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Get a Job
What is a good problem statement for all the actors you have identified, including your client?
How to X, without Y
Unemployment and communication
As I mentioned in version one of the Problem Statement, there are important gaps which place a burden on the job seeker who is, arguably, least equipped to address the system’s inadequacies. I revealed the principal communication problem in a flow-chart diagram on said version 1 page as the four failing opportunities for feedback. Fifty percent of the time you won’t receive good feedback, and in real world cases this may go all the way: no feedback, none, zip.
Why is feedback necessary?
Feedback is a fundamental component of communication, and there are numerous cases of complex problems where problem owners go to extraordinary lengths to get it. These include bringing a new product to market, or running for public office. These situations involve high stakes, because they require monetary investments, involve many actors, and develop over long periods of time. For example, there is no certainty if a marketing campaign for a film will interest movie goers, or if a politician’s public policy platform will pass through the noise of rivals and meet the concerns of the voters. Nevertheless, problem owners in these contexts are notorious for their efforts to collect feedback. Film companies use pre-screenings to test their films before general release. Politicians use public polling in a discipline called political forecasting. Employer’s are keen to give feedback to their current employees. Employer’s want feedback for their commercial efforts. Why don’t employers develop relationships with prospective employees?
Actor Table
Below is another attempt at the Actor Table method–modified slightly–with two more columns: ‘wish’ and ‘crisis’, plus the ‘gap’ between them, and the ‘dilemma’. As I stated earlier, I added these additional columns, because they helped me to conceive of a narrative for each stakeholder. There are multiple entries for the same actors.
Note! This is a hypothetical scenario and not a real analysis of a client’s request. All entries in the Actor table are fictitious and for educational purposes only. If an actor position sounds too kitschy or thin, please post your ideas and I will add them to the table.
| ACTORS | WISH | CRISIS | GAP | DILEMMA | ERRORS? |
| job applicant | I want a job in [x] | previously I worked in [y] | I have mixed experience | matching your skills to the job you want happens privately (both employee 'looking' and employer 'evaluating' without the other's input) | |
| job applicant | wish for an interview | no interviews | I don't know why employers are not contacting me for work | there is no feedback in the hiring process. | |
| job applicant | I want a job in [x], but I have mixed experience & the closed hiring process does not provide feedback. | |
| small business owner | I wish to hire the best candidate quickly for position [y] | My heuristic [1] says I'm expensive | If I'm going to be expensive I want education & former employer to match the archetype. | If the abstract archetypal employee is not found, I will quickly have an expensive mismatch employee | |
| small business owner, management (labor) | I wish to hire someone who respects & fears me. | in bad economy we get all types. | everyone is respectful when they start; its difficult to judge people's character | As an employer I am biased towards the young & inexperienced, | |
| small business owner, management (labor) | I wish to hire a functionary employee, but everyone is politic in the beginning & only some will stay the course. | |
| small business owner | I wish to hire the best candidate quickly for my open position, but if this ideal candidate does not appear, I will quickly have a mismatch. | |
| hiring manager | as a hiring manager you wish to evaluate all options | when you're ready to hire someone, many already have jobs | inefficient to keep tabs on prospective employees | window of opportunity between open positions & applicant's availability is too complicated to track | |
| hiring manager | our mission is to maximize the efficiency of hiring the best qualified candidates | a recommendation from a current employee is good, too | it's difficult to judge people based on resumes, cv, & background checks alone; additional criteria may be discriminate; | We don't have a problem; Do you have a problem? I'm in control here. | |
| hiring manager | Have you ever been fired from a job before?
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| current employee | I wish to be myself | if I'm too open at work I people may not like me | I may lose social capital | work involves subsuming your personality & needs while at work (& sometimes more, too) | |
| current employee | I wish to maintain the status quo | shit rolls downhill | even if I perform my job well, I can run afoul of the higher ups | I have to work two jobs: doing what I was hired for & protecting my ass, but I only get paid for one [2] | |
| current employee | I wish to do what I got to do & go home to my family | always demanding more of me | why should I be different from the owner--they don't want to pay me more & I don't want to work more | employers are always finding new things to ask of employees | |
| current employee | I wish I didn't have to deal with work evaluations | I don't want to be stacked & ranked [7] | evaluations don't help me | evaluations by & large serve as disciplinary tools & little else | |
| current employee | I don't want to work harder than I have to, but work is political--you have to work to keep a good reputation.
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| customer | when I deal with a representative of a company, I want to feel like I'm dealing with a real person | CSRs sound like they're reading from a script & sound like robots | customer service must be under a lot of pressure | modern telephone customer service is outsourced to people who are powerless | |
| customer | when I deal with a representative of a company, I want to feel like I'm dealing with a capable person | employees who who work for large firms are helpless against the system [3] | is it too much to ask employees to step in where systems fail? | Big companies hire people like they buy equipment & equipment doesn't get up from it's desk. | |
| customer | I wish the I was treated with more respect when I spend money with a firm | I'm treated like they don't need money | this style of customer service is impersonal personal | business owners have every right to run their business however they wish, even if they lose customers at the same time. | |
| customer | I wish the companies who managed my health care, my insurance--the big companies--would manage their employees like a small company, but this is not our current model of accountability within firms. | |
| customer | I wish to align my lifestyle & values with my consumption | I don't feel good about my relationship with most consumer products | I find more facts about the products in my life from the internet, than product advertising can effectively respond to | I'm confused & uncomfortable with the schism between global business operations and local consumption | |
| customer | I wish to align my lifestyle & values with my consumption, but I'm confused & uncomfortable with the schism between global business operations and local consumption.
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| government organization | our purpose is to redistribute federal funds both assisting employers in hiring qualified workers and helping job seekers to develop the skills and abilities necessary to secure gainful employment [4] | ?? | ?? | individual's who are long term unemployed may require additional help which does not fall under the umbrella of labor assistance | |
| government organization | administer TANF [5] program requirements for individuals receiving public assistance (without minor dependant child(ren) in the household) & eligible to work | needy individuals do not represent a group of workers in high demand | ?? | systemic issues separate these workers from the larger workforce | |
| government organization |
Our purpose is both assisting employers in hiring qualified workers and helping job seekers to develop the skills and abilities necessary to secure gainful employment, but individual's who are long term unemployed may require additional help which does not fall under the umbrella of labor assistance.
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| business competitor | I wish to have a competent workforce cheaper than my competitor | ?? | ?? | collusion is largely illegal in the United States, Canada and most of the EU due to competition/antitrust law [6] | |
| business competitor | I wish to have a competent workforce cheaper than my competitor, but market competition hampers my price determining ability.
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| commercial third party | take advantage of the wide gap between labor & business interests to deliver value | we're like insurance, you don't value our service until you have a problem | we struggle with the same issues which plague labor & business--and we benefit by these gaps. | there is only a narrow subset of issues we can tackle & still make a profit | |
| commercial third party | we would like to track applicants more reliably | the time in someone's life when they are looking for work is a rough comparison & measure to their everyday working lives | people's lives change. what do you base a tracking system's data on? | centralized & persistent applicant records have validation issues | |
| commercial third party | We wish to serve the interests of labor and business, but we're not in the public good business.
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| commercial third party | We would like to track applicants more reliably, but centralized & persistent applicant evaluation is only effective for separating out new applicants from old & not for applicant-employer matching.
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| job competitor | I wish I knew what people with my experience were putting in their resume's and cover letters. | my only recourse is hyperbole, exaggeration, & denial--talking all about myself like a politician | how are you supposed to compete if you don't know who is your competition? | as job seekers we are in competition with an unseen opponent--we rarely meet our competition | |
| job competitor |
I wish I could compete for jobs on issues, but as a job seeker I'm competing with an unseen opponent.
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Footnotes
[1]: Project management triangle proverb: “You have three options, pick any two: Fast, Cheap, Good.” [Wikipedia]
[2]: Robert Kegan, Lisa Lahey, Andy Fleming, and Matthew Miller. “Making Business Personal” (Harvard Business Review, 04-2014). “To an extent we ourselves are only beginning to appreciate, most people at work, even in high-performing organizations, divert considerable energy every day to a second job no one has hired them to do: preserving their reputations, putting their best selves forward, and hiding their inadequacies from others and themselves. We believe this is the single biggest cause of wasted resources in nearly every company today.” (p.45.1)
[3]: I used my experience trying to get a referral for myself from my medical medical doctor to imagine this customer. My doctor is employed at a medium size cluster of medical offices all under one parent group. Some 50-100 or so employees and a number of specialists in just this building. I needed to see a medical specialist for severe heartburn. When I called on 09-18-2014 for a referral from my primary care physician, I was told the process took 24-48 hours; It took more than a week. By Wednesday 09-24-2014 when I still hadn’t heard back, I traveled to the doctor’s office (1.5 hours one way on public transportation), because I wasn’t getting anywhere on the phone.
While trying to resolve the issues I was told by a receptionist the issue was out of their hands, and in the system waiting for the doctor to reply (if you know the office this also includes the doctor’s assigned nursing staff who have previously called me personally on behalf of my doctor). Is this a Complex Problem? You decide. The doctor’s actual desk is less than 200 steps away. It seems employee’s responsibilities (established by the company? or the employee? or the union?) do not permit them to step out of their desk role to investigate–even after 4.5 working days.
This would only be ludicrous if it wasn’t for Thomas Eric Duncan, the first Ebola patient to die in the U.S. I finally saw the specialist on 09-29. Duncan’s ordeal started on 09-25 when he was sent home and not until 09-30 was he properly diagnosed. Here’s a timeline from the Duncan case. That Dallas hospital has a serious problem now.
Maybe Duncan may have lived if the information collected by the nurse about Duncan’s trip to Liberia, Africa was provided to the attending doctor. Instead, the doctor is reported to have asked the same questions and received different answers (he told the nurse he just traveled from Africa, he told the doctor he lived in Dallas; both were true). I experienced this gap in patient care personally when I was told by a health care worker, Reception is one group and Doctors, just 200 paces away, are another group–the computer system handles the rest.
What’s more, a computer system inadequacy is also at the start of the story. I called on the morning of the second day (09-19). Later in the afternoon I called to find out if anyone had tried to contact me (I have terrible cell phone service and an even more terrible phone). The receptionist said flatly the scheduling system did not ‘record calls’ to patients. I pressed for clarification, You mean it hasn’t recorded a call yet? Or your system doesn’t record calls to patients? The answer I was given, I can’t tell if someone called you. Then the receptionist said, Check caller ID.
[4]: The Workforce Partnership Federal Workforce Investment Act (WIA)
[5]: Nassau County Department of Social Services, Employment for Temporary Assistance Clients. As a result of Federal and State welfare reform legislation, TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) and Safety Net (those without minor dependant child(ren) in the household) customers are required to actively search for work, show proof of their job search efforts, accept a job when it is offered, or participate in work activity assignment.
[6]: Collusion is an agreement, usually secretive, which occurs between two or more persons to deceive, mislead, or defraud others of legal rights. [Wikipedia]
[7]: Microsoft Kills Its Hated Stack Rankings. (Business Week Online, 11-13-2013)
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