Hiring Practices: Fit For Service

When it comes to hiring practices, finding a new employee can be quite challenging and that challenge can be substantially more difficult if the employee will be provided with access to highly sensitive data and/or capabilities. Therefore it is imperative to ensure that every employee is fit for service but how is that actually accomplished? Some may state the best way is to conduct background investigations to include criminal, financial, social, and possibly travel histories. While I do find minor merit in this approach I do think it is a narrow straight that has made its way away from the main river. I believe each candidate should be investigated based on the candidate’s own set of prescribed ethics, views, and beliefs. For instance, of a candidate sees no particular value in money a financial background check may find the candidate has finances and/or a credit record that is considered to be poor or lackluster. This could be interpreted as a susceptibility to bribery or blackmail while in truth it indicates the exact opposite. Blindly conducting background investigations to determine if a candidate is fit for service only determines if a candidate fits the archetype of a fully indoctrinated and ingratiated member of society whom subscribes to all the beliefs of the hiring entity and whom has not faced substantive adversity. A hiring entity may have the luxury of such arbitrary hiring choices when the candidate pool is rather disproportionately large but with smaller candidacy pools the hiring criteria should be considerably more focused on perspective and less focused on social indoctrination. Choosing your employees based on their beliefs and not on conformance to an archetype will help to ensure the the wold isn’t mistaken for a sheep and the sheep dog isn’t mistaken for a wolf.