I take the same route to and from work every day. I’m sure others have had the same experience, but there are days when I get to work and don’t remember much of the drive. I don’t pay very much attention to my surroundings because the buildings I pass and the streets I drive on don’t change.

One afternoon at work, one of my colleagues (and fellow blogger), Reid, asked me if I had noticed the squirrel statue in the roundabout by our building. (If you aren’t familiar with a roundabout, it’s basically a four-way intersection, but it has a circular roadway around a central island). Even though Reid is a psychologist, I thought he had lost his mind. Surely if there was something as strange as a statue of a squirrel in the roundabout that I go through twice a day I would have noticed it. But sure enough, as soon as he pointed it out to me from our office window, I saw the squirrel positioned right in the middle of the roundabout. I couldn’t believe it and wondered how I could have missed something so obvious. Now I wonder what else I’ve missed not only in my surroundings but in my day-to-day activities as well.

It is easy for work processes to become like my commute – so routine that we switch to autopilot and perform our tasks without even noticing them. When was the last time you systematically evaluated your pre-employment hiring process? If you always go through the process in the same way without really looking at what you are doing, how will you make improvements? If you look for candidates without really thinking about what makes a person successful on the job, what are you missing? Perhaps we should take some time to step back and evaluate our processes and determine what it is that we are really trying to accomplish. We might find something important that needs to be altered (or at least something we hadn’t noticed before) that will help us be more successful. Feel free to call or email us so that pan can help you find your squirrel statue.

Jenni Ginsburg