Death By Lousy HRM — Chapter VI

[Chapter I, Chapter II, Chapter III, Chapter IV and Chapter V in case you missed them.]

Zelda did not sleep well that night, but she was up early to notify her boss of what had happened and that DCI Fritz would be in touch to request information about her project and, perhaps others on the campus, which she hadn’t been authorized to provide.  She also notified her team, without giving them any of the details which DCI Fritz had asked her to hold confidential, that she might be unavailable for most of the day due to an urgent matter that needed her personal attention.  By the time DCI Fritz’s team member arrived to drive her back to the office, she was feeling much better after a good night’s sleep, a decent breakfast, and time to collect her thoughts on what had happened.

Back in Cummins’ office, with the body removed and a good bit of rapid cleaning up, Zelda and DCI Fritz sat down with those manila folders and the actual whiteboard in front of them to begin deciphering those color-coded tick marks.  With many years of taxonomy building, database design, and pattern recognition and abstraction under her belt, Zelda saw this “project” in those terms and began immediately to note what was known, e.g. she recognized almost all of the row names on the whiteboard as hiring managers across the organizations which Cummins represented as their recruiter for key positions, and she recognized several of the column names, also found on manila folders, as candidates whom either she or one of her colleagues had interviewed.  Making the leap from there that all the manila folders might represent candidates and that all the rows on the white board might represent hiring managers, she was ready to tackled the color-coded tick marks.

Realizing that Ms. Kahneifmeyer’s deciphering capabilities far exceeded his own, DCI Fritz left her to get on with it.  Meanwhile, he went off to work with his team to digest the scene of crime findings, await and then review the autopsy report, get preliminary findings from the cyber team’s review of Cummins’ electronic devices, from his use of Great Software’s applications through those devices, and his online activity and social exhaust.  He also needed to speak with Cummins’ immediate boss, the CHRO Ms. Nikki Patel, and with the head of Great Software’s campus and UK GM, Algernon Wrigley, to whom both Cummins (ultimately via Ms. Patel) and Kahneifmeyer (directly because of the importance of her project) reported.  Although he had spoken with Ms. Patel immediately after getting word of the death because otherwise entry might have been delayed at the secured premises and again that morning about the events of last night, he wanted to speak with her in greater depth as soon as she returned later that afternoon from a business trip to Paris.  Also, although Cummins wasn’t known to be married or to have any children, Fritz still needed to inform and then interview his next of kin, speak with his banker and his lawyer, and initiate a thorough search of his home.   With a very full day’s work ahead of him, DCI Fritz gave Ms. Kahneifmeyer his cell phone number and asked her to call him if she had any progress to report.

Left to her own devices, Zelda did get on with it.  First, she went through all of the manila folders, looking at the various combinations of color-coded tick marks and creating a list of each different mark and color combination.  Then she did the same for the white board chart.  Some of the marks were used quite liberally, in the same and different colors, both on the board and in the folders.  Others were used very sparingly, with fewer color combinations.  Finally, she found that there were a few marks which only appeared in a single color and which were used quite rarely.  And of course, as she already knew, there were no such annotational marks and color combinations offered as a feature of their quite fully featured staffing automation software.

Was Cummins trying to describe something about individual candidates and/or about the interaction of candidates and hiring managers for which their advanced software provided no capabilities?  Were there important KSAOCs or other points that Cummins wanted to record in a way which only he could interpret?  Hmmm…

Stay Tuned For Chapter VII