Excellent post today by Claudia Faust at RecruitingBlogs.com (find original post HERE). I know Claudia through our interaction in the recruiting community (by the way, she's awesome), and wanted to repost her thoughts because they are appropriate whether you are a recruiter, an engineer, or a CIA Operative. Claudia's weekly column is a "Dear Claudia" format where somebody writes her a question and Claudia does her best (which is pretty darn good) to give them an answer. So, here's the question and answer for today: Dear Claudia, I’m a corporate recruiter at my company, and I work closely with an HR Generalist for business hiring. I thought we had a great working relationship until a few weeks ago when another recruiter took me aside and said that the Generalist has been telling our business customers that I’m struggling in my job (of course, she denies that she said this). To make matters worse, she “forgot” to invite me to a meeting last week with an SVP to intake a new requisition, and now I’m racing to fill in the blanks with an executive who travels constantly and thinks I can’t keep my calendar straight. How would you handle this situation? Steaming Mad Dear Steaming, Can I say out of the gate that this situation really sucks? Any way you look at it, the undercurrents are tricky. If you’re lucky, you might wrap this up as friends; if not, you’ll have to learn to live with a very toxic co-worker. So let’s take a rational look at your options: Option A: She’s innocent (we’ll start with the positive). It’s entirely possible that the Generalist really is the great person you thought she was a month ago: she didn’t malign you to others, she was either misunderstood or misquoted. And she made an honest oversight by not inviting you to the meeting with the SVP. It may sound thin – but hey, it could happen. Option B: She’s guilty. By extension, she’s also mean, devious, and the HR-Partner-from-Hell. Maybe she really does have it in for you, wants your job, or (more likely) finds you intimidating and wants you gone. Ewww. Bad co-worker. The truth is that until you know the truth, you’re assuming. And when you assume… well, let’s just say that assumptions can lead to things you later regret. Of course, it’s impossible to talk about assumptions without noting a basic truth about human perception: People tend to perceive what they expect to perceive.

The CIA (always good for something fascinating) published a report a few years back that delved into this subject with gusto, where they also noted two other interesting gems about human perception: The mind is quick to form an impression, but resistant to change it. And... New information is assimilated into existing images. It turns out that for humans, perception is an active process; it constructs reality rather than recording it. This is why we say that perception is reality for the beholder (listen up if you’re at all concerned with candidate experience and employer branding – this one is for you, too). So where does this leave you, dear Steaming? My advice is that you set aside your assumptions to get to the truth of the situation. Ask questions to confirm you have all the information needed to either confront the situation (there’s a great formula for difficult conversations to be found here in my previous post about hairy candidates), or put it to rest and move on. If you need help in the confrontation, go up the HR chain, or (if internal politics are too funky) to a trusted and more senior manager, to mediate the conversation. I wish you good luck!