“Speaking good” – communication as a leadership factor

There are many successful people in leadership roles (where the working language is English) whose spoken English is hardly at a B1 level. Even understanding them presents serious challenges – especially those from France and Italy (to stick to European countries) – and not only because of the accents. I’ve observed many among them whose written English was A2-ish: their emails hardly made any sense. Their grammar was so rudimentary that it couldn’t convey anything reminiscent of logic, let alone rhetoric.

English is a special case: being the lingua franca of our times, many people who have never lived for a longer period in an English-speaking country speak it fluently (even on an A2 level), and native speakers – especially in business – have a pragmatic attitude toward them: if their skills and experience are strong enough to counterbalance the lack of language mastery, they’re ready to make the compromise.

Also, there is a general decline in mastery even among native speakers. The general decline in the level of everyday language is typical of all languages. And since the borders between the professional and the everyday are blurring, standards are dropping in most domains. Thus, it’s quite possible that in certain areas of academia, for example, foreign speakers’ mastery of English (coming from countries where the decline is not so strong) is higher than that of native speakers; and this is even more so when we compare these foreigners to the average native speakers whose jobs don’t demand more than everyday English. In this case, the language categories in job application forms don’t make much sense at all.

Since A2–B1 “works just fine,” a false sense of mastery emerges from being “fluent” – and this means (on this level) nothing more than speaking routinely. This further reinforces the general tendency of decline, leading to misunderstandings and miscommunications to such a degree that meaningful conversations between people are increasingly becoming a real challenge – meaningful outside of transactions, that is. From this point of view, AI is already more efficient than people – and that this would be the case in all mechanical functions was clear to everyone from the start.

Now, the point is this: keeping communication standards high is a leadership function. While a certain degree of pragmatism is absolutely necessary, purely pragmatic leadership is an oxymoron – not to mention “leadership” that specifically aims at lowering standards.

 Posted on October 10, 2025 by

 communications

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Redefining employer branding

To think critically about employer branding, we first need to discard the most common illusions[1]  that dominate the field. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll focus on just one for now: the belief that each employer is different. Different in how they hire, how they work, in their “culture,” employee value propositions, candidate experience, and similar aspects.

Experience shows a very different picture – one of uniformity across all domains, with only minor and largely insignificant variations. The common denominator across all companies, regardless of size or stage in the life cycle, is mechanization in their modus operandi and an asymmetrical power relationship between the employer (often a perceived as a faceless, semi-mystical abstraction ) and the employees where the former enjoys most benefit and control.

When it comes to employer branding in talent acquisition, this has led to the same manipulation techniques that the advertising industry has developed over the last 150 years – only with much smaller budgets and much less thought and efficiency. When it comes to employees, the goal of the employer is to ensure full control over them, minimize legal risks and maximize profits on a balance sheet where employees constitute a major cost factor. Employer branding’s only raison d’être is to make employees feel good about this.

When we strip away the illusions surrounding employer branding, including the illusion of differentiation, it becomes clear that all major KPIs serve only to sustain those very illusions. “Candidates” (a term that is fully inappropriate in many cases) are acutely aware of this, while employees tend to be less so.

So how do we redefine employer branding? By tearing it down and rebuilding it – not around the machine (the company), where differentiation is dead, but around the organization, where it can still exist.

Want to explore the difference, discuss questions, explore further? Feel free to reach out!

[1] Illusions are incomplete realities: they are real in that they’re perceivable and provide real experience (this is why they’re dangerous), but their stated purpose can’t be achieved: this is the missing part. When people are not aware of this or pretend or rationalize this void, we have an illusion on our hand. Etymologically (illūsiō, illūsiōnis), illusion implies conscious deceit in a playful manner (illudere). It’s easy to see that the original meaning is quite relevant here, and playful deceit has deteriorated to cynicism.

 Posted on September 16, 2025 by

 tools

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The art of conversation – Trivium program

Communication, by nature, is not a mechanical process. Grammar, logic and rhetoric are tools in service of something higher than themselves while simultaneously being the very symbols of this higher factor that pulls them together into a cohesive whole. Principles like correct[1] views, correct intention, correct expectations, correct observations, correct timing, self-control, “nothing unnecessary” and similar become manifest in unmistakable style elements of artists of communications, who are invariably leaders in the most diverse fields. In fact, these principles build the very foundations of leadership.

In the past 30 years or so, business organizations have become increasingly mechanized, to such a degree that we are witnessing the emergence of new paradigms, still accompanied by the old slogans that testify to organic realities: leadership, style, differentiation, community, and similar concepts.

Communication itself has become victim to the tendency of mechanization. Conversation, the de facto tool of exchanging information, has been replaced by templates operated by people in a robotic manner. Over the past ten years, I have personally observed the intensification of this tendency while leading various forms of communications initiatives in a wide variety of settings: genuine conversation has become almost impossible.

People now serve processes determined by technology, rather than the other way around. Many genuinely believe that after a 20–30 minute “data exchange” – which they call a discussion, a talk, a chat, or even an interview – they will walk away knowing more than they did before.

We can only speculate about what happens when people continue interacting but stop truly communicating with each other. Some signs are already visible in everyday workplace interactions – and we can probably agree that they do not look promising.

I am an optimist, yet I believe it is too late to trigger large-scale, systemic change. It is not too late, however, to effect small change by rethinking how we communicate within our own environments.

The Prakhsis Trivium Program is designed to support such efforts. If you’re interested in launching one within your team, let’s have a conversation.

www.prakhsisacademy.com

[1] What’s correct in terms of views are almost never what’s being perceived as beneficial short term for the business. When I say almost, I am being overly generous.

 Posted on August 28, 2025 by

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A nuanced view on recruiters being equal to hiring manager

There’s a lot of talk among recruiters about being advisors to hiring managers — about their being equal partners in the hiring process. One can’t help but feel, however, that in most cases, this is more wishful thinking than reality.

In practice, things often look quite different, primarily due to intellectual, experiential, and positional realities.

Intellectual realities

The career paths of recruiters and hiring managers — particularly in technical domains — are generally not comparable. Hiring managers often have more rigorous academic backgrounds, and their professional progression typically demands a higher level of intellectual engagement than that of most recruiters. The selection pressure they face throughout their careers tends to be significantly more intense.

There are exceptions, of course — recruiters in executive search who were once CEOs after a career in technical, financial, or otherwise intellectually demanding fields (I’m not counting economics, marketing, MBAs and similar). But these cases remain rare, even in firms that position themselves precisely on that premium level.

I’ve personally encountered recruiters with brilliant minds (not only ex CEOs in executive search), as well who outshine many hiring managers (due to intellectual and other actual practices outside recruiting) — again, in exceptional cases. The average recruiter is far from this. For emphasis: this doesn’t mean that potentially they would not be able to tackle the same challenges a software engineering manager, a financial director, a plant manager, etc. have had to tackle up to the point of the briefing meeting when they face each other perhaps the first time! But, alas, this is irrelevant.

In all fields where numbers dominate, the average is below the norm — and by norm, I mean something aspirational, ideally brilliance, certainly not mediocrity. In such fields, this applies to hiring managers, too: only a minority are truly exceptional in terms of intellect or aptitude. But based on what I’ve seen, their average tends to be higher than that of recruiters.

It’s worth pausing here for a brief detour into management consulting, a field whose entire positioning is based on intellectual excellence: rigorous selection processes, high-impact assignments, etc. Yet even here, the average falls below the norm. And if you consider the outright criminal behavior often seen at the top levels of leadership, one might argue that both intellect and character are lacking across the board.

Yes, both recruiting and the business functions that require hiring can be highly mechanical, thus intellectually restrictive. However, the perspective of the hiring manager is necessarily broader than that of the recruiter. This point needs no explanation. If this should not be the case, the hiring manager is most likely a liability.

This brings us to POSITIONAL realities. Recruiters are not responsible for the hire. Period. In some organizsations they may have to take the blame if a new hire doesn’t work out, but this is non-sense. It’s possible that a recruiter has seen a thousand hires taking place, but besides his well-defined contributions, he has made none. They may have built recruiting teams — but unless they’ve also built and managed engineering, finance, manufacturing, IT and similar teams, they are not on equal footing with the hiring managers responsible for those domains.

Of course, seasoned recruiters have likely seen more hiring mistakes than most hiring managers ever will. From that standpoint, they can bring useful insights to the table. But does that make them equals? Even if the recruiter also brings more intellectual rigor to the selection process (more consistent application of the principles of critical thinking, more powerful reasoning, etc.) than the hiring manager, the HM may render all this irrelevant due to his positional superiority: he can say “I don’t care” and get away with it. (I am aware of exceptions, for example in big tech and other entities where OD is highly politicized, but let’s stay outside of that bubble for now.)

Less experienced recruiters, who mostly deal with data management, process documentation, and recruiting software, are even farther from being able to contribute meaningfully to the selection process. For them, claiming a seat at the “selection table” is wildly ambitious.

I’ve heard of hiring managers — perhaps after reading too many recruiter-authored articles — posing a question during executive search discussions: “Would you take responsibility for your recommendation?” The nuanced response should be: of course,

  • If in case of conflict you take my recommendation over your own decision, and
  • If you put me on your board

For internal recruiters, this kind of framing — either being asked to take responsibility or volunteering to do so — is simply absurd.

To elevate the quality of hiring, both recruiters and hiring managers need to raise their intellectual game. Additionally, companies should rethink the internal recruiting function by experimenting with new operational models that challenge traditional role definitions and qualification standards.

Let me know if you’d like to discuss either — or both — in more detail.

 Posted on July 15, 2025 by

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On brilliance

Norms, averages, misfits

Fundamentally, there are two types of students: the good ones and the bad ones. Some of the good ones go on to become teachers the others move on to different things. Some of those who become teachers will become good teachers, most will become bad ones. Some of those who move on to other things will become good at what they do, others will be bad.

Common to all good students is that they fit the educational method; in other words: how they teach fits their learning style.

There are also two types of bad students: those who could be good at something else, but not at the given topic, and those whose learning style is not comparable to how the given institution teaches.

You may be asking at this stage: how about the average students or the average teachers? For simplicity’s sake let’s not even consider the average. The average is a gray mass that connects the bad and the good and the difference between the three factors is quantitative only. The bad may become average and the average may become good, depending on how we set the criteria for performance. There is, however, a qualitative factor that is rather disruptive to institutions that dominate the landscape today: brilliance.

If brilliance is an anomaly in a given organization or a given field, it sheds light on two things: the topic (the main thing) is unnatural and/or the approach is wrong. Both of these are typically the result of quantitative values: appeal to the masses.

True brilliance, namely, is naturally elitist and, naturally, there are elitist fields and organizations. Let’s look at poetry as an example: the greatest poets didn’t go to poetry school to learn from a good poetry teacher. Born poets live their craft from the moment they realize this is what they’re born to do and then they emerge ready, inimitable in their brilliance. The development process is focused on learning, not on teaching – and learning is solitary.

The same applies to scientists, doctors, philosophers, writers, architects, artists, craftsmen, wine growers, cheese makers, warriors, etc. Brilliance’ natural path of development is not the “hear and repeat” or adjustment to inferiority. Brilliance unfolds according to nature, so to speak: everything in nature is in the sign of perfection.

Since about the Renaissance, almost no organizations can accommodate brilliance.

The “majority” plays an important role in the relation between the average and the normal: the average shows how far the majority is from the norm. The lower you set the norm, the closer they will be, and the more normal the average will seem. This is what we see today when brilliance and the thrive for perfection is frowned upon.

There is another alternative: when the norm is kept high, latent qualities unfold and the average becomes brilliant. In such cases the majority (in any field and in any organization) is not numerous. If nothing less than brilliance is the norm, everything changes: the organization, the method, the people, and last but not least: the outcome.

Today, the brilliant ones in any field are misfits. And their role is to maintain the norm without compromise.

Conversation starter: how do you accommodate brilliant misfits? Let us know if you want to explore this and we’ll invite you to our next discussion on this topic!

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 Posted on July 15, 2025 by

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A brief note on corporate TA leadership

All recruiting leaders have a good idea of what the ideal state of the talent acquisition function is supposed to look like, typically described along the lines of it’s not about filling seats, but building (winning) organizations, if my hire doesn’t perform according to expectations, I failed*, we must start with corporate and/or business strategy and organize the TA function accordingly, and similar.

Now, those willing to face reality know that some of these statements are made to show responsibility and thereby securing one’s own position as a TA manager – especially when people are in a phase of their career where proving themselves “against all odds” enjoys a higher priority than thinking critically about challenges and where management fosters a “crunching it” culture that prefers breaking things and increasing (an ever more expensive) organizational debt to doing things right to avoid such costly organization debts in the first place. This situation is almost a given in the startup scene, but it’s more common then people think even in conservative mid-sized organizations or big corporate settings as well. Every five years, as a new generation enters the workforce, the same mistakes are repeated.

If any of the following is in place, systems level changes are required to fix the TA function, even if “the leadership team is 100% behind recruiting, including the CEO” (mostly only rhetorically):

  • The TA manager reports to HR
  • The TA manager is not involved in, let alone run workforce planning
  • The TA manager’s entire career is in recruiting and/or HR
  • The CEO and/or the line managers are disconnected from everyday recruiting beyond their limited role in the recruitment process, however decisive it may be

* It’s worthwhile making a note here: there’s a wide-spread delusion among internal recruiters that they actually hire people, as opposed to simply finding them and prescreening them. For recruiters to take full responsibility for a hire even when the final word is not with them is simply not rational; for them to take responsibility for how the new employee works out when they have zero control or influence over the new team member’s integration into the team and their ultimate management, is similarly nonsense. Let’s add that the same applies for agency recruiters and search firms.

 Posted on June 3, 2025 by

 recruitment & TA

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The role of hiring managers in the recruitment process at mid-sized companies

One of the least discussed topics in recruiting is the impact hiring managers have on the outcome of the recruiting process. While this is obvious to everybody, hiring managers do not have recruiting KPIs and their impact is almost never measured in other ways either. When I say almost, I am being overly generous. This should really surprise you in our data-obsessed times.

In fact, we have a schizophrenic situation: on the one side, HMs do have skin in the game, since if their team is not complete, they will miss KPIs that are measured. On the other hand, since they don’t have recruiting KPIs, they do not have skin in the recruiting game. If they mess up, the blame is typically pushed to the TA team. (These observations are industry- and size specific and apply mostly to mid-sized manufacturing, logistics, retail and fmcg players. For example, the picture is somewhat different at corporate/big tech, where we find a completely different set of problems.)

Factors to consider when planning the recruitment process

It’s difficult to judge what makes a hiring manager good. If somebody doesn’t create obstacles to the hiring process, is clear with his expectations, is a good communicator and flexible, is ready to adjust expectations to market realities, is responsive, seeks and listen to counsel, exercises critical thinking, etc., it still doesn’t guarantee that in the end the right person will be selected and hired.

Also, who’s in a position to judge who is a good hire, let alone the right hire: somebody who smoothly integrates into the current team, is adjustable and stays 5+ years? Somebody who delivers big things but perhaps leaves after 2 years? Expectations and decision makers below and above the HM  may change every few months – in fact the HMs themselves may change shortly after the hire was made; so do the pronounced and hidden agendas of players and organizations. While it may seem that it’s much easier to define who a bad hire is, even in this case, there are simply too many factors and what seems to be true in one point in time, may prove to be wrong in a few months.

All this being said there are a few things stakeholders, including HMs themselves, should consider when setting up the recruitment process for a particular role. For now, this is only about hiring managers, not the other stakeholders, their cooperation or the overall process.

  • The HM’s career stage: are they at the beginning, mid-way or at the end of their career? Also: are they new, relatively new or an old-timer in their current role, etc.
  • The HM’s influence and perception in the organization: a linchpin, an outsider, anti-social, a joker, a problem child, a feared dictator, defensive blame pusher, a responsible people supporter, etc.? How are they perceived? How much weight their words carry?
  •  The HM’s team. Did the HM inherit or built the team? How’s his perception in the team? Is it a good and stable team? Is the churn-rate consistently high?
  • The HM’s management experience and skills: both the measurable ones and the people-related ones, which are immediately perceivable, but rarely measurable.
  • The HM’s hiring experience and skills. Many managers, even experienced ones, may have only limited hiring experience…or they may have lots of hiring experience from other companies, but being completely unfamiliar with how their current company hires.

At the very least, these factors should be discussed and considered by all stakeholders when planning the recruitment process, under the assumption that the HM hires foremost for the company’s benefit. The alternative is to make one single assumption – as is often the case at smaller and mid-sized companies: since the ultimate responsibility is with the hiring manager, thus he/she is ultimately right.

 Posted on May 26, 2025 by

 recruitment & TA

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Leveraging Recruiting Models for better TA performance

Recruiting is a complex function that often gets oversimplified in organizations. From a process perspective, the two most common recruiting models are:

  • Advertising Model: This involves advertising job openings, processing incoming CVs, managing the recruitment process, and utilizing the Talent Acquisition (TA) system.
  • Executive Search Model: This focuses on market mapping and directly approaching targeted candidates.

Different Models, Different Skill Sets, Different Expectations

These two models require distinct skill sets and cater to different stakeholder expectations. However, many companies, especially with a high requisition portfolio, use both (and more) models within their internal recruiting functions without adapting to these differences or even recognizing them.

For example, recruiters who are used to purely administering a large portfolio of requisitions are often expected to switch into executive search mode with the corresponding consultative mindset (without training), while senior TA partners who were often hired from search firms find themselves in an admin function, setting up appointments, “maintaining data integrity” and similar. Also, hiring managers who take a “static view” on the TA function are frequently unclear about what to expect from recruiters let alone their own role in the process. All this leads to chaos, frustration and inefficiencies. A few examples:

  • Senior leadership candidates being contacted by administrators (with recruiting titles, of course) unable to conduct meaningful conversations or “prescreen” (more often than not a completely wasteful task) them effectively – let alone impress and engage them.
    • (Even inexperienced) Hiring managers being caught off guard, often becoming even defensive when senior recruiters – whose CVs they never saw and whom they consider to be mere administrators – attempt to advise them not only on the recruiting but even on selection practices, warning them about predictable threats, suggesting a change of course, etc.
  • HR and TA managers focusing on the wrong KPIs, missing the real issues…you can’t manage everything you can measure!
  • Unnecessarily slow process, roles don’t get filled, blame game, silos get fortified, etc.

A Path to Improvement

Addressing these challenges requires an organizational development approach – including taking a fresh look at current TA roles – paired with AI tech stack planning. By aligning recruiting models with the right processes, skills and expectations, companies can unlock significant short-term benefits. While fixing an underperforming TA function involves many more elements, tackling these process-related issues is a critical first step toward building a more effective and cohesive recruitment strategy. Some of the short term benefits include:

  • Clearer role definitions and expectations for recruiters and hiring managers
  • Improved candidate experience across the board
  • More relevant and actionable KPIs that drive meaningful improvements.

Final Thoughts

Recruiting is a dynamic function that must constantly adapt to changing market dynamics – a cookie-cutter approach won’t cut it. Recognizing the distinct nature of different recruiting models and adjusting organizational roles, expectations, and technology accordingly can transform your talent acquisition outcomes. If your company is struggling with recruiting chaos and frustration, starting with such a fix can be a game-changer.

https://prakhsis.com/

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 Posted on May 18, 2025 by

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The HR Conundrum

HR has always been an odd function.

It has never had anything to do with making money. Over a 100 years ago HR was created by company owners to ensure their company complied with applicable laws. That’s it.

(The fact that the interest of company owners and that of employees have become mutually exclusive is significant. It is just as significant that “employers” consist of employees, including HR, acting against their own interests, in a schizophrenic modus operandi – with the obvious exceptions of small family businesses.)

For a long time, it didn’t try to be more than what it was: a bureaucratic function focused on compliance. Alas, like all functions, it “evolved” due to a push by daydreaming academics who made careers coming up with ideas about what it could be. Their effort was received with enthusiasm by ambitious career bureaucrats and together they turned HR into an undeniable monster which is perceived by everybody as an internal secret service (empowered servilism) or an incompetent saboteur – despite all the rhetoric to the contrary.

The problem, of course, always lies outside the domain that manifests it. Prior to personnel departments, there already existed bureaucratic structures in various government organizations, although these were fundamentally different from what we mean by bureaucracy today. These early bureaucracies manifested values far greater than the practical, pragmatic considerations absolutely necessary for the mere survival of the organization itself. To use a simple example: no bureaucracy could desacralize the value of one’s word back then; besides honoring agreements even without contracts (and the corresponding legal apparatus), this determined a respectful conduct in everyday interactions unimaginable today. Once ambition turned against values, a repulsive hubris developed, turning the natural order of things upside down, elevating the pragmatic above the ideal. It is not surprising that in such a sub-natural environment ill will is, in fact, valued and any manifestation of actual value is ridiculed.

Whole organizations have turned into absurd, cynical and value-signaling bureaucracies where nobody’s allowed to live their values, while everybody’s forced to talking about them; where statements and intentions clearly contradict each other; where a somber, Kafkaesque culture rules pervasively.

The problem is not that HR has no seat at the boardroom, or that it has no credibility from a business point of view. The situation is quite the opposite: the organization’s problem is that, as a whole, it has become the worst version of HR imaginable.

Image: a scene from Kafka’s The Trial

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 Posted on May 18, 2025 by

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Self-worth and market value

A guy I know positions himself as somebody who almost never had a job other than a CEO. Fresh out of university, his first job had been VP, but four years after that he was already CEO and he never looked back. It’s hard to check whether this is true – he started in the early 90s in the CEE. He set his price at 12,000 EUR/month, anything else would be insulting, as he put it. In the span of our relationship, he worked for top tier tech companies and private equity funds, trying to adjust companies to the content of business books: his positioning was impeccable. His results? Well: he was average. In the tech business, he was an Excel manager: others filled in the cost lines in his P&L, and competitors consistently beat him in the market. Nothing special.

I know another guy, this one in the pharma business: his price is 30K EUR/month: but for that money he’s prepared to do anything, as he says, to deliver – similarly to the morally flexible “thought leaders” in McKinsey; or in the top banks in the USA paying billions of dollars in fines and out of court settlements every year; or his (higher ranking) colleagues in pharma who hire the likes of McKinsey to optimize profits, no matter what.

An HR manager from Western Europe on assignment as an expat at a global food & bev company in Hungary nicely explained to me – as a side note in a conversation – that he considered search guys to be arrogant and brainless idiots who drive BMWs, get business from organizing BBQ parties for YPO members, and do absolutely nothing valuable. Who knows, he may be right. I know some search consultants who make over 85,000 EUR/month, by simply having a conversation with less than five people a day. They used to be CEOs of market leading companies in their geography and they’d never go back to trying to manage 1000s of people for the same money or less. The clients who pay their fees perceive their value very differently than the bitter HR manager who never hired top players himself.

We all know the prices of the suits running global companies.

All these people have successfully adjusted to the market: they have quantified their worth. Now: if the conditions change and the market no longer pays the price (or if they go to jail), there is a problem: their self-worth, even in their own perception, is ruined: a gap develops between what they project they’re worth and what they’re actually worth. This often leads to nothing less than personal tragedies.

As recently as two hundred years ago, people were considered to be more valuable than the products they produced or the process they served, and the cream of the crop in many professions joined guilds that put only 2-10% markup on their products or services: the lower the markup, the prouder were the masters. Not only craftsmen, but also academics in universities were organized in guilds. What made guilds special? Only quality mattered. What was the measure of quality? Usefulness to the community and mastery for the individual. This applied to other orders in society as well: the military, law, politics (for this we need to go back way more than 200 years) and religious organizations.

Quality people back then would have never come to the conclusion that they needed to quantify their worth. (For example, even if there had been demand, Clemens Wenzel Lothar Fürst von Metternich Winneburg would have never thought about charging any amount of money for giving a speech, opposite to modern politicians and celebrities who refuse to move a finger unless they’re paid for it; in fact, many consider people doing things for free to be losers, or look at people offering help for free with suspicion).

Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the stoics, Plotinus, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, Jacob Böhme, Muhyi al-Din ibn al-Arabi, Confucius, and many others whose names will never be known are simply not matched by Hegel, Kant, Freud, Jung, Heidegger (with all their merits considered), let alone, God forbid, by Zizek, Harari, Kurzweil, Flink, Musk, Zuckerberg, Gates, Jobs, Schmidt, Page, Bezos, Sinek, Robbins (or any other platitude mongering motivational speaker) or by any other F100 CEO or contemporary politician.

Quantitative differences, even in the trillion dollar magnitude, are insignificant when compared to qualitative differences, which may indeed be astronomical.

For closing, an anecdote: I heard a story on the Joe Rogan show about the confidence level of a rich (but short) guy in social situations (the story was told by the guest who knows the guy and the conclusion was that money makes men more confident). It reminded me of my ex neighbor (also a short man) who works with his hands, has never made more than 1,500 EUR/month, yet there is no man or situation that may shake his relaxed confidence; in other words: he doesn’t derive his self-worth from market conditions.

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 Posted on May 18, 2025 by

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The philosophy of experience

Can a machine be experienced?

The machine is fundamentally a quantitative concept. Of course, some machines are put together better than others and some perform their function better than others. Also, the machine is a productivity hack. This is all true. But the machine is fundamentally a quantitative concept. With time, it deteriorates.

The very essence of quality is that with time it improves: it beats entropy. Life is the most obvious qualitative concept – as long as it’s not mechanized, that is.

Experience is also a qualitative concept – as long as it’s not mechanical. It matters only to a specific point how much experience somebody has on an assembly line. Beyond that point, extra time doesn’t guarantee extra quality. The same applies also to any mechanical activity, be it white or blue collar. Think about processes from this point of view. Subordinating man to a mechanical process kills experience. Somebody making the same decisions for 20 years is not more experienced than somebody who has made them twice.

Most people abhor making the same decision twice in order to serve a process: it doesn’t feel right, since no two situations are the same: life simply doesn’t work that way. Company policies do not provide context for life, just as quantity never provides context for quality.

Experience also has a quantitative aspect: how many times one succeeds following or establishing true hierarchy by subordinating quantity to quality. Many people with great careers and decision-making power go through life without developing any experience at all – and this is the root cause of many of those corporate problems that become fashionable to “solve” profitably by inexperienced people: innovation problems, culture problems, diversity problems, motivational problems, quality problems, work-life balance problems, UX, CX, EX (user, customer, employee experience) problems, mental health problems and similar.

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 Posted on May 18, 2025 by

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Why Referral Programs Underperform: The Fear of Referring Someone Better

Referral programs are often hailed as a cost-effective and efficient way for companies to find high-quality candidates for their open positions. By leveraging existing employees’ networks, companies hope to tap into pools of talent that align with their culture and values. However, despite their potential, many referral programs consistently underperform, leaving hiring managers and HR teams scratching their heads. A deeper investigation into this issue reveals a surprising root cause: employees’ reluctance to refer individuals they perceive as significantly better than themselves.

The Promise and Reality of Referral Programs

Employee referral programs come with a slew of benefits. They are faster and cheaper than traditional hiring processes, reduce turnover rates, and often bring in candidates who already have an understanding of the company culture through their connection to the referrer. The logic is simple—employees, who understand the demands of their roles, are likely to recommend people they believe can excel.

And yet, referral programs frequently miss the mark. Companies expect a steady stream of referrals but often receive lackluster participation or, worse, recommendations that fail to bring in top-tier talent. Why the disparity between expectation and outcome?

The Fear Factor: Why Employees Hold Back

One of the less-discussed yet pervasive reasons for the underperformance of referral programs lies in the psychology of fear. Many employees fear referring professionals they perceive as stronger, smarter, or more skilled than themselves. This fear is not rooted in malice but rather in self-preservation. Here’s why:

1. Concerns About Job Security

When an employee refers someone they believe is better qualified, they might unconsciously worry that this new hire could outshine them or even render their own role redundant. This fear is particularly pronounced in competitive work environments where job security feels tenuous. Employees may avoid introducing talent that could overshadow their own contributions, instead opting to refer individuals whose skills, while adequate, do not pose a threat.

2. Fear of Judgment

Referring a candidate is, in many ways, a reflection of an employee’s judgment. If a referral fails to perform well or does not mesh with the team, the referrer may feel their credibility is at stake. To avoid this potential embarrassment, employees may hesitate to recommend individuals who challenge the status quo or bring unfamiliar skills to the table, even if those skills could be beneficial.

3. The Desire to Maintain Status Quo

Employees often form bonds with their coworkers, creating a sense of camaraderie and stability. Introducing someone who shakes up the dynamic—especially someone perceived as highly ambitious or demanding—might be seen as disruptive. Employees may feel pressure to protect the existing team dynamic rather than prioritize the long-term benefits of introducing stronger talent.

The Impact of These Fears

These factors delude the referral program’s potential, as companies find themselves onboarding competent but unremarkable hires at best, rather than innovative leaders and game-changers.

Conclusion

Referral programs hold immense potential to transform hiring processes—but only if they are implemented with an awareness of the psychological barriers that may stifle participation. By addressing the fears employees face when recommending top-tier candidates, companies can turn underperforming referral systems into dynamic engines of growth. The key lies in understanding organizations as organic communities as opposed to programmable machines, and making appropriate adjustments. Only then can referral programs truly fulfill their promise of delivering outstanding talent to drive organizations forward.

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 Posted on May 18, 2025 by

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