Guest Post by Peter Lanc @HRMexplorer

Wed­ding day blues and get­ting a job what’s the dif­fer­ence? Not a lot…. Aren’t we all look­ing for supe­rior performance?

I was speak­ing to a friend recently who is get­ting married.

She asked how she could know what it would be like after got mar­ried. I told her it’s a bit like my recruit­ing job. The can­di­dates look great but how can I know what are they really like?

It’s all good up until the day, kind of like a pro­ba­tion­ary period, but as they say cur­rent and past per­for­mance is no deter­mi­na­tion of future success!

That’s got us think­ing, so off to the bar we went for cock­tails to muse over this del­i­cate  topic. Over a few drinks we con­tin­ued to pon­der what would it be like to ask a soon to be spouse the fol­low­ing questions:

1. How can I be sure that you are who you say you are and that you’ll stay that way?
2. What will you be like when I am hav­ing a baby or mother in law trou­bles– will you stick around or move on?
3. Will you always remain as a high per­former or will you (like the Who tune) fffff­fade away….
4. How can I know you will treat my friends right even if you don’t like them and not have emo­tional out­bursts and cause rela­tion­ship problems?
5. Will you con­tinue to put me at the cen­ter of your world and not go off with your bud­dies all the time?
6. Will you stay the course, not get bored and go some­where else?

Oh and what about ref­er­ences!! That caused some chuck­les I can tell you. Now would that not be some­thing… Can you see their face when you say, “Give me 3 names of peo­ple who you have dated so I can check you out, I want to see how you were with them!!!”

Can you imag­ine the response? Well that’s not fair they will never give me a good ref­er­ence because….. etc etc.

There were even more ques­tions we thought of. Oh what fun we had, the more we had to drink the bet­ter and more inci­sive and per­sonal the ques­tions were that we came up with. Oh boy, well maybe some of us do this and some of us sim­ply think it over cock­tails, with our bud­dies and girlfriends.

I guess a job is a job yet it is much more and how many take the same time and thought over it as my friend who was get­ting mar­ried, and oh my those references!

Who would you not want your prospec­tive employer to ask a ref­er­ence of?  Just think, who are we really and for how long?  How many masks do we have and what shadow do we really cast? What are we really like? I mean really…

Its all so impor­tant, just like a mar­riage we have to be the right fit… all of the time!