I think we all have this person at our work

I heard a great quote this week from one of our managers. He was talking about an employee who is on the chatty side. He described the person to me this way- "He has more stories than Mother Goose". I loved it. I think every workplace has at least one of these individuals in its employ.

You know it's bad when

I've written previously about how my boss is not very time oriented. Well, this week she was telling us how one of her kids has no sense of time. They went to the daughter's house for Christmas. Dinner was scheduled for 6 PM. They ended up eating at 8:45 PM. My boss said that is typical for this daughter.

You know it's bad when your non-time conscious parent talks about how horrible you are at being on time.

When people are the cause of their own hurt feelings

One of our managers was eating breakfast at his desk this morning when one of his direct reports came to him and said "my feelings were hurt because I didn't get an interview for X position." The manager said his jaw dropped. He told the employee he would check into the situation and get back with him. Upon checking, the reason his jaw dropped was confirmed. The person didn't get an interview because he didn't apply for the position. Funny how that works.

This was the 2nd interview for an opening with this title in the last month. The jobs are on different shifts and were posted separately.  Thus, applying for the first opening has nothing to do with the interview process for the second one. We did end up filling the 2nd position with someone who was also in the candidate pool for the first position, but the key is this person applied for both position. If you want the job, you need to make people are aware of that fact by turning in the required paperwork.

As my mom likes to say "Being a manager would be great if you managed robots."

Physician, heal thy self

One of the things I quickly noted at my new job is that we did a very poor job of staying on time for candidate interviews. We would start late and run over frequently. I immediately determined that once I was in charge of scheduling interviews myself that I would make a concerted effort to improve our punctuality. I had a couple of reasons for this. First, I am task/time oriented person. I hate it when things don't run on time. Second, and more importantly, not being on time presents a poor impression of the organization to our candidates. As I have often said, the candidates' time is more valuable than mine. I am getting paid to attend the interviews. They aren't. They've had to rearrange their days, often on the sly, to be there. I thus want to respect their time.

I am happy to report that our on time performance has markedly improved. However, would you like to guess which area is the worst at this? My mom got it in one- HR. Yes, physician heal thyself. It drives me crazy. You would think it would be the department I could most readily get to achieve timeliness, but counter intuitively it's not. I like my boss, but I have found she is not good at estimating how long tasks will take to complete. She tends to allow significantly less time than things actually require. Unfortunately I can't as readily call out her and her boss (the HR director) when they run over. I just have to tolerate it. Thankfully, our department is now fully staffed, so we hopefully won't have to do any more interviews for our area any time soon.

I see what's going on

A couple weeks ago we were doing interviews for one of my company's openings. One of the candidates had a well done resume that reflected the experience and skills we were seeking. I was hopeful he would be a strong candidate based on this. When we started speaking with him, it became apparent this would not be the case. The job history he gave us did not match what his resume said, a huge red flag and something the rest of the interview team noted after the interview was over. In addition, he didn't discuss the skills he had listed on his resume. He did, however, bring a list of questions that were very good. Based on my own job history, I figured out what was going on, and I shared my theory with the interview team after the candidate left.

One of the things all candidates provide at the interview is a form listing how they heard of the job. His said the local career center. I worked for my state's career center for 2 years, and therefore I was able to put the pieces together. He had worked with someone at the career center, and that person had prepared his resume and given him the questions to ask. You could just tell he didn't do those himself. It's fine (and highly desirable) to have a qualified person help you with your resume. But, it needs to be written by you and really reflect your experience and skills. It is painfully obvious when it doesn't.

My hunch was confirmed last week when I got a call from a staff member of the career center asking how this candidate did. I told her the fact that his stated job experience did not match his resume was a huge flag for us. I did compliment the questions that he asked. I also shared that I had been a career coach in a previous occupational life and that her services are definitely needed by job seekers in our area.

You never know when skills from a previous job will pay off in another job, sometimes in unexpected ways.

Tales HR people tell

As in any profession, HR people like to trade stories of the crazy things they've seen. This week I heard one that's immediately gone to my top 10 list.

An employee turned in a request to add his newborn son to his insurance at work. Shortly thereafter, the benefits administrator received another request to add the child, but the birth date was slightly different. She requested documentation to see which date was correct. It turned out both were. The man had sons born to two different women less than a month apart, and both kids were given the same name.

HR is seldom a boring gig, and it certainly has its entertaining moments.