canadian headhunter

Déjà vu all over again…

I know that I have said this before at some point on this blog but based on an experience I had yesterday I will throw a few more punches at what I already assumed was a dead horse.

Yesterday I was driving into downtown Toronto for some meetings when my cell phone rang. It was a candidate of mine. Specifically one who had been scheduled to be starting an interview with a client right about that time.

My first thought was that he was canceling the interview. Candidates have a funny habit of calling you when they are not going to show for an interview instead of calling the person they are supposed to be meeting.

The problem however was more mundane. It appears the client didn’t have a copy of his resume. This was odd since we had sent one over. In fact after reading the resume the client agreed to see the candidate.

Of course the second part of the problem was that Mr. Candidate had for some reason decided NOT to bring a copy of his resume. He wanted me to e-mail a copy to the client immediately. This however wasn’t possible since I was sitting in total gridlock on the QEW. When I informed Mr. Candidate of this he helpfully offered to go out to his car and retrieve his laptop – which had a copy of his resume on it. Grrrrrr.

Later on that day I was debriefing with the client. He too mentions the fact that we didn’t send him a resume. When I gently reminded him that my colleague had sent one about a week ago he looked at his email inbox and sure enough there it was! Grrrr..

Moral of the story? For all you candidates out there. NEVER go into an interview without a copy of your resume, even if you have sent it to the interviewer directly. When I was consulting for a Fortune 500 company I used to have stacks and stacks of resumes on my desk. Sometimes I legitimately would not be able to find a resume when I needed it. Typically it was when the candidate didn’t bring a resume.

Remember the first impression is very important. Some studies have suggested that employers make their decision on you within the first ten seconds. I don’t know if that is true or not but why make the first ten seconds of your interview an awkward situation where you look unprepared for not bringing a resume and you make the interviewer look unorganized by not being able to find it?