A Recruiter’s Scales and Tools of Justice

“So, you know I’m not the most politically correct person…”—UCLA student’s now-viral YouTube preface to the self-destructive proof

 

JUSTICE/Image: Michael Moffa

How do you, as a recruiter, respond when you discover an applicant has made a fool of herself—or worse—on YouTube? This week, the mega-popular video posting site was abuzz with viewings of and responses to an inflammatory video posted by a sadly sophomoric junior and poli-sci major at UCLA, Alexandra Wallace, whose name already generates more than 850,000 Google returns when searched.

Anatomy of Self-Destruction

The clip is a self-described “rant” about Asian students—specifically about what she felt are their bad manners, their clan caravan-style family visits on weekends, their inability to “fend for themselves” and their distracting use of cell phones in the library, which broke her concentration as she was on the verge of what she called a poli-sci exam study “epiphany”.

These complaints were spiced up with a  highly alliterative parody of Chinese cell-phone chatter: “Ching-chong ling-long ting-tong!…Oooh!”

After her self-posted video went viral, so did the devastating counter-parodies, rebukes and a few expressions of sympathy for all involved.

Shamed into apologizing in the same medium, Wallace (presumably not related to the late segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace) has announced that, because of death threats, she is withdrawing from UCLA.

She is also forced now to face the harsh consequences of her harsh harangue—albeit one with an almost disarming clueless-Valley Girl delivery, as though no one would take offense at her alluding to the Japan tsunami catastrophe as a kind of personal annoyance.

Well, big miscalculation: UCLA’s chancellor personally expressed his dismay in a public statement and the hapless girl has ended up splashed and trashed all over network news as well as the Net.

Damage Control?

The relevance of her folly and pillorying to recruiting became fully evident when one of her critics suggested that she “beg” YouTube to remove her video (and presumably all responses to it), if she is to have any hope of ever having a career.

At that point, I tried to imagine what your responses would be, were she to make it as far as an interview with you a few short years from now or sooner.

Making the very reasonable assumption that you would react reasonably and fairly, the question becomes this: What form of justice would you want applied to her case and her candidacy ?

The Seven “R”s of Justice

On analogy with the norms of jurisprudence, justice could be dispensed (by you) in one or more of the following obvious forms and tools of fairness:

• Revenge: You could join the angry villagers and basically stone her for her sins and reject her outright.
• Rehabilitation: You make any possibility of hiring her contingent on her taking sensitivity training, possibly within a company-sponsored program
• Restriction: Without putting a surveillance anklet on her, you could continue the processing of her candidacy, but with explicit restrictions on her actions, e.g., no more YouTube postings, no appearances on network talk shows, no blog, no book deals.
• Restitution: You express conditional interest in continuing with the evaluation of her candidacy, but with the proviso that she must make direct restitution to those whom she aggrieved, e.g., through her establishment of an Asian Studies Scholarship or donations of all TV, movie, book and poster-child earnings.
• Redemption: You recommend that she do something to redeem herself, e.g., by doing something that offsets, rather than makes restitution for, the harm she did. This distinction between redemption and restitution, although perhaps subtle, is solid. Ask any parolee who has become a preacher.
• Retrial: You listen to her side of the story, if it hasn’t been tarred and feathered beyond all recognition, to allow for the possibility that there was a rush to judgment and that she has been wrongly convicted by a YouTube jury of her peers.
• Remission:As with “remission of sins”, you simply forgive her, expunge her “record”, and move on with the selection process and her shot at the job.

What is of particular interest in this list of options is not just the range of choices, nor how your choice(s) will reflect your values as they force you to reflect on them.

Rather, of special interest is the suggestion that you, as a recruiter, should act in such an interventionist way and actually do something to further the cause of justice, if not her candidacy.

I imagine that in the vast majority of cases, a corporate, in-house recruiter would simply reject her after discovering her YouTube legacy—perhaps from simple cautiousness and not wanting to take a chance.

However, in that instance, whether or not the intent is revenge, the outright dismissal is in its consequences virtually tantamount to that.

To see why, despite not having a vengeful bone in your body, categorically rejecting her on the basis of her YouTube blunder is equivalent to revenge, try to categorize that rejection in any of the other ways listed:

Rehabilitation? No. Rehabilitation is supposed to help, not hurt or impair chances of recovery. Rejection only hurts and obstructs.

Restriction? Again, no—You are not restricting her access to YouTube by rejecting her application, nor are you restricting her opportunities to rant again, unless it is in the trivial sense of restricting them to the rest of the universe outside your office.

That would be a weak restriction, much like telling an ex-convict that there is only one place in the whole universe he can’t go, e.g., the home of the wife he beat up or anywhere she happens to be.

Actually, even that analogy with a released ex-convict is weak, because while the ex-con is under a “restraining order” preventing him from returning to the scene of the crime or repeating it, the miscreant UCLA girl would not be returning to the scene of her crime, nor would she be at all likely to re-offend while at work, making such a variation on a restraining order unwarranted.

Restitution? No way. Nothing is restored to anyone by hamstringing her future opportunities for productive work.

Redemption? Ditto. How can she redeem herself by being made to suffer and nothing more?

Retrial? Absolutely not. Outright rejection is more like “re-sentencing”.

Remission? Obviously not. There’s nothing forgiving about ending her chances.

So, like it or not, in unblinkingly rejecting her, you are, wittingly or not, exacting the equivalent of vengeance.

One More “R” of American Justice

Reflecting on her monumental misfire and the viral YouTube response, I have to say I was very impressed by the fact that much of the flak she drew was a kind of friendly fire.

There was lots of playful and very intelligent parodies, innuendo-laced jibes, left-handed mock compliments from half-mesmerized guys about her distracting physical appeal, full-(and semi-)dress take-offs and take-downs by some of the girls, and at least one first-rate song dedicated to her folly.

That is to say, her peers—Asian and non-Asian alike—meted out their own and in some ways uniquely American brand of creative justice: humor. No-holds-barred humor, but humor nonetheless.

Even her own “attack” had a comic aspect to it, bordering on self-spoof, which made the real parodies even easier to stage.

It seemed that instinctively most of the respondents knew exactly which form of justice she and we deserved—the form that would be fair, firm, yet, oddly enough, friendly—much like the style of a good teacher or life coach.

That form of justice is the eighth “R”, to be added to the others above.

The “roast”.

Should she or anyone like her ever be sitting opposite you, as a job candidate, it is to be hoped that you—and the rest of us—employing humor, and possibly her as well, will be able to help her to regenerate herself, like a fallen Phoenix.

With that help, she may be able to rise from the ashes of her self-immolation flame-out and to avoid ever having to experience another roasting like the one she’s experiencing on YouTube, the news networks and  everywhere else on the Net.

A “celebrity” roast wouldn’t only be fair.

It would be constructive and instructive fun—for all…

… that should instruct as well as include her,  as part of everyone’s purging and her penance.

[Note: Among the dozens of re-postings of and ripostes to her video, this is one re-posting of the original, which she removed after her inserting an apology into it— http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Johj5WEYzZo.]