One man's rules for ruling out job applicants

Journal Record, The (Oklahoma City), Jun 17, 2002 by Diane Stafford The Kansas City Star

Hiring is picking up, but make no mistake: It's still a buyer's market. Employers can be very choosy.

Peter Lemke, chairman of EFL Associates in Overland Park, Kan., makes the point well in his company newsletter. EFL is an executive search firm that helps employers find managerial and professional talent.

Lemke bluntly tells employers, "Your challenge is to ... ferret out the talented professionals from those who are in transition due to poor performance, lack of talent or other undesirable characteristics."

Sometimes, good people are caught in layoffs through no performance fault of their own. Other times, layoff survivors look around and admit a hard truth: The deadwood was cleaned out.

Lemke suggests five guidelines -- some of them controversial -- for employers who want to cherry-pick the good ones and avoid the deadwood. He advises:

* Discount applicants who have held three jobs over the last five years. His reasoning is that it's expensive to hire and fire, and there's no sense taking a risk with a job-hopper who is likely to be gone soon.

* Bypass candidates who have been out of work for a year or more. Such idleness, he says, suggests "the candidate sat on his or her severance package" or "did not aggressively" job-hunt or lost out to better candidates for other jobs.

* Don't get sidetracked on the resume of someone from a substantially different industry. Retraining costs money, and there probably are good candidates from within the industry who won't cost training dollars, he says.

* Do complete interview, evaluation and reference checking on job candidates. A good rule is to call a half dozen professional references and run a background investigation, including credit, criminal and motor vehicle checks, he advises.

* Shy away from candidates who made significantly more in their previous jobs than what is being offered. Such applicants may be willing to take less because they're desperate, he notes, but they're likely to bolt when they get an offer closer to what they previously made.

Told you some of his points were controversial.

Some of his suggestions run counter to advice that encourages midlife career changes and counter to current assurances that frequent job changes aren't as frowned upon as they once were.

Lemke admits there are exceptions to his "rules." He has violated them in his own hiring when the situation and the job candidate were right.

But as companies cautiously begin to infill behind the layoffs and the early retirements that depleted their ranks, Lemke sticks to his "buyer beware" guns.

"The individual looking for a job is going to have to work harder to find a suitable fit, and then hang on to that job," Lemke said in an interview.

"They need to develop some permanency in an employment situation to show stability, as well as commitment to interpersonal development."

In a buyer's market, personality quirks and jumpy work histories aren't as forgiven as they were in the "warm body" hiring era. There may be pent-up hiring demand, but employers who heed Lemke are going slowly and carefully.