For those of you who are a little uptight about hiring a consultant who has a pair of nose and glasses on his website, don’t worry. You can ask any of our clients and they will tell you that we are completely professional about our work. Now, for those of you who are extremely uptight about yourselves, you are definitely in the wrong area of the website, and probably in the wrong website altogether. You see, at the BOOTH RESEARCH GROUP, we have fun at what we do.
This section of the website is a reflection of that fun. In this section we will provide various jokes, stories, humorous anecdotes, and similar information. We would like to make this as interactive and participative as possible, so we encourage you to send in your ideas, laughs, guffaws, stories, and similar thoughts. We will attempt to post them as quickly as possible.
Meanwhile, we thought that you might like to hear a story from:
TALES OF ASSESSMENT CENTER HORRORS
Over
the years we encounter all sorts of interesting candidates
who look at exercises from new and sometimes unusual perspectives.
One of the funniest was a fellow who was taking one of our
in-basket exercises.
The basic set-up for this exercise is that the candidate is
to assume that he or she is in the role of the position being
tested. In this situation, it was a Fire Lieutenant. The candidates
further assume that they have been out of town, and their
in-baskets are filled with all sorts of memos, reports, email
messages, telephone calls, and other assorted documents that
present various problems for them to handle. Their task is
to sort through those problems and develop an action plan.
They are given about an hour to work through the documents
and develop solutions to the problems. Once that hour is up,
they go before the assessors to explain their rationale.
Unlike other consultants who simply have the candidates turn
in their action plans for review at a later time by the assessors,
we have the candidates actually sit down with the assessors
to discuss their strategy. They explain why they chose the
action they did, what alternatives they considered, whether
or not they understood the likely consequences of their decisions,
and the degree to which they are prepared to handle those
consequences. We believe that it is essential that the candidates
have an opportunity to explain their thinking on these matters.
So, this candidate for Fire Lieutenant finished his review
of the documents for Fire Lieutenant and walked proudly into
the room where the assessors were located. He took a quick
look back at the first document he had handled, and said,
“Woo wee, that was a tough one. I decided I was gonna
put that one in my thinkin’ pile.” He pulled out
his next document and sure enough said, “Woo wee, that
was another one them troublesome ones. I’m gonna put
that one in my thinkin’ pile too.” So the process
went. Each item appeared troublesome to this candidate so
the only action he took was to “put it in his thinkin’
pile”.
Now I’m the first to admit that the in basket is not
necessarily a simulation of what actually goes on at a job.
Indeed, when I go through my in basket at work, I frequently
address a couple of difficult issues and then turn to something
light, like jokes sent to me via email. Further, I think we
all have encountered some problems that we thought might best
be handled by putting them aside for a while, maybe into our
“thinkin’ piles”. Indeed, sometimes the best
way to handle some problems is to let them sit for a while
in the hopes that they will go away. Now while this sometimes
works in real-life, it is seldom a good strategy for an in
basket exercise at an assessment center.
Tell
us your stories. Simply submit them to our website.
