LJ 2-5b

How do your personal experiences, prejudices, and expectations impact your ability to objectively select the best candidates for a job or project position?

These three aspects can positively or negatively impact your decision. The main point here to be aware of your prejudices and expectations that have been molded through your varies experiences. Having a prejudice toward certain behaviors or ethics is not bad, but you need to be aware of them. Having prejudices based on race, dress, ethnic culture, body type, etc are part of reality, but can not get in the way of objectivity. Prejudices can be your danger alerts or gut feelings. Again must be aware that you have them and understand why you have these prejudices. This is the same for expectations. It is great to have high expectations, but must be relative to the job or position and not what your personnel expectations are for that job - a realistic outlook on what is expected of an individual. Setting too high expectations leads to failure and low morale/drive of that person. Too low of an expectation leads to complacency and boredom, resulting in poor use of a person's potential. Must be aware why you have an expectation and why you have it.

The reason why it is necessary to be aware of these aspects and how they interact is so you will be objective. You can not and will not be objective (will be subjective) if you allow these aspects to act as instinctual judgement calls and not as questions for you to internally rationalize logically. Choosing the correct person needs to based on how they align to the company's values, beliefs, culture, and ethical behavior. Just because you like someone personally and all of your prejudices, etc are validated does not mean they will be great employees and successful. The flip side also applies - not liking someone because of your prejudices, etc does not mean that the individual will not become a solid performer.

So these three aspects can cause you to ignore a diamond in the rough and choose the wrong person.