Wednesday, March 31, 2004

Ranking I.T. Staff

Jeff De Luca follows my recent post on HR Myths #3 with his own version of what’s wrong with the process of ranking I.T. staff. Actually the method he describes is not identical to the methods I have seen in two large American companies but it is similar enough for you to get the picture.

H.R. applying the bell curves and normalizing within levels is not just sub-optimal it is often plain unfair. It assumes a related normalization of staff numbers and skills and performances by level across the organization. You can’t just say we’ll promote 3 associate programmers this year and 2 programmers. What if the associates mostly performed poorly (can easily happen if the hiring was not good). 3 associates get promoted no matter what. What if there is a much higher percentage of outstanding programmers then there is outstanding associate programmers this year? (again, can easily happen). They are penalized as only 2 will get promoted no matter what.

As Johnnie C. commented on my HR Myths #3 post…

Wow. Is this a common scheme in larger companies? You make very good points. Setting up a scheme like this is silly. Just another reason that I’ll try to avoid working for larger corporations.