Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work (31 page)

Many candidates also provide the names of personal and professional references who will vouch for them. These individuals are a good resource if they are questioned carefully. Unfortunately, some references may verify résumé information that is false, such as job titles, scope of responsibilities, salary level, and performance. This situation is very hard to get around unless you know the reference personally—perhaps through a professional organization.

For each reference it is important to have a list of key questions that focus on verifying known information and soliciting new information, but keep in mind that the data collected are often only impressions or hearsay. Recall, also, that psychopaths leave behind pawns, patrons, and patsies in their wake, each with his or her personal perspective of the candidate. Patrons will be expected to give glowing reviews, while patsies and some pawns will provide a decidedly negative picture of the same person. Dramatic differences in their reports may provide a clue to potential problems.

Former bosses can provide valuable firsthand knowledge about the person’s qualifications, work ethic, diligence, accuracy, ability to get along with others, approach to problem solving and decision making, and other hard-to-define characteristics. A good approach is to ask the reference how the candidate handled work situations that the candidate related during the interview. Because these situations were also discussed in detail during the interview, the hiring manager now has two points of view to compare. One cannot expect them to be a perfect match, but any distortions or exaggerations should be readily apparent. Other typical questions include:

• What is the applicant’s record of accomplishment when it comes to project management and completion of assignments?

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• What are the applicant’s strengths, both technical and personal?

• What are his or her weaknesses or development needs?

• Which management approach worked best with this applicant?

The last question is particularly important, as it can begin to get at the real management issues of interest to the hiring manager and should be asked once rapport is established. Also, it allows the previous supervisor a chance to deepen the conversation into any concerns that may be lurking under the surface. The purpose is to get a clear, detailed, and accurate picture of the candidate from someone who actually knows the candidate, and then use this information to validate one’s impressions from the interview.

In addition to questions about the applicant’s technical expertise, background, and experience, it is important to learn about the applicant’s impact on others.

• Is the applicant a team player?

• How did the applicant treat peers and, especially, subordinates?

• Do people feel comfortable with and trust the applicant?

• Were there any peers, subordinates, or other members of management who had issues with the applicant? How did the applicant handle them?

Another area of questioning should focus on any changes in perception, such as surprises or disappointments that occurred over the course of the applicant’s employment; reports of any strange or erratic behavior would come under this line of questioning.

• Did the applicant ever surprise or disappoint?

• Were there any trust issues?

• Would the reference rehire the applicant?

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There are other sources of information about performance and scope of responsibility that hiring managers can pursue. The most common include the interviewer’s professional acquaintances who also work for the candidate’s previous employer. In some industries, key individuals know each other and may be willing to offer their opinions. These individuals may not know the candidate, so this is a hit-or-miss approach, and the information provided may be biased.

However, it is worth trying if the information gleaned is interpreted with caution.

CHECKING BACKGROUNDS

Another source of information about candidates involves background checking. This has been made much easier in recent years with the advent of the Internet. There are also companies that will provide professional background-checking services for a fee. These typically include criminal record, credit reports, education, licenses and credentials verification, and even driving records. While the amount and quality of information is not guaranteed, it can be used to verify what is already known and possibly to uncover issues of concern. Having a criminal record is not in and of itself a rejection factor. Many individuals who have broken the law in years past make good, solid employees. But in some industries, such as banking and securities, a history of fraud is an automatic red flag. Used wisely, background information can help the company make a more informed choice.

“Please God, Help Me Plunder”

Joyti De-Laurey, a thirty-year-old former personal assistant at a British investment bank, was sentenced to a seven-year prison term for stealing more than $7 million from her employers. She used the money for a lifestyle that would be considered extrava-gant even by the rich and famous. She obtained the money by
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forging her bosses’ signatures on checks and transfers, and then moved money from their brokerage accounts to her checking accounts. The scam was so simple and obvious that her lawyer
blamed her bosses
for the crime because they were too busy making money to monitor her behavior.

One of her bosses stated that he had noticed that his account was “light” by two or three million dollars but assumed it was his mistake. He also thought she was “a talented woman” and considered promoting her because “she knows exactly how to work for me.” Her lawyer argued that she was guilty of nothing more than “honest greed.”

Perhaps, but De-Laurey also had a grotesque sense of ethics and entitlement, and a convenient belief that God was on her side. The latter was evident in her “Bibles of Daily Thoughts,”

notebooks containing her letters to God. “Dear God. Please help me. I need one more helping of what’s mine and then I must cut down and cease in time all the plundering,” she wrote. “Please ensure my job is safe and my integrity is unquestioned.”

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

The purpose of this multistep selection process is to gather as much information about potential hires from as many sources as possible so that a company can make a good decision. By combining information from multiple raters (that is, interviewers, references, and recommendations), the company creates a more thorough picture of each applicant, improving its chances of picking the right person for the open job.

A thorough hiring process is very similar to the approach used by psychologists and criminal justice professionals in assessing criminal behavior, although obviously the criteria being rated are quite different. A prison record is a de facto “résumé” of an offender’s “accomplishments” and includes “references” and “performance reviews”

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from social workers, psychologists, and criminal justice officials.

When evaluating psychopathy, researchers combine their interview notes with what others have observed and documented in the record.

Having access to collateral information is as important to screening for psychopathy as it is to making the right hiring decision. While the company has a different objective in mind and rarely probes into the deep psychological motives of an applicant, a solid selection process has the potential for capturing enough information about the applicant’s behavior at least to raise some red flags.

Executive Hiring and Promotion

When trying to fill technical positions, having clear job requirements eases the hiring process. There are certain things that chemists, engineers, computer programmers, and financial analysts, among others, are expected to know, and specific experiences that they are expected to have had at various points in their careers, making the screening of candidates somewhat straightforward. The selection of a senior manager is significantly more difficult. One reason for the difficulty in selecting the right executive is that the nature of the executive’s job is so amorphous or so tailored to the individual that it is difficult to ascertain exactly what knowledge, skills, abilities, and attitudes are required. It should be obvious to the reader by now that a good job description is critical to understanding the qualifications to be sought in new hires and promotional candidates. Unfortunately, many executives we have met just do not have an adequate job description with which to work.

Also, there is some overlap between things psychopaths do and good executives do, at least on the surface. A complete understanding of the differences is important because one can be mistaken for the other, and the amount of damage a high-level bad hire can do to the organization can be significant.

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INTERNAL VERSUS EXTERNAL CANDIDATES

Choosing between an internal promotional candidate and an external hire is sometimes like comparing apples to oranges. Internal candidates for promotions, of course, are better known to the company than outsiders, but this often works against them, because the external candidate usually seems much better qualified than the internal one. Because more is known about the internal person’s personal weaknesses and idiosyncrasies, it is more likely that decision makers will have formed negative opinions that work against his or her candidacy. Conversely, organizations usually discover much less about the external candidates, making them appear more qualified. This kind of uneven comparison makes it much easier for a psychopathic candidate to join an organization, beating out an internal candidate who is otherwise qualified. Would you choose the “devil you know or the devil you don’t know”?

The matter is made more complicated if you already have a corporate psychopath on staff (without your knowledge) who has established an influence network and already has a patron on his or her side. In this case the (possibly) better-qualified external candidate is at a disadvantage. Recall that the psychopath spends considerable time and energy building relationships with key decision makers in the organization, in case he or she needs their support later on. The psychopathic fiction, “I am the ideal employee,” created in the minds of his or her supporters can be easily transformed into a very believable “I am the ideal leader.” In this case, the internal psychopath will look much better than any but the most outstanding external candidate.

Furthermore, the psychopath also has a clear advantage should the company compare him or her with internal candidates. Recall that corporate psychopaths spread considerable disinformation about their rivals (unbeknownst to the company or the rival), which leads to doubts and concerns, thus effectively knocking other candidates out of contention.

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This is a real problem for the company trying to fill a top-level job. The best defense for this type of systematic manipulation is to add more hurdles or screens, in the form of executive recruiters and formal succession planning.

EXECUTIVE RECRUITERS

Executive recruiters specialize in the identification of talent and then recommend candidates with the appropriate background and credentials.

Psychopaths Wanted

University researchers have used a variety of techniques to study psychopathy in the general population. The challenge is to get them to come into the laboratory and to agree to provide enough information about themselves for a proper assessment to be conducted. A common procedure is to put an ad in the newspaper, such as the following:

Are you charming, intelligent, adventurous, aggressive, impulsive? Do you get bored easily and like to live life on the edge? If you would like to make some easy money by participating in a confidential interview, please call to set up an appointment.

But who would volunteer for such a study? Real psychopaths, psychopathic wannabes, crooks, would-be mercenaries, or those who just need the money? All of these, it appears. Indeed, a recent study found that the average score on the PCL: SV of those who answered such an ad was very high, with half the scores approaching those of incarcerated criminals. Among the latter, some had been arrested for a variety of crimes, while others had managed to engage in a range of unethical behaviors without ever being charged.

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The use of professional executive recruiters adds a layer of security in this type of selection, as they have often placed the executives they recommend in more than one company over the course of their careers. They therefore have access to an extensive performance database (both track record and personal chemistry) from their previous dealings with these executives. Much of this information comes from hiring managers at other companies who have used their services to fill vacancies. Also, in some industries, key applicants tend to circulate through the same companies and can provide information about each other to the recruiter. Although information from peers might be biased, it often is uncensored and may reveal questionable behaviors of the sort covered in this book. Using their vast databases, astute recruiters should be able to find a good match between the company requirements and the profiles of their candidates, and to screen for any hint of previous indications of psychopathic behavior.

While a corporate psychopath may be able to fool a recruiting firm some of the time, the more the recruiter knows the candidate’s history, the less likely it is to occur again.

SUCCESSION PLANNING

The alternative to external recruiting is internal promotion. Succession plans provide orderly continuity of leadership for the company, and they are the most effective means of identifying and grooming leadership talent for promotion. If well designed, they can minimize the chance of a corporate psychopath’s slipping through. Formal succession planning can be cumbersome, but when compared to the alternatives, it can reap benefits.