I met with a candidate this week - very nice fellow. Was engaging in the interview, able to articulate his background quite well, seemed to be someone that likes to go above and beyond, good image / body language / eye contact and just left me with an overall positive impression. We quizzed him about his education and he seemed offended that we'd have the audacity to ask a question about his educational credentials. That's where it all went south. It's right there on the paper - see - it says "diploma". Since it didn't say bachelors, I didn't think he had a 4 year degree, I just wanted to know what the "diploma" was all about. I think he was just being defensive because he DIDN'T have a 4 year degree. Later that day he got upset because our online portfolio nuked his content when he had to hit back on the browser. The final straw for him was our formatting of his resume. Heaven forbid we take the content they give us and put it in a format that gives our profiles a consistant look & feel (and although he accused us of this, no content was changed whatsoever).

So what's my point? People are always moving in increments with me - either they're going the right way or the wrong way. This gentleman moved a long way to the positive, so much so that at the first sign of trouble I was still trying to put my concern to bed about his education. I really didn't even care if he finished the online profile - I just needed some professional references and he easily could have said "sure, I'll email them to you", answered a question about his training and we'd have been right as rain. Instead he decided to get his undies in a bunch about nothing and say to my recruiter in a derisive tone "I'll just let XYZ Consulting represent me in your market". My response? "Not a problem - if these non-issues cause such a big of a problem I can't imagine how you'd react when the heat got turned up at a client". No question this worked out for the best - this candidate had done a great job of selling me and it was going to take a monumental blunder for me not to take him to market. Fortunately he made that blunder before he was sitting in my client's cube.

I hate to start this blog off with 2 somewhat negative posts (recession & a jerk). Next week I'm going to find things to talk about that are positive because there's more positive in this business than negative.