conscious and unconscious beliefs, sub positions
that we make about other people.
In many ways, the stereotypes can help us.
When they're positive heuristics that we used to make decisions but in another times, that
can cause us to make negative decisions and can cause us to treat others wrongfully to
prejudice them in our decision making because we make these oppositions about them based
on some factor.
Whether we get this belief or this opposition about others.
It's from our past experience in our relationships, you probably heard that out of clich'e that
you don't change the devil, the devil changes you.
Same goes in the positive context that you begin to become like those around you.
Their beliefs tend to become your beliefs and it's very difficult to change after that
once you've established that firmly and you built so much other beliefs off of these fundamental
tenants that you've acquired from friends, family, personal relations, your community,
the laws that ram place at a given time.
Even to the point of the impression that you're given from companies.
The advertising that was done, the perceptions that were created about certain product or
individuals of a certain types of class etc.
All these become part of our psyche, part of our way of thinking and how we interact
with others.
A positive aspect there is that these impressions that we have, these initial beliefs are overcome
by actual interaction with the individual.
Once you have contact with the individual, you can overcome these initial biases or prejudices
that you have simply by someone's appearance, someone's way of speaking.
someone's approach or thought process, their political party, their religion, their nationality.
etc.
Once you started to deal with these individuals personally, then again, those prejudices tend
to go away and you start to judge a person more based on what they present to you at
that time.
The signal that they give you which leads us naturally to if we understand that naturally,
these previous position exists, we can as individuals who know that they exist, either
consciously or subconsciously hopefully when their negative - only subconsciously if they
exist at all.
Their techniques to overcome the intuit to achieve personal fit in spite of them.
Like we said, having that level of interaction with someone again takes away from the assumptions
that they have, the conclusions that individuals jump to simply by seeing us or reading something
about us etc.
So this word has a negative connotation in many respects but to assimilate in some way
to the person you're around, we all have the tendency to do that or at least to - most
effective communicators have the tendency to do that.
That they scope their communication, their oral and physical presentation based on the
audience.
The better that they understand the individual that their speaking with, they better able
to scope their message to be more convincing, to be more appealing and in a way, shape or
form.
So if you can do that, and it requires using all of your senses to recognize about someone
what they're like so you can at least present yourself in a manner that's most common to
that - so that they will start to - through that interaction, they will overcome many
natural biases or prejudices that they have so that they will arrive to a level of belief
that there's mutual understanding, beliefs, values, goals, objectives, goals, interests,
personality etc. that it will step, take one step closer to what we've been talking about.
Achieving that level of fit.
To do that, consider all things that you're interacting with that individual.
Gender, race, religion, interests, political point of view, word choice, your accent that
you have, your clothing choices, topic, the topics of conversation, the depth of conversation
that you're willing to go to, how energetic you are and how many questions you asked versus
how long you talked in sequence without letting the other person talk.
All of these things that you recognize about someone else, well, some things are demographic
things that you obviously can assimilate to but you can obviously assimilate on the actions
that - the things like accent, word choice and structure, communication style, dress,
appearance, things like that that you can downsize and not that you want to in any way
negate the importance of individuality but downplaying negative stereotypes that may
be associated with a certain way of speaking, certain speech pattern, a certain way of dressing
etc.
Well help again to dispel some of the beliefs or worries that an individual has.
Now, while in many ways, it's sad that an employee has to do this to be successful but
the reality of the situation is, it is there.
An effective communicator is generally able to overcome these things in the same way when
you're communicating you're transmitting your value proposition as a potential new employee.
You have to deal with that as well and you have to be a salesman for your personal attributes
and in a way the ability to recognize those attributes that would demonstrate commonality
with the other person and then in some way demonstrate a level of assimilation towards
the end will make you a more effective candidate for a job position during interview, during
the interaction, during the prescreening process.
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