Dogged Pursuit of Truth Leads to Pets

If you ask a random sampling of managers what questions they ask when interviewing prospective employees, you’ll probably get the same answers: What diplomas or degrees do you have? What is your work experience? What obstreperous computer programs are you familiar with? Do you have a criminal record that includes multiple felonies? Have you ever chewed another person’s food against their will? What kind of food?

Increasingly, new knowledge about the human condition is making such questions irrelevant. The longer I live and the more I read, the more I think that questions of prospective employees should center around their pets. A mounting body of knowledge suggests that if people are important to the success of your organization, their pets had better be important to you.

Unlike many of the beliefs I have, in this one, I am not alone. Time Magazine, as part of its continuing obligation to inform citizens on issues vital to our democratic processes, recently ran a story about the pets of Presidential hopefuls under the headline "Pets, the Ultimate Primary Test." Time profiled the dogs of Al Gore, Gary Bauer, George Bush and John McCain, along with Pat Buchanan’s cat; McCain’s cats, fish and iguana; and Steve Forbes’ chickens. (Crying "fowl," Time pointed out that Forbes "wouldn’t give us a photo" of the chickens.)

But just as Time wants to know about our prospective presidents’ pets, we persons in business should want to know about our prospective employees’ animal companions. Why? Pet ownership can reveal both promise and problems in job applicants.

For starters, pet-owners are smarter than people who do not have pets. The American Pet Products Manufacturers Association, which is certainly an objective body, says that the average high-school student who has a pet has a grade point average of 3.5, which is three-tenths of a point ahead of non-pet-owning students and 3.2 points ahead of the average corporate vice-president. Even more striking, the association reports, the SAT scores of students who keep fish are an average of 200 points higher than the scores of students who do not keep fish. Therefore, it is more revealing to ask a job applicant "Do you have a fish bowl?" than something as commonplace and as unrevealing as "Do you mind working in a fish bowl?"

Although your pet-owning employee will be smarter than non-pet-owning employees, the intelligence that employees ostensibly gain from their pets can be offset by the negative aspects of pet ownership. As just one example, a survey by the American Animal Hospital Association showed that more than half of all employees have taken time off from work to care for a sick pet. I suspect that many of these people lie to their employers when they call to report that they won’t be in. They probably think it is more acceptable to say "I have the flu" than "I’m awaiting expulsion of a hairball." This can be a cause for concern for productivity-minded employers, who can overlook pet-owning behaviors — such as the fact that nearly two-thirds of all pet-owners admit to singing or dancing with their pets and that almost one-fourth of these people send their pets greeting cards, potentially depleting valuable corporate stationery supplies.

Health insurance for pets is an increasing employee perquisite, and you can understand why because two-thirds of pet owners visit their pet’s veterinarian more often than they visit their own primary care provider. People care more about their pets than they care about themselves, which explains why we don’t have veterinary HMOs.

Thanks for letting me share these thoughts with you, and please, HMO industry, do not send fish.

Dan Danbom keeps rats (really!).