Did voters in Tamil Nadu see actor Vijay as an agent of change, or were they simply starstruck? Enterprises are no different; they have a penchant for hiring leaders with aura. “I want resumes from Google, Apple, Amazon,” is something you will frequently hear if you are in the technology industry. When hiring, organisations are often enamoured by qualifications, brands, and persona, and tend to throw caution to the winds. The usual filters applied when recruiting or promoting take a back seat due to the star allure and lead to wrong appointments.
If you are of my era and follow cricket, you wouldn’t forget how the experiment of appointing the once-in-a-generation batter Sachin Tendulkar as captain and India’s possibly best all-rounder Kapil Dev as coach went.
Star tantrums
A senior sales head of a Fortune 100 company was being assessed for a rival firm, and he kept posturing in different ways during the interviews as though he wasn’t even interested in this career move. He would say things like “you know I travel only business class” when he had to meet the board members in another city. For the next round of interviews, he made sure the chairman got invited to the golf club he was part of, to show off his peer network there. But then his demeanour, pedigree, the brand he was employed with, and his social status influenced all the people who processed him. The HR team struggled to manage him through the offer process, as he would deny them easy access. However, he had managed to charm the board and the CEO so much that all the enabling functions had to put up with his tantrums during his onboarding.
