Employers must focus on culture and teams

Cambridge professor Jason Arday was found dead nine days after he resigned from the university under a cloud of plagiarism allegations.

Cambridge had already announced inquiries into its appointment processes, before the death of their high-profile professor of sociology.

Chief among the concerns about Arday were allegations that he plagiarised other academics’ material, the standard of his own output and his experience. Many commentators asserted that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the hiring process had created the problem for Cambridge.

I don’t know if any of these charges are accurate. However, I am a woman leading an Australian manufacturing company, so I understand the DEI debate intimately.

I also have a business to run, which includes the responsibility of employing 150 people from diverse backgrounds. As the CEO, I’m responsible for not only hiring, but the impacts created by the new employee: impacts on the person and their family, the staff, the company culture, the financial outcomes and the leadership team.

Mr Arday’s death has made me reflect on the lessons that can be taken from such a situation. If a job candidate’s CV or interview raises doubts about experience, credentials, suitability, or readiness for a role, those matters should be investigated before the appointment is made. The time for true assessments of a candidate is before the offer is made, not after it’s been accepted.  

Along with filling a role, effective recruitment entails due diligence, asking questions, verifying information, and ensuring the organisation and the individual are primed for success.

When appointments are made without sufficient scrutiny, teams lose confidence and culture is disrupted. The new hire might also find themselves carrying expectations they were never equipped to meet. The organisation loses, and so does the new employee.

Successful organisations build strong cultures with the right people in the right roles. That certainly requires fairness and inclusion, but it also necessitates due diligence and a willingness to test assumptions. The employer owes this to their existing teams as much as the new people invited to join them.

And what of DEI hiring practices? Yes, we have to ensure barriers are dismantled where they stop non-traditional cohorts being employed in certain jobs. I understand this very well as one of the few female CEOs in the manufacturing sector.

However, focusing your hiring on immutable characteristics doesn’t help much with the totally mutable qualities of experience, age, aptitude and skills. Not to mention the cultural fit which is really what most employers are looking for.

In the industrial sectors, I can tell you it would be very hard to appoint an inexperienced and perhaps ill-prepared person into a senior operational or managerial position: the problems would show up immediately, the team-members would lose morale and measures such as productivity and quality could easily go backwards. You would risk breaking a successful culture, which is why there’s no room for ‘woke’ considerations when employing.

When you get the right people, you can build a success culture around teams. But you have to start with the right people, and you have to be looking for the right things. I find the Jason Arday situation terribly sad, and it reminds me that when we hire a person, we should be doing what is right for them as surely as we are helping the organisation.

Julie Harrison is CEO of Harrison Manufacturing Company