Uncommon Sense: A free spirit versus Frankenstein

If you have not yet encountered Aleksey Vayner on your internet travels, can I recommend a visit to YouTube.com or simply run his name through a Google search. There will you find Vayner, a Yale University student, in a video made to support his job application to UBS, the investment bank. His thoughts include 'always push your comfort zone' and 'bring your A-game, your determination and your drive to the field'.

I have seen Jack Welch, the former head of General Electric, issuing similar platitudes. But there is something very creepy about hearing a stage-managed delivery from this bumptious student.

Accompanying this are shots of Vayner performing ski stunts and karate chops, pushing weights, playing tennis and ballroom dancing. It is all so larger than life, a caricature of the American wunderkind. It has made Vayner a laughing stock on the internet.

But at least one senior manager has declared he would be prepared to hire him 'sight unseen'. It's hardly surprising because Vayner is only saying the kind of things that many businesses are seeking in graduate recruits.

In defining the image of the 2:1 graduate who displays evidence of team leadership, presence and ambition, companies have created a corporate identikit. Vayner's words could have been lifted from 100 leadership books. He's the Frankenstein's monster of corporate management.

The so-called search for talent is beginning to pursue a narrow path that is in danger of marginalising those who cannot live up to such exacting standards or who work to a different set of standards. So who might recruiters be overlooking? Let me introduce you to Matt Harding, a 29-year-old who describes himself as a 'deadbeat from Connecticut'.

Harding was a games designer until he decided to travel the world. He took along a digital camera that included a video mode. A friend suggested he could do a dance in every place he visited. The record of his trip, set to music, proved so entertaining it attracted a cult following on YouTube. It also attracted sponsorship from a chewing gum manufacturer that paid for him to travel the world again.

You can see the results on his website, WherethehellisMatt.com. If it doesn't make you chuckle, then I don't know what does. Behind the simplicity of the idea is a lot of organisation, not just in the logistics of travel arrangements but in bringing together session musicians for his backing track, choosing the right locations and making the music fit the dancing.

Any company would benefit from his organisational and creative skills. But they won't get them, not because their sifting mechanisms would reject his CV - although they would - but because his CV is not going to be in there. The Matt Hardings of this world do not want to work with the Aleksey Vayners.

Some recruitment processes are recognising the need for diversity, represented by the list we all know so well: ethnic, gender, disability, possibly age. But that is only one kind of diversity. There is also a diversity of values, personalities and characters. How can any company that has developed its competency, behaviour and personality models around a perceived ideal hope to identify with the wider population?

Is it any wonder that investment banks face so many sexual discrimination cases? Too many City organisations have closed themselves to the wider society in the same way the Bourbons did before the French Revolution.

The role of HR in diverting companies from the path of distorting elitism is crucial but I fear that too many HR professionals have been sucked into models of talent management that border on C-suite cloning. It's time to rethink recruitment and development policies around human values, not solely corporate values.

Too many creative and entrepreneurial spirits are being lost to companies just now. These are the people that can move a business forward with new ideas. The alternative is to watch them build their own ventures, growing ever larger in your rear-view mirror. Just listen to them roar as they pass.

- Richard Donkin is employment columnist at the Financial Times. richard.donkin@haynet.com.