Be Kind to the Unemployed

As a freelancer earning just enough to keep me able to face myself in the mirror most mornings (after my gainfully employed husband has left for work), I do ocassionally toy with the idea of joining the great commuting masses and getting a real job. Every now and then, a job that speaks to my strengths gets advertised and I apply. This happened recently, and I was called for interview at one of the nation's largest and finest non-profit advocacy organizations.

The interview went really well and I didn't even find afterwards that my mascara had run or my flies were undone. Indeed, the woman who could have been my boss said she'd like me to come in for a second interview, meet the HR people, and all that. I was thrilled. That was now almost four weeks ago. My chatty little emails charting my availability for a second interview, saying how excited I was about the job and how delighted I was that a second interview was in the offing have gone stonily ignored. I took time and trouble over the interview, and have been on tenterhooks for weeks, only to be left gradually losing confidence that anything further is going to happen.

Now, I know that everyone's busy, not least in an under-funded, over-worked non-profit scenario, but this is not the first time I've been interviewed and then blown off completely. I'm going to stick my neck out here and say that this is downright rude. I hope that anyone reading this who is in any way involved in hiring in their company could not be accused of the same.

Hiring practices are an essential part of your corporate communications and they need as much careful attention as any press release or marketing collateral you put out. If someone was interesting and credible enough to bring in for an interview (or, I would argue, simply apply for a job at your company), then it's quite likely you may encounter them in a different scenario another time. So what's the upside of disrespecting them and making them mad? It takes 30 seconds to fire off an email saying: "Hey, thanks, we thought you were great, but we're still thinking about it, or we've decided to go in another direction..." You can even send it out as a personalized mass email via a natty little program compatible with Microsoft Outlook called Send Personally.

But I would ask all of you to think back to the last time you got hired. A lot of hope and other kinds of mental energy went into the possibility dangling in front of you that you'd enter a whole new fray, routine and set of personal interactions, quite aside from what it would mean professionally. Be kind to your prospective employees, and let them know what the heck is going on in good time. There's almost no down side at all, except a tiny bit of time, and you never know what benefits - or, more importantly, retribution - you might reap further down the line. It's a blogged world, after all, and it's only my British reserve that prevents me from naming and shaming the organization in question this time.

Are you on crack?

Well, probably not. But you may share a problem with Charlie Sheen all the same. A story in today's New York Times argues that the real trouble for the actor who can't seem to stop shooting himself in the foot is not so much the substances he may or may not be abusing, but the fact that he's surrounded by a coterie of yes-men (and where-do-you-want-me-honey-women). Success strangely narrows the universe for the person enjoying it, obstructing the field of vision just when you most need to be able to see the truck bearing down on you, or the furtive scurryings going on at your feet.

So what I want you to ask yourself today - go look in the mirror while you're doing it - is: Am I like Charlie Sheen? Am I so surrounded by people who are invested in the status quo that we've forgotten to keep an eye on dangers and new opportunities? Is my reality, frankly, skewed? Remember that your business has a public persona, whether intended or not. Is your company's persona ranting drunkenly about Nazis outside a bar in Paris, or is it building schools for orphans in Kenya? Is it dropping the F-bomb at the Oscars, or is it advocating for world peace at the UN? Time to check in and find out.