You can blame criminal elements, but counterfeit products enter markets through stupidity.

The principal of Occum’s Razor is used by most of us in our day to day lives, whether we know it or not. All things being equal, the simplest explanation is most likely to be true.

There’s been a lot of speculation about counterfeit produce in US markets recently, from fake Tiffany rings on e-bay to major influxes of counterfeit drugs into the US pharmaceutical market place.

This is not robbery, it’s not theft – it’s a lesson in false confidence. At some point, someone was taken for a fool in a circumstance where they should have known better. In almost all cases, they were motivated to ignore or downgrade the risk element because they had something to gain. When we ignore the tell-tale signs of fraudulence, it’s almost always because we want to believe.

There’s a reason they’re called confidence scams. The con man doesn’t need the real product; he doesn’t even need any product at all. All he needs is your confidence. This seems like a good deal to me.

As I read these stories, I’m constantly brought back to the same question: How are so many people in this country able to ignore the advice they have been given since childhood by mothers, fathers, teachers and bosses?

If a deal looks too good to be true, then it probably is.

Great deals come with simple explanations. The rent for this apartment seems very cheap, but the owner needs to leave town urgently for 6 months and doesn’t have time to wait around. This hotel seems cheap, but they’ve only been open two weeks and they are attracting customers away from established competitors. Sensible and simple explanations.

If the simple explanation is either missing – or you have cause to doubt its veracity – it’s time to back away.

Most of us have seen it on the streets of major cities. There’s a guy selling designer goods out of a suitcase; the boxes are all top end brands – Calvin Klein, Ray-bans, Gucci. $10 for the 50ml bottle that sells for $70 in Macy’s. Hungry tourists crowd round to get themselves a bargain.

Now and again a furious buyer returns shouting at the vendor. They’ve opened the box and the product is a cheap imitation.

But what are they complaining about? Of course the product is fake. They’re produced for $2.00 and sold for $10.00. No other plausible explanation existed from the beginning. You can hope that they’re stolen if your conscience allows it, but even then – what are the chances?

Some research for this blog threw up some incredible message boards where people complained at length that the Tiffany ring they had bought on e-bay was not the real thing. The price was $6.00. Come on. Seriously?

The perfume is fake. The handbag is not really from Gucci. The sunglasses are not really Ray-bans and yes – the $6.00 ring is not really from Tiffany. If you paid $6.00 and expected a Tiffany ring, then you are an idiot by anyone’s definition.

So when it comes to the healthcare industry’s issue, who is really to blame for the influx of counterfeit drugs into the huge US market? (40% of the world’s prescription drugs are sold in the US.) The answer is simple. At some point the supply chain moves from illegal to legal. It moves from the criminally devious to the honestly stupid. Breaking this link in the chain is the answer to combating counterfeit produce.

At a corporate level, every bit as much as at a personal level, we are responsible for making sensible decisions. We must assess risk, identify things that need explanation and follow a sensible, logical course of action.

In every occurrence of a fake product entering a market, someone is failing to do these things. Someone is chasing a bargain or a glut – and an opportunity to benefit personally – that is blinding them to their obvious responsibility to see things for what they are.

If you don’t 100% trust the source you’re buying from, you have to be 100% sure you have the means to assess the product before you either use it or pass it on.

Buyers across the pharmaceutical supply chain would do well to keep Occum’s Razor close at hand.

Candidate has great skills, ideal experience and strong references? Well done, you’re half way there.

If you made a new hire today, there is a 46% chance that they will be gone in 18 months. This statistic, which is alarming enough in itself, is compounded by the fact that 89% of these failures will be attributed to attitudinal factors. Put simply, half the people you hire will not survive in the job you gave them, mostly because they have bad attitudes.

Now a bad attitude may conjure up images of laziness or insubordination, but there are other more common faults that fit into this area, including a lack of coachability, emotional intelligence or motivation.

Turnover in the modern workplace is a major problem for productivity and where failure occurs, it is only occasionally due to a lack of hard skill.

Ask anybody with hiring experience, in any sector, anywhere in the world and they will tell you that the best way to lower turnover and increase tenure is to hire the right people in the first place.

What this recent study (the basis of Hiring for Attitude - a new book from business coach Mark Murphy) suggests is that far too many employers are basing their hiring practices on simple check lists of hard skills, at the expense of a genuine assessment of a person’s suitability. The result? A short term success that spells long term disaster.

Talascend hires thousands of people every year, for our own staff and for our customers. What everyone here will tell you first and foremost is this…

The interview is the most important part of the entire hiring process.

Here are our five tips for getting it right.

1.       Don’t duplicate the role of the resume and references.

Let the resume and references establish the candidate’s skills and credibility. If they claim to be academically qualified, capable of a specific role technically and that they have worked in the role for five years at these two companies, then – If it all checks out via transcripts and references – it’s a safe assumption that they can do the job, so you don’t need to focus too much time on their hard skills.

2.       Move quickly to the important part

You’ll want to spend a short time satisfying yourself that their track record is deserved, but once you have, move quickly on to the soft skills that are going to determine whether they succeed or fail with you. How will they behave within a team? (and most importantly your team.) What motivates them? (and are their needs consistent with what you can offer?) How are they likely to respond to pressure?

3.       Don’t be awkward asking personal questions

 It’s easy to understand why interviews tend to focus heavily on hard skills; it’s much safer territory for the interviewer and interviewee. Tell me about your experience using the new ABC software. How much time have you spent conducting site reviews?  These are a lot less awkward to ask than questions that drive at emotional intelligence and very few hiring managers have had the training they need to conduct a rounded interview. 

4.       Get Help

There are a number of great resources available to navigate this terrain. There are templates available online, your HR department is likely to be very helpful. There are also external devices like psychometric profiles, which some employers swear by. Staffing agencies that you work with will be happy to help you; it's in their interest for your interviews to go well – ask them what they can offer.

5.       Act now, before the next 46% doomed hire joins you

Whatever you do to address this issue, do it sooner rather than later. We all understand what 46% turnover means for our teams, projects and businesses. 

We can all do better than this; we simply have to do better if our operations are to thrive and grow. Your next coin-toss hire could be sitting in your building right now. 

Facebook for jobs? It’s time to SWOT up.

by Josh Kaplan

If you’re job hunting on job boards and corporate websites, you might be missing something right in front of you. It could be time to take Facebook more seriously.

18,000,000 Americans found their current job through Facebook. Not a date for Saturday night. Not a great new Vietnamese restaurant downtown. Not a video of a giant panda sneezing. They found a job. That’s equivalent to the combined populations of New York and L.A.

If professional connections are the serious side of social media, then Facebook is getting serious. And why wouldn’t it? At the end of the day, contacts and relationship management are the key to a strong career path and while Facebook may have been created as a means for people to share personal and informal information, its incursion into the world of work was inevitable.

For jobseekers, that means it’s time to think about how they use Facebook and where the dangers and possibilities lie. This week, we use a very business-led model to help you navigate the issues. We present a SWOT analysis of Facebook’s potential for jobseekers.

Strengths

Accessibility

Facebook has all the obvious benefits of any online media. – 24/7 access, live access and real time news and events.

Segmentation

If job advertisers want to reach the 35-50 year old market of engineers in Frederick, Maryland – they can. And they don’t have to pay for all the extraneous exposure. Expect to see this activity increase, especially among smaller employers with limited budgets.

Passive Job Seekers

Relevant jobs can land on your Facebook profile without you even asking for them. The best candidate for any job is a passive candidate. If you’re a company trying to recruit, finding a candidate from among active users on Monster or CareerBuilder may result in a great deal of competition with other employers.

Scale

500,000,000 people means massive potential in any context. Period.

Weaknesses

Generation gap

A great many of the key skills in most demand, particularly in engineering, are only available among a demographic group that is relatively inactive on Facebook.

Current functionality

While talk of Facebook-Jobs continues, current functionality,  does not allow users to silo content in the same way that Google+ does, so that your football buddies see one thing and your business contacts see another.  G+ may be dead on arrival, but it would have been of greater benefit for jobseekers in time.

Opportunities

Future Functionality

Whatever Facebook lacks, it can develop - and based on its track record, it probably will.

Overall Market share

In the online job world, market share is very important. Monster is great example. If you’re first, you have a major advantage in attracting investment and reinvesting in marketing to further boost your intake. At that point, it’s your ball to drop. Facebook does not drop the ball very often and they are a light year out in front of the pack.

Threats

Work / Life balance

It remains to be seen if Facebook users en masse simply don’t want to integrate their personal lives with work. They may look for an entirely different product, just on principal. (Someone run down to the basement and dust off Google+?)

Fear of Embarrassment

We’ve all seen those e-mail examples of Facebook mistakes and misjudgments. It has ended marriages and careers too. Many people may choose to stay on Linked-In rather than risk their career and reputation by linking their CEO to their college roommate. This may threaten Facebook’s ability to control the market.

So there it is, early days for Facebook as a dominating online job resource. One thing is certain, it is currently playing a role in landing people work. The question is whether it can bring one of the side benefits of its model into a central role without compromising its central purpose.