PACHYDERMIC PERSONNEL PREDICTION A bold new proposal for matching high-technology people and professions. Over the years, the problem of finding the right person for the right job has consumed thousands of worker-years of research and millions of dollars of funding. This is particularly true for high-technology organisations where talent is scarce and expensive.. Recently, however, years of detailed study by the finest minds in the field of Psychoindustrial Interpersonal Optimisation have resulted in the development of a simple and foolproof test to determine the best match between personality and profession. Now, at last, people can be infallibly assigned to the jobs for which they are truly best suited. The procedure is quite simple: Each subject is sent to Africa to hunt elephants. The subsequent elephant-hunting behaviour is then categorised by comparison to the classification rules outlined below. The subject should be assigned to the general job classification that best matches the observed behaviour. CLASSIFICATION GUIDELINES MATHEMATICIANS hunt elephants by going to Africa, throwing out everything that is not an elephant, and catching one of whatever is left. Experienced mathematicians will attempt to prove the existance of at least one unique elephant before proceeding to step 1 as a subordinate exercise. Professors of mathematics will prove the existance of at least one unique elephant and then leave the detection and capture of an actual elephant as an exercise for their graduate students. COMPUTER SCIENTISTS hunt elephants by exercising Algorithm A: Algorithm A 1. Go to Africa. 2. Star at the Cape of Good Hope. 3. Work northward in an orderly manner, traversing the continent alternately east and west. 4. During each traverse pass, a. Catch each animal seen. b. Compare each animal caught to a known elephant. c. Stop when match is detected. Experienced computer programmers modify Algorithm A by placing a known elephant in Cairo to ensure the algorithm will terminate. Assembly Language programmers will execute Algorithm A on their hands and knees. ENONOMISTS don't hunt elephants, but they believe that if elephants are paid enough, they will hunt themselves. STATISTICIANS hunt the first animal they see "n" times and call it an elephant. CONSULTANTS don't hunt elephants, and many have never hunted anything at all, but they can be hired by the hour to advise those people who do. Operations research consultants can also measure the correlation of hat size and bullet colour to the efficiency of elephant-hunting strategies, if someone else will only identify the elephants. POLITICIANS don't hunt elephants, but they will share the elephants you catch with the people who voted for them. LAWYERS don't hunt elephants, but they do follow the herds around arguing about who owns the droppings. Software lawyers will claim they own an entire herd based on the look and feel of one dropping. DIRECTORS OF ENGINEERING, research, and development try hard to hunt elephants, but their staffs are designed to prevent it. When the director does get to hunt elephants, the staff will try to ensure that all possible elephants are prehunted before the director sees them. If the director does see a nonprehunted elephant, the staff will (1) compliment the director's keen eyesight and (2) enlarge itself to prevent any recurrence. SENIOR MANAGERS set broad elephant-hunting policy based on the assumption that elephants are just like big field mice, but with deeper voices QUALITY ASSURANCE INSPECTORS ignore the elephants and look for mistakes the other hunters made when they were packing the jeep. SALESPEOPLE don't hunt elephants but spend their time selling the elephants they haven't caught, for delivery two days before the season opens. Software salespeople ship the first thing they catch and write up an invoice for an elephant. Hardware salespeople catch rabbits, paint them grey, and sell them as desktop elephants. VALIDATION A validation was conducted about these rules. Almost all the people surveyed about these rules were valid. A few were invalid, but they are expected to recover soon. Based on the survey, a statistical confidence level was determined. Ninety-five percent of the people surveyed have at least 67 percent confidence in statistics. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This study has benefited from the suggestions and observations of many people, all of whom would prefer not to be mentioned by name. Thanks to: Peter C Olsen, Byte Magazine Following the insertion of the article above in the Common Room Echo, some further suggestions came to light..... TECHNICAL AUTHORS Don't actually hunt elephants but talk for hours about how to do it, problems arising, best places etc. Also write the guides for elephant hunters called "A beginners guide to elephant hunting", "Supercharging Elephant hunting", "Elephant hunting: Reference guide", etc. Not successful when they actually try elephant hunting because they tend to not recognise REAL elephants, hold the rifle the wrong way round, and go to Alaska thinking that it is Africa. TECHNICAL SUPPORT Run advice services on how to hunt elephants. Like to advise hunters on novel ways of trying to hunt elephants. However, will claim that "it's never done that before" if a hunter comes in complaining that the advice didn't work. SYSOPS Guide parties of hunters but will normally insist that after a certain number of elephants have been shot, 1 must be added. Kind Sysops will allow you to move an elephant from another safari park. Unkind sysops will insist that you personally breed a replacement elephant. REGIONAL COORDINATORS Like to try and join in elephant hunting, but normally get shot at by anyone who is having a problem and can't shoot the guide (Sysop) ...and some quickies... [1] METROPOLITAN POLICE OFFICERS capture the first animal they came across and then swear blind it was an elephant... [2] AMERICAN POLICE OFFICERS would shoot everything in sight in the hope that they would eventually get an elephant. [3] AMERICAN LAWYERS would persuade a giraffe to plead guilty to the lesser charge of being an elephant. [4] PAUL DICKIE sends every animal in Africa a message, in the hope that an elephant would reply... [5] IRA TERRORISTS wait until someone else caught an elephant & then claim responsibility... [6] SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS create alternative universes in which only elephants could be found in Africa... [7] SUNDAY SPORT JOURNALISTS would write a story claiming that all the elephants had been kidnapped by Martians! [8] SUN READERS would go and look for elephants in Basingstoke... ...thanks to Brian Timmins for bringing the article to notice & Simon Muth for his excellent suggestions!!!