Here are some of my favorite recruiting stories.

It is great when you have candidates interview for one of your open positions and they immediately indicate that they want the position. That is half the battle; you sold the job. But what do you do if you don’t believe that person is suited for the job? You can tell them before they get out of the interview chair or you can send them a thanks-but-no-thanks letter or you can pawn the rejection duties off on human resources. What do you do if those candidates persist with phone calls, letters, emails and surprise appearances even though you have sent a clear message that they are not in consideration for the position? With the scarcity of jobs today, we find that we are dealing with more aggressive job hunters and some don’t know how to take no for an answer. Here are a few stories about some of my candidates who could not understand the simple phrase, “You are not getting the job!”

Arm Twisting

Sometimes you have to convince someone other than the applicant that the job is not a good match and sometimes you just can’t win.

One morning the executive secretary called me and said the owner/chairman wanted to speak to me. He gave me the resume of his good friend’s daughter and he told me to interview her for my open programmer/analyst position. There was nothing useful on her resume for our company and she had worked for four different employers in the past five years. The first second I laid my eyes on Margaret I could tell that she was a burnout. She didn’t complete her first two years at her community college and she majored in yoga. She rigorously complained about her former bosses and then she ripped into her ex-husband for leaving her. She gave me a slight apology for her mood but she blamed it on her period and the severe cramps she was having. I only spoke to her for a half hour and I felt like slashing my own wrists. She got her start in programming when she applied for an entry level job posting while working as a clerk in accounts receivable. She couldn’t explain any of her accomplishments and she told me she liked to work alone. I explained the position to her and she maintained her dour, disinterested attitude. She surprised me when I showed her to the door because she droned, “Well? Did I get the job?” I marched upstairs to the owner and I explained to him in detail that she does not have the skills or the attitude we need for this position. He told me to hire her anyway. Apparently he did not hear me so I explained it to him again. He heard me the first time and the second time and he was not going to listen to me a third time. “Hire her and make her into a first-class programmer! Now get going!”, and he threw me out of his office. I went to the CFO, the COO, the president, the Vice-president of sales and the Director of Human Resources for help and no one wanted to challenge the owner’s decision to hire Margaret. She must have called in sick ten times in her first month and one of my programmers even saw her with her friends at the mall one of those days. After three months I went to the owner and I asked him if she was a sacred cow or if I could slaughter her if she doesn’t get her act together. He transferred her to the store operations group and the COO went to the CFO, the president, the vice-president of sales, the Director of Human Resources and me for help. No one wanted to challenge the owner’s decision to transfer Margaret. She was assigned to one of our worst stores in Chicago and she did an unbelievably fantastic job. She became a shining star and she had finally found her niche.

My Remora

About eight years ago when I was the Director of I.T. for a large retail chain in the Midwest, I needed to find a new operations manager to run our data center. The talent pool was pretty thin but there were plenty of C-grade candidates who applied for the position. I interviewed some goofball who had a great resume but it was extremely misleading. If my memory serves me well, I think he was a salesman in a luggage store.

When the brief interview was over it was time for my lunch. The corporate offices were about two blocks away from my health club and I would go there during lunch to relax.

I was taking a shower after my workout and the guy next to me says, “How’d I do on the job interview?” It was the lathered-up luggage salesman and he proceeded to enlighten me about his computer experience while we took our shower together. You wouldn’t believe how bizarre it was to conduct a formal interview with a person and then find yourself standing naked with him in the shower. I told him that running a cash register was not relevant computer experience and there was no way that he was going to be considered for the job.

The next day I had to listen to him while we soaked in the whirlpool and he showed up next to me again when I was riding the stationary bike. He didn’t stop being my lunchtime workout buddy until I told him that I filled the position. I think he thought he would grow on me over time.

Whenever I consider trying to get past the barricade of people who insulate the CEO, I think of that guy and his invasion tactic and then I just work with the system and stay out of the showers.

Mr. Kyle’s Agent

I was always looking for programmers and I had just been through a week of long interviews when the switchboard operator told me to come down because I had a visitor. I asked her who it was and she said it was a Mrs. Howard. I came down the stairs and I looked at this fifty-ish woman who was a complete stranger to me but she greeted me with a huge smile and a big hug as if I was her long lost brother. She was Kyle Howard’s mother and Kyle was a thirty-year old talent-less programmer who I had interviewed earlier in the week. She brought me a bag of food and some craft plaque that she made with little painted marshmallows which spelled out “I love my job”. She wanted to thank me for hiring Kyle. She really caught me off guard and I accidentally told her that Kyle was a strong candidate but I had to interview a few more people to make sure I have the right person for the job. She told me that Kyle was out in the car and she could bring him in for me to see him again. This sweet little mother turned into a high-pressure appliance saleswoman and she battered me until I couldn’t take it anymore. She wasn’t going to stop until I hired her son and gave him a desk. She tried to follow me up the stairs and I swear she would have followed me into the men’s room if she had the chance. As soon as I got upstairs I asked my administrative assistant to type up a thanks-but-no-thanks letter for Kyle Howard and get it out to the post office immediately. I wondered if I should send it to Kyle or to his mother. I received a voice mail several days later from Mrs. Howard and she angrily scolded me for not hiring her son. Her marshmallow plaque that said, “I love my job” hung in my office for over five years. “Thank you Mrs. Howard, I’m sorry about your son”.

The Prodigal Son

When the tech crash hit our economy I had people who had previously snubbed their noses at my company coming to me and begging for a lousy non-existent ten-dollars an hour position. A year before the crash a candidate accepted one of my open positions and he never showed up to work on his first day. I had gone to lunch with him every week before his start date but he suddenly disappeared and he even changed his phone number. This guy had the nerve to call me a year later and ask to see me. I was curious about his disappearance so I agreed to see him. There he was sobbing in my office and he was claiming to be close to deportation. I don’t like anyone crying in my office much less unemployed, unprofessional traitors. “Santosh, there is no job!! I have no openings!”, I kept saying. I printed out several phone numbers of some businesses and headhunters and I attempted to send him on his way but he wanted to talk to one of my developers who was an acquaintance of his. I turned him over to Paresh and I went back to my work. The next day I strolled into the developer’s area and out of the corner of my eye I spotted Santosh sitting in one of the empty cubes. “I am working for you for free so you can see the quality of my work”. I looked at him in disbelief. Here is a guy who didn’t take a job I gave him and now he is taking a job I don’t have. “Who let you in here?” Paresh sheepishly lifted his hand. “I’ll tell you what, since I don’t have an open position and I probably won’t have one for a couple of years, why don’t I fire Paresh and give his job to you!” Paresh nearly jumped out of his skin and I never heard anyone talk that fast even in one of those cell phone commercials. I instructed Paresh to escort Santosh out of the building and I warned him to never do that again. As Santosh was going out the door he turned to me and said, “Call me if you change your mind!”

Cyber Mistake

I needed to interview for a new Systems Engineer after my previous one mysteriously vanished and I was not looking forward to the task. It was always a tedious chore to find qualified candidates who would want to commute to our part of the city. A newspaper ad costs about 1,200 dollars and it always seemed to be a waste of money. Flesh peddlers charge 25 to 30 percent of the candidate’s annual salary and that can amount to 15 to 25 thousand dollars so I decided to post the job on one of the popular Internet job sites. I wrote up the job description and I sent it to our office administrator for her to post the position. It cost about 250 dollars and all I had to do was kick back and wait and hope for the applicants to start rolling in. I came into work the next day and the admin greeted me with hundreds of resumes. I did not expect this but it was exciting. Then I started getting the emails. There were hundreds of them. Our phone lines were flooded with candidates calling about the position and customer service was sending them directly to me. How the heck did this happen? I went out to the Internet job site to look for my ad and there it was; our company’s name, address and phone number along with my name emblazoned on the top of the job description! We deleted the job immediately but it was too late. This reminded me of the time my friends and me lobbed a brick at a huge paper-wasp nest. We were being dive-bombed from every direction and there was no way to turn it off. It was like a feeding frenzy. The front desk operator called and told me I had some visitors. I asked her who they were and she said that they are applicants for my open position. I went to the front door to give those candidates the courtesy of a hello and you would have thought I was the driver of a Somalian food truck. I took their resumes, thanked them for coming, I told them I would get back to them and I went back to my office and shut the door. I looked through the stack of papers and I found three great local candidates within the first fifty resumes. I didn’t need to read any more and I couldn’t read any more. “You have 327 new emails!” “You have 95 new voice mail!” I shook my head and wondered how long it was going to take me to clean up this mess. My phone was ringing constantly and the front desk operator paged me over the overhead loudspeaker. “You have someone here to see you.” I told her to tell the person to leave the resume. “He says his name is Albert Tong.” Albert? He was one of the best network consultants who I used many times to help out on special projects. He asked me for the job and I gave it to him right on the spot. This could have been the most successful job search that I have ever had in my career if it weren’t for the following six weeks of fending off some very aggressive candidates, all of whom knew me by name.

Final Thoughts

Recruiting for an open position is like finding a soul to inhabit a body. The position has been occupied by many different personalities over it’s existence and you always hope to refill it with a wiser entity. But only one being can fit at a time as you sort through those eager and clamoring souls who are looking for an occupational identity while they wander the limbo of unemployment. My advise is to be honest with them and give them their status as quickly as possible so they can focus their attention elsewhere. Some of my colleagues like to tell their candidates exactly why they didn’t get the job because they thought it would help their career. Not me, I tried that and it only starts a painful round of debates instead of a silent appreciation for the education. Quick and clear feedback is the best way to help your candidates or you might be surprised to find them sitting next to you at your family barbeque.

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