Poor Interview Etiquette

Recently I had an interview experience that I haven’t had in quite sometime. I’ve had candidates cancel interviews for a variety of reasons but I can firmly say that I have never had this happen to me before.

I scheduled an interview with a candidate one week ago. Everything was great from the candidate perspective including the day and the time of the interview. My colleague and I followed up throughout the week with updates and received no concerns or conflicts from the candidate. Two-hours and two-minutes before the interview, we receive an email thanking us for the opportunity but the candidate has accepted another offer. Okay, a last minute cancelation.

This left us wondering when the offer was made.

After some very easy searching, I found a tweet that the candidate had accepted the job the same day as the interview was scheduled!

Maybe the candidate was excited for good things happening all in one day. Maybe the candidate didn’t know how to respond to an interview request. Maybe the candidate wasn’t thinking at all at that moment.

I conduct a lot of Twitter searches, Boolean searches and social media searches. I failed to follow my own rule of checking a candidates comments. I do not seek anything specific, I often just look to see how they use social media and not to make a hiring decision based upon what I find.

• Should I have looked more often at their social media feed? Yes!
• Should I have received a call or email well prior to the interview? Yes!

Sometimes it takes just a moment to realize what you should do and what you should not do. I certainly learned here, not sure the candidate learned anything though.

3 steps to poor interview etiquette

1. accept a job
2. accept a 1st interview with another company the same day as accepting the job
3. cancel the scheduled interview with less than 2 hours notice

Lesson learned.

Why Numbers Alone Don’t Matter

Everyone is caught up in numbers and metrics. Some metrics are dead on and others wecan do without. Two such metrics people tend to get caught up in revolve around thenumber of friends/followers and the number of tweets.

Why are these numbers not as relevant as you may think them to be?

 

 

Number of Facebook Friends or Twitter Followers

Having a large following is a nice topic to throw around in a conversation, but does itreally help you? Many celebrities, pseudo-celebrities, industry experts, authors, and manyothers have a pretty strong follower count which helps from a message push or listeningperspective. Now, look at how many people they follow and see if you are valued in theirnetwork.

Probably not.

It is great for them to push out their information and hope you will share with yournetwork as well. Good for them. Not so great for you.

This is in no means a recommendation to follow everyone who follows you. But withall the “social media experts” talking about engagement, do they really engage or justengage when spoken to? Think about the last time someone with a high friend/followercount interacted with you off of one of your messages without you mentioning orreferencing that person.

 

Number of Tweets

The number of times you tweet should not mean a thing? Why you are probably asking.

Well, as Twitter is an unbelievable tool for conversations, learning, listening, sharing andnetworking, it also is a great tool for connecting with apparently every other social mediatool created.

You may connect Twitter with LinkedIn, Facebook, Foursquare (and other location-basedservices), Tumblr, MySpace, blogs, etc. etc. etc.

The more networks you are connected to, the more potential of redundant message beingposted, of locations being shared, of somewhat meaningless data.

Should I be able to read all of your tweets on LinkedIn or Facebook? You could argue oneither side of this and make effective cases. What I am saying is that it is some of thesemessages are redundant, auto generated and used to somewhat spam all of your socialnetworking channels.

When I view my Twitter stream, I don’t care to see all of the Foursquare check-in’s. Iknow I am not alone here but I also realize plenty of others share the opposite feeling.

But in strictly looking at Foursquare and Twitter, it is conceivable that half of your tweetsare Foursquare check-ins. That alone artificially inflates your tweets to show how active aTwitter user you are.

Other people/accounts use messageing services that auto tweet for them and possiblyrepost the same message multiple times per day (full disclosure: yes, I sometimes do thisfor my blog posts… but not every day and for everything I read).

 

In closing, numbers really don’t mean everything if value isn’t there. Isnt’ that why ROIis always an interesting discussion point!