Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Interview Blunder #1: Burning Your Bridges Long Before You Interview


Very early on in my recruiting days I had the opportunity to work on a job search for a company I had made a significant inroad with. As with any search, I worked the candidate pipeline and identified a handful of outstanding candidates for the position. After narrowing down my pool to the top three, I presented them to the client – well the company was a client, but the hiring manager I was presenting to was somebody I had not worked with before. I would soon find out this hiring manager was someone I would not want to work with in the future.

She was very arrogant, had a complete lack of respect for others, and overall ruled over her subordinates like a dictator. I didn’t know this at the time, and found out details as I came across her former employees in subsequent months, but she treated each of them so poorly that one described her actions as “not a way he would talk to a dog.” There was constant belittling, name calling and demeaning that was occurring. Not surprisingly, she also had a high turnover rate on her team – thus the need for yet another placement to fill the spot of the most recently departed.  After submitting my candidates and being given the run around for over a month, with a plethora of unreturned calls and emails, she finally became so desperate to fill a position left vacant (by this employee that she had belittled to the point of fleeing) that she finally called me back and requested I send my candidates to interview ASAP. By the next day, I had my top three lined up, scheduled and ready to go. My first candidate showed up at the designated time, and proceeded to wait in the lobby for 45 minutes – with no sign of hiring manager. It turned out she decided to take a long lunch, and with no regard for the for anyone’s time but her own, made my candidate wait. She finally arrived at the office, called the front desk to have my candidate summoned in to interview, then discovered she had left the keys to her desk at home. This is relevant because it is in her desk (under lock and key) that she kept the carefully laid out, handwritten test she used to administer to all interviewees. So, she did what any reasonable person would do in the situation, and made my candidate wait an additional 30 minutes while she drove home to get the key. My candidate got tired of waiting (understandably so), and left.

Having caught a glimpse of this dictator’s iron fist, and out of respect for my other two candidates, I cancelled the following two interviews with her and withdrew my name as a recruiter on the position. It certainly did not reflect well on that company, or on me for sending him there, and I did not want to jeopardize future placements because of her. It was also a lesson to me as I finally admitted the hassle she created was not worth my time, or ruining the relationships I had with my best candidates. After this debacle I never heard back from this hiring manager anyway – that is until one desperate day a number of months down the road.

I should preface the next part of the story by stating the fact that by this time I was much more established as a recruiter, and making a name for myself. In other words, I wasn’t chasing anything and everything to get business. I pursued only those searches that were a win-win for both sides. The reason I heard back from her: shockingly she had been fired by that company, and needed a new job. Needless to say, the roles had reversed. I’m not completely sure why, but I was one of the first recruiters she called for assistance. She called once. Then called again. And then called a few more times. After giving her the run around for a little while, and making sure she got a small taste of how she had treated her own employees and my candidate, I reached out after a month to let her know that I had no interest in working with her because of her past track record. Suffice it to say, I was not alone. Not a single recruiter would touch her, and she had built such a negative name for herself within her industry (her former employees all landed with competitor’s after being demeaned by her), she had no job prospects. Nothing.

The point of this anecdote is to illustrate the importance of building a positive reputation, and not burning bridges with anyone. This hiring manager was in a power position (literally), but once that was taken away, she needed the help of others. The problem of course was that she had burned bridges with so many former employees, colleagues, recruiters and with everyone in the industry in general that she had nowhere to turn once she needed a new job. Ideally job seekers should be building their networks long before layoffs so that job prospects will already be in place. In this instance, she could not even get to the interview stage because she had imploded her entire network. Moral of the story: don’t burn bridges with anyone, because you never know when in the future those bridges will be needed.

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