HR cannot be always right?

Assembly lines may come and mess up the tenets of production; Computers may come and kill the need for arithmetic abilities; AI may come and muck up things for all and sundry; but, for as long as man management exists, the basic principles of man management may probably not change. (What if ALL you employ is AI? Well, then, would the need for man management still exist?)

And so it proves with Tiru saying something like this which will echo with the HR guys of today...

Enaivagaiyaan thaeriyak kannum vinaivagaiyaan veraagum maandhar palar - Tirukkural

No matter how detailed your assessment before you select a person, there will always be those who change once they are on the job - Loose Translation

I'm sure that Tiru does not mean technical capabilities here. Like, it is not likely that the chap who was an expert at coding is suddenly going to turn around and ask you, "What is Java?" THAT is not the sort of thing that Tiru expects to happen. It could well happen that the chap who talks well of coding is, in actual fact, incapable to writing a single line of code...but THAT would mean that you had only interviewed him and not tested his coding skills otherwise. (NOT detailed assessment, no?)

But, yeah, you could find that he is pathetic at working with people in a team. Now THAT is the sort of thing that shows up over a period of time; it is not like he is going to break his laptop over the head of the team lead in the first meeting. But THAT still does not count as 'changing'; it's merely a character trait that manifests only when on the job and not under test conditions when people are trying to put their best foot forward.

Some changes do happen. Like, when someone is hungry for a job, all the conditions of the employer seem fine. ONCE on the job, comparisons creep in - about how peers in the company are treated; how peers in the industry are treated, yada yada. The person may well be perfectly honest when he agrees to take up the job; and equally as honest when he goes up in arms against the compay later.

People will change on the job. Their sense of their own value, their sense of the fairness of their own treatment, their sense of the burdens of the job and the sacrifices demanded - all of that will change once they are on the job.

Which is why managing people is way different from managing machines. THAT, after all, is one of the primary attractions of AI!