Friday, October 29, 2010

The Right Person in the Right Job

Yeah, right.  Since closing my business, I'm now back in the job market, and so I've become attuned to these mismatches.  This morning I went to a job search workshop at Jewish Vocational Service.  I arrived about five minutes late, despite the fact that I left home an hour before for what is usually a 30-40 minute trip.  I had to wait 20 minutes for the N-Judah tram to show up, and when it did arrive it was packed, and I had to stand.  Plus it was a slower-than-usual trip in, with several delays.  So I was a few minutes late arriving, with a badly-needed coffee in hand on this cool, damp morning.  The receptionist didn't greet me, didn't say good morning or hello. She merely said "you're late, and you can't take coffee in to the workshops." 

At that point, I was frazzled, and just not in the mood.  To put it delicately.  It doesn't exactly give me great confidence in a vocational service that puts an obviously-unfriendly bitch in a receptionist role.  I should think some basic and obvious skills for a receptionist would be friendliness and courtesy.  Apparently the world has changed. 

And frankly, having such a clearly-inappropriate person in that particular job at that particular agency is an insult to all the job-seekers that agency is supposed to be helping.  There are dozens of people who would be happy to have that receptionist job, and who would make an effort to do it well, and yet the JVS puts that person out front.  A good receptionist, someone with "people skills," would have said to me "Good morning.  They've just started, but I don't think you've missed anything important.  It's just down the hall to the right.  Oh, and in the future, we prefer that people not bring outside beverages into the workshops."


Unfortunately, I see this all too frequently.  I remember a trip to Office Max to pick up some supplies for the store.  I had four items on my list, but could only find one of them.  So I go up to the checkout, and the clerk asks "were you able to find everything you were looking for?"  I answered "no," and she ignored my answer and proceeded to ring up the one item I had.  I just stood there, stunned. It really isn't her fault, it's the fault of whoever hired her.  Her boss either didn't coach her as to how to respond to the situation, or he did but she didn't really care.  Either way, this was a person that should never be put out where customers might encounter her. 

We've all received telemarketing calls from people whose language skills are so rudimentary, we can't even understand what they are saying. I'm not talking about heavily-accented callers from Bangalore, India. I'm talking about Americans who aren't even capable of speaking English clearly.  If they aren't calling out, they are certainly on the other end of the line when we call in to customer service.  I can't imagine a company is really interested in serving their customers if they put such people in a customer service role.  Have you ever called Sprint's customer service department?  Neither has Sprint CEO Dan Hesse, or he wouldn't make TV commercials that talk about how important customer service is to Sprint.

But these are the kind of people that too many companies hire for customer service roles.  My suggestion is to punish these organizations by refusing to do business with them.  I left Office Max that morning and haven't been back.  And I dumped Sprint, because when they hire brain-dead people for customer service, people who can't solve problems in a quick and efficient manner, they are telling me they don't care about me or my time.  So why should I care about making them more profitable?  And as someone who is out there in the job market, like I said, I'm insulted when I see that a company has hired grossly unsuitable people.

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