It's official. My office manager of 13-odd years, Teresa, is moving on. She will be missed, and I'll write about that later. But right now, I'm in the throes of a replacement search, knee-deep in a swamp of semi-legitimate candidates. And it's getting uglier by the minute.
If I were smart and good, I would probably get a professional, someone like my friend Bob Corlett at Staffing Advisors, to help me find a new admin. But, like an overambitious homeowner with a dull saw, I'm engaging the project by myself. The trouble is, so are the job candidates. And the results are beginning to look ugly:
So, in the interests of humankind, my sanity, and to bolster the increasingly faint possibility of actually hiring somebody before the next equinox, I am going to share with you, dear candidate, the errors that your predecessors have made that have guaranteed them a place in my personal Hall of Amazing Ineptitude, or in other words, the Would Not Hire Ever file.
1. If you make an appointment for an interview, SHOW UP FOR IT.
No, seriously. Wednesday night I scheduled two candidates to interview. Neither of them showed up. Neither of them called.
2. Don't wear yoga pants to your interview.
So long as it isn't loaded with enough metal to give the TSA the fantods, I really don't care about your body. I do, however, care about what my patients would think about being greeted by someone in the universal I-didn't-get-out-of-bed-in-time-to-get-dressed outfit. How would you feel if you came to the interview and I was wearing my bike shorts? Ewww.
3. For the love of all that's holy, please clean up your email address.
When I am emailing a candidate to schedule a job interview, and I have to send the email to sweaty_pole_dancer@yahoo.com, I'm not going to do it. I'm just not. You could have the best resume in the world, have all the right experience, be willing to sign a 10-year contract and work for $8/hour with no days off, and I'm still not going to do it.
4. And while you're at it, clean up your social media.
You can bet that the first thing I'm going to do if I may hire you is google the heck out of your name. If 37 of the 40 pictures you're tagged in have someone holding a handle of marshmallow-flavored vodka, I'm not going to call, because of the very poor judgement such pictures indicate. Marshmallow-flavored? Really?
5. Do not tell me your chiropractor horror stories.
I don't know even why I have to say this, but it's happened. More than once. If you're being interviewed by a chiropractor (me), it is generally regarded as Bad Form to tell me how you, or your nephew, or your Aunt Myrtle had their head almost ripped off by a chiropractor who - gasp! - ADJUSTED THEIR NECK! OMIGOD THE HORROR!
Odds are, I probably adjusted someone's neck less than an hour before seeing you, and that was probably the umpteenth time I had done a neck adjustment that day. It's not dangerous. In fact, it is quite beneficial for many people.
If you follow these relatively simple guidelines, I can guarantee your chances of getting hired by me will go up exponentially. Of course, then you have to deal with the whole working-with-Dr.-Jenkins-issue. But that part is easy. Just ask Teresa.