Degree versus Pedigree

For a person passionate about cricket I have been amazed by the ease with which batsmen all over the world have started hitting sixes. Is it because of better bats or because of smaller grounds or because of physically stronger batsmen or is it because batsmen are practicing big shots more in the nets. The answer I think is the combination of all the above mentioned factors. It seems, so easy as batsmen after batsman move their front leg and with a golfer like swing lift the cricket ball out of the ground. It looks ridiculously easy. On Indian pitches where ball rarely deviates from its original line it is easier to get in line of the ball and with a deft swing of the bat send the ball out of the ground.

The same batsman who seems capable of doing anything with the bat comes a cropper when confronted with swinging atmosphere and seaming pitches. Is this a case of not being taught to handle a condition which is foreign to him? We have to assume the fact that a talented and intelligent batsman should be able to make adjustments in his batting technique to handle alien conditions. This brings us to our topic of degree vs. pedigree.
According to me degree is what is taught to us whereas pedigree is what we learn in life from the day we are born. We may be taught to become a doctor but what we learn differentiates a good doctor from an average one. It is no denying the fact that our DNA contributes to our pedigree. Pedigree is also about our family upbringing, school upbringing (which school we went to), college upbringing (whether we went to IIT / IIM), corporate upbringing. What good things we imbibe during these upbringings makes us pedigreed.

For more than six years India saw phenomenal economic growth. We saw lot of new businesses coming up and the big business houses became bigger in this period. All these necessitated search for educated work force which India had in plenty. The recruitment process was simplified and almost became a part of logistics management. A recruiter merely saw what degree the prospective candidate had and how he / she were able to display that degree and years of experience. With the economic boom it was relatively easy for most candidates to perform (quite akin to a batsman taking a swing on Indian pitches and connecting beautifully and sending the ball for six!!!). If the recruiter was not sure of what skill was needed to perform a particular job he merely advertised for an MBA and got one, though at a higher cost.
And then in September 2008 the world changed. With the fall of Lehman Brothers the world woke up to a new economic order. The trust between bankers reduced. Credits which were easily available simply disappeared. The world economy which till then was merely showing signs of tiring after a long and fast run went into a tailspin. Businesses started showing drastic reduction in top line and bottom lines. A manager who till then was considered a great performer looked shaky in the changed economic environment (similar to what happens when a batsman bred on Indian pitches is asked to play in seaming English conditions). HRD of almost all Indian companies had to start redefining the skills required for a particular job. Gone was the stress on mere degrees. The middle level managers slowly started feeling the heat. HR heads were besieged by complaints about non-performing managers. These were same managers who not even six months back had been short listed for fast track growth. These managers were born and bred on growth formula and could not react to the changed environment which called for different way of thinking.
MBA as a degree lost considerable amount of its shine post the mortgage fiasco in USA. The complicated and complex mortgage instruments that were designed which led to collapse of US housing and US economy could have been the handiwork of most fertile minds which the MBA graduates possess. Days of creating complex business models are over giving way to simple models. The world is once again embracing the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) formula. In an economic upturn you are appreciated for finding complex solution to a simple problem whereas during economic downturn promoters are looking for employees who can find simple solution to complex problems. Suddenly experience became important. Companies started their hunt for candidates who had seen recession and who could react to ever changing ground realities. Most companies became risk averse and capital expenditures for future revenues became avoidable. It was a question of riding the present situation. Cost cutting and belt tightening became the order of the day. Employees who had got used to wining and dining on company expenses in order to entertain (so as to retain) customers were asked to stop the practice.
Arrogance gave way to humility, as if a new formula was thought of by a clever teacher who decided to pass on his teaching to his pupils. Employees were back to good behavior and started looking for lost friends. No one’s job was any longer safe. People who prided on the number of missed calls they had in a day started taking calls. Individual’s trait of not taking calls has bewildered psychologist a lot. No education teaches us to be rude and so individual’s reluctance to accept a call can’t be part of his degree. Nor does any upbringing teach us not to return calls. So this trait comes from individual’s faulty self learning. These kinds of traits became important for HR professionals when they started evaluating a candidate’s suitability to handle a job. If avoiding a call is our way of avoiding a situation (however unpleasant), or it’s our way of saying no, then it’s a trait not suitable for most jobs.
One big Indian company which is in the engineering sector decided to judge their middle management (it had more than thousand managers in this level) in informal environments. In off site get together it started video taping employees’ outlook. How employee reacts to their superiors and how they react to their subordinates? A manager to be really successful has to be first a good human being. The CEO of this company has often said that keep a manager only if he is able to use the same tone to address his boss as he uses to address his subordinates. Wonder how many of the Indian managers will be able to hold on to their jobs if this principle was implemented? This very CEO had asked his HR Head to redraft the HR policy with one simple guideline. If the policy is going to be right for your child then the policy will be right for all our employees.

There is one listed company based in Bangalore which thinks that they have made huge mistakes in their recruitment by laying enormous stress on candidate’s degree. They now have series of informal interaction with the candidate to judge his pedigree. One thing they do is take the candidate for a drive on chocked roads of Bangalore. The candidate is asked to drive while three of their employees chat like old friends. This drive through lanes and by lanes of Bangalore takes close to two hours and ends with beer and lunch in a restaurant near their office. The candidate drops his guard and is able to show his true self. Bad traffic really tests people, its not uncommon to find people who assume that except for them every driver on the road doesn’t deserve the driver’s license they may be carrying.

The best way of judging a person’s depth is how he reacts when someone close to him/her asks for help. Remember that no degree teaches us not to help a needy person. A help is normally requested by a person who is close to you. All our upbringing (pedigree) also teaches us to go out of the way to help a person in need of help. But how do people normally react. Some will simply forget the request hoping that the help seeker will never broach the subject again. Some will start avoiding you as if you have asked for some unethical assistance. Some will give excuses which you will find so shallow that you will be forced to drop the topic. The most surprising thing is that no one will admit that they are not in any position to help. A person who is unable to find time and ways to help a friend will never be able to find time and energy to help a colleague and his organization.
Needless to say, in conclusion that time has come for recruiters to look for pedigreed candidates rather than a candidate with a long list of impressive degrees. In cricket they aptly say that form is temporary but class is permanent. There is no denying the fact that effort required to get a pedigreed candidate will be much more than just looking for right degrees but then benefits for the organization in the long run will also be much more.