Peaches or Lemons…

Peach and Lemon has been used in the UK as a review for used car for a while now. If your used car is a peach it means that it’s a good used car and a lemon means that it’s a bad car. We can apply this terminology in our daily lives such as in the work place. You must know somebody who is a peach and there is at least one lemon in a company no matter how small the company is.

A peach is considered as a great worker who has a can do attitude and will never be weary no matter what assignment he/she has been assigned to. A lemon is considered as the needle in your company flesh; he/she is the one who is always complaining, judging other people works or even screwing them but never get his/her job done. It is good if you are the boss and you can just fire him/her, but when you’re an equal… too bad you just have to live with it.

I watched this show by Tim Harford (The Undercover Economist, The Logic of Life) about life in the workplace, when a company wants to hire a new worker it will try to find some clues whether the new hire is a lemon or a peach. What we can do as a candidate is to signal our future employer about our capabilities. However signaling is very easy to fake, just by putting up some good sentences in the right time can multiply your probability of getting hired. Real skills can only be seen when the new hire starts to work in the company, but sometimes the company doesn’t even spend enough time to analyze their new recruit long after they were hired, therefore efficiency is compromised.

I think it would be good if a company can have a policy of evaluating every employee in their payroll and have a one-on-one evaluation report. This will help the company and the employee to grow and become more efficient. Well, at least in theory… Have you ever wonder whether you are a peach or a lemon? I have and it’s been bothering me since I don’t even know what I am. I think I’m in a crossroad in my career or maybe it’s just my lack of confidence in my own skill sets or maybe it’s just my hormone imbalance.