'Twas at Cohn & Wolfe London, the fantastic rule-bending, vicarious, award-winning then-black sheep of the Young & Rubicon family back in 2000. This was in the days before WPP plc bought Y&R, turned creative leaders into quarterly MS Excel slaves, ruined the ethos and vibrancy of all the companies beneath it, destroyed the culture of creativity in less than six months, and started "rightsizing" things so that 'Sir' Martin Sorrell - the fattest of UK cats - could buy a yacht to go with his numerous homes, cars, piles of other materialistic goods, and a room full of gold doubloons he could dive into and swim around in like a kiddies' ball-pit at the mall.
I was dealing with a particularly cantankerous, unpredictable, and - to be honest - soul-destroying client at the time. One who'd attempted to poach several members of staff from the PR agency, sexually harassed another, and had the rest in tears at one time or another. It was a client whom all the account executives had completed their 'tour of duty' on and vowed to never work on again and, ultimately, became one of the main reasons why I had no choice but to leave the agency in 2003. After I left, the then director of Corporate Public Relations couldn't persuade one single member of C&W staff to work on the account, so he fired the client even though it was worth circa CAD$500,000 at the time.
As is my way, I cannot help but think and plan strategically, and constantly troubleshoot along the way. I forget the precise instance but remember going to talk to my boss about a potential problem I'd foreseen in a tactic we were employing on that account. Hugh, my boss and Yoda-esque career mentor of that time (so named for his tendency to talk in riddles, not his green skin and pointy, fuzzy ears) told me: "You can't flag a problem to a client without providing at least one suggested solution to go with it. It's too destructive."
I still carry those words with me now, and they came back to me while I was agreeing to disagree with my ex-wife yesterday when discussing by blog post below (I believe no reply at all to a job application simply isn't good enough, she disagrees). So, dear HR people who might be feeling a little singed at the moment, here are my suggestions:
- Put an expiry date on the role you are attempting to fill. See how easy that was? Every single applicant then knows that if they haven't heard back from you within 'x' weeks, they should move on.
- Choose your recruitment automation tools more carefully, and with more considerate functionality. If you've decided that recruitment isn't important enough to warrant human involvement (don't get me started), and are using some sort of application to filter resumes at the start of the process then, surely, that same software is also clever enough to reply? You'd have to poll, but I suspect most applicants would favour some kind of automated reply over ignorant silence. Besides, if the software is really clever (which I'm sure it is, I just can't prove it), then it MUST be able to offer some kind of rudimentary feedback.
What we do in life echoes in eternity, and most people accept that mistakes are inevitable but measure others on how they deal with them. Thoughtful, timely feedback to those who don't make the next round pays it forward, and may well pay you back in the future when you least expect it.
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