Isn't professional courtesy a thing, anymore?
Several years ago, a hotelier friend of mine bemoaned of an interview the hotel held, where out of fifteen applicants called, only eight turned up. Most of the follow-up calls went unanswered with one saying he was on the way...only to seemingly disappear from the face of the earth. At that time, I thought to myself ‘What has happened to professional courtesy? Don’t people care about it anymore?’
Those thoughts came back to haunt me during a recent experience when hunting for job candidates for a freelance Business Development Executive role in one of the companies that I am involved with. Having advertised on LinkedIn Jobs, we received a flurry of candidates, so much so that LinkedIn actually auto-paused our advert, claiming we had reached our quota for the day. This looked promising, and we set out to evaluate our candidates with a encouraged sense of satisfaction and eagerness.
Phone calls were made, Zoom meetings scheduled, and this is where we started to see that professional courtesy just isn’t a thing anymore. I remember applying for jobs ten years ago, attending interviews at the interviewer’s preferred time and location (you didn’t even dare to ask for an alternate time, let alone location, and Zoom simply wasn’t around at the time). You made sure to leave home with ample time to reach the location, smartly dressed, shoes polished, breath-checked, CV in hand, etc. Where has all that gone? For heaven’s sake we aren’t even asking you to come to our offices, but interviewing you via Zoom.You could be in your birthday suit from the waist down and we wouldn’t know.
You see, we had several candidates simply not show up at their allocated Zoom meetings, the times of which were set at their convenience. Furthermore, they never followed up with excuses, nor did they answer the phone when we called to give them a second chance. In the end, we decided that second chances would not be given to anyone who behaves in such an unprofessional manner, and the candidates would be blacklisted when applying in future for jobs within our company.
What I’ve learned from this is that in this “click crazy” world we live in, people apply for a job even when they have no real level of interest. They apply for a multitude of jobs with absolutely no ethics, because applying electronically through the internet costs almost nothing, hardly requires any effort, time and is so easy. As a result these spurious job applications create serious problems by clogging a company’s candidate search system and result in a significant loss / waste of time. . Some apply, whilst waiting for a ‘call up’ after an interview elsewhere and when they land the job, simply forget about letting the recruiter know.
After this experience, I wondered whether I was dreaming. Is there really an economic crisis in the country? Do people really need extra income? Are the power cuts, rampant food inflation, rising fuel and electricity prices, increased income taxes and spiralling cost of living all figments of my imagination? Then, my electricity bill arrived, and I realized that this was for real and not a fantasy. We are all caught in a landslide with no escape from reality.
However, our candidates seemed perfectly happy to slide with the landslide without even trying to save themselves. I can’t understand their lackadaisical attitude towards job interviews that could avail them of extra income. Many candidates held bachelor’s degrees and professional qualifications, having worked for reputed companies. Most disappointing were the ones who stated that they were ‘Unemployed’. So what? You want to stay unemployed, with your attitude? I get that...but don’t expect any sympathy from me, when you inevitably grumble on social media about how tough it is to find a job.
Ashraaq Wahab – Director of Sales & Marketing and Technical, Hospitality Sri Lanka, Automotive Journalist, Marketer, Photographer and Writer, who enjoys penning his thoughts, insights and ideas on a variety of topics
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