The Tipping Point

Guess what? I have a great idea! Forget cow tipping, let’s work on our resumes, write cover letters, apply for jobs, schedule interviews and then – wait for it, here’s the fun part – not show up! Doesn’t that sound like fun? Just imagine the look on the face of the employer, or perhaps that work-from-home mum looking for some hands-on help. Better yet, perhaps they’ll have worked hard to juggle around schedules so we can really waste some time.

The applicant described herself as, “reliable, dependable, and caring.” She studied art during a year abroad in Italy, had been a beloved nanny for umpteen families, and was hoping to teach art to at-risk youth. “Trust me,” her profile read, “I treat every child as if it were my own.” Trust me, if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. Despite the number of emails we’d exchanged confirming times and directions, perhaps I should not have been surprised when she left me holding the baby instead of showing up for the interview.

A few weeks back, my husband’s firm placed an ad for an office manager. He whittled the applicants down to half a dozen good ones and scheduled interviews around his crazed schedule. And then three of them failed to show up. So what’s the story? In a climate where every newspaper and media outlet is reporting endlessly on record unemployment rates and the every sneeze and move of Occupy Any-City, it’s hard to imagine applicants wasting their time ofor kicks and giggles. You can’t help but wonder what’s going through people’s minds.

I’d exchanged several emails with my potential art-student-cum-babysitter, so when she failed to appear I thought I’d better check in to see if the no-show was perhaps due to getting lost, a misunderstanding, or a plain old rescinding of interest. We’d been fortunate with a bumper crop responding to our Care.com ad, but I confess this applicant had seemed particularly promising, a good fit. The daft part here is that online hiring sites equip you with an array of marvelous tools, among them the ability to see when people have logged in to view their messages. Our candidate may have thought better of showing up, but I was able to see that she had checked my message less than an hour after I’d sent it. So much for hiding; her guilt was transparent.

To be fair, the dismal slide in basic hiring courtesy goes two ways. In recent years, job applications have become a tough, impersonal business. Companies rely increasingly on the kind of online submissions that strip every last shred of personality from your resume and leave you neatly boxed within a few dates and lines about your academic and career experience. They might as well provide you with a virtual pink ribbon with which to wrap yourself up. You might be given a small chance to shine with a box that mimics a short cover letter but, even then, the character limit will probably keep things to a superficial please-and-thank you sound bite.

However impersonal the 21st century job application process may be, my beef lies with the companies that fail to respond to potential recruits. What could it possibly take out of anyone’s day to send a boilerplate “thank you but no” rejection letter? Several years back, I was incredulous to receive a phone call inviting me to come in for an interview a full three months after I had submitted the application. Not that they had ever actually acknowledged receiving it.

And so it seems the worm has turned. Perhaps applicants are trying their hand as a some sort of virtual jail bait, hedging their bets to come off as the peach perfect applicant right up until potential employers take a shine to them. Whatever the ploy, let me tell you firsthand it’s a royal pain in the proverbial derriere.

I’m hoping my remaining interviewees show up and present their A-game. With our sitters graduating and applying for jobs in new careers, I feel my own share of embarrassment as their applications go unanswered and follow-up calls unreturned. It surely doesn’t take much to make courtesy part of the plan. Unless, that is, you find it as entertaining as cow tipping.