A place for pride in the recruitment process

We’ve recently been recruiting at Elephant Property. I both love and loathe recruiting – mostly because I know how important it is to find the right fit (culturally and attitude-wise).

It’s exciting when it works and you recruit someone amazing who becomes like a new family member, but it’s always sooo time consuming to find that right person and as we all know, it’s an art, not a science.

I have a stupid name, I’ll freely admit it. “Kirsty”, easily spelled incorrectly. “Dunphey”, even easier to miss or change a letter. All applications come directly to me and typically if my name isn’t correct they’ll go into the no pile straight away.

Mean, nasty, cruel of me? Maybe. But 80%+ of our client contact here at Elephant is via email or letter – we have clients and customers with far stranger and trickier names than Kirsty or Kristy.

So this time around during our recruiting I got one application that came through addressed to Kristy. I didn’t disregard immediately and instead read through the application and, based on their (very) relevant work experience, I put them through to a first interview stage.

At the end of their interview I asked the applicant how they felt their attention to detail was. “Oh, excellent” was their assured reply. I told them that I’m sure it was in most cases, however, there was something on their initial email application that almost prevented them from getting an interview, something really relevant when it came to email contact. Their face was downcast, horrified almost, as I knew it was and they assured me they’d go back to their car and look up the email. I asked them just to let me know their thoughts after looking over the email.

That was two weeks ago and I haven’t heard a peep from the applicant since then.

Perhaps they couldn’t be bothered looking at the email to find out the issue. In which case, it was an effective screening method on my part.

Most likely – the applicant went, searched that initial email and couldn’t find the issue and was too proud to come back to me and say they’d looked but couldn’t find it.

Sadly, they’ve done themselves a disservice if that’s the case. I get that we’re all human – that we all make mistakes. If we employed this person, no doubt they’d make mistakes frequently (as we all do) in the role. What would be inexcusable is if they couldn’t own up to their mistakes. Either way, I’ve got my answer here.

Wish me luck on our new team member!

From broke at 19 to retired at 27, Kirsty Dunphey is an entrepreneur, mother and author, and lives by the motto Memento Vivere (remember to live).