Never “Call Your Ex” When Hiring a Pharmacist
I was interviewing a candidate last month and fell in love with this person. I could see myself really enjoying working with her and thought she would be outstanding for the role she was interviewing for. I was imagining how she would fit in with our company, how we could really use her savvy marketing skills that I could tell were very authentic. She had a natural ability to make you want to listen to her even when you hadn’t talked to her for very long. What a great possibility for a potential recruiter, I thought.
But something didn’t feel right. Although she was enthusiastic about marketing, she didn’t seem that enthusiastic about our company. One example was that she didn’t grasp what our company did from our website. In fact, she was totally off. She didn’t put the two and two together that we help connect pharmacists with jobs. Red flag, red flag! I started to justify it in my head that maybe our website’s unclear. But I couldn’t bring myself to settle in that justification because every interviewee who’s looked at our website has understood what we do.
Yet I was tempted to call her back.
And when I still hadn’t found the right person a few weeks after that, I thought again about calling her back.
Have you experienced something similar when you’ve been in the process of hiring a pharmacist? It’s like wanting to call your ex—you have moments when you think maybe you were wrong about breaking up with someone. Time goes by and you wonder…maybe it wasn’t really that bad after all? It’s the same when you’re in that position where you really need to hire someone, but haven’t found the right person yet. When the workload gets backed up in the pharmacy, you may be tempted to call this person you liked & question whether your judgment was right the first time. You get tempted…
My honest assessment of her was that she would have been fantastic in the role I was looking for. But I didn’t think she had a true interest in the recruiting profession. My intuition was that if she were to work with us, this would just be a temporary in-between career move for her. And that wasn’t necessarily in alignment with our company’s needs.
It took a bold move to not move forward with considering her, rather than to open our company to misalignment. To tell you the truth, I called her back and looked for how she may explain why she didn’t grasp the first time what our company. But the conversation confirmed my initial intuition. What bold stance will you choose to save you trouble from hiring down the road?
Put the phone down, and keep looking for the right candidate. If you still aren’t getting the right candidates, maybe it’s a good time to develop a relationship with a highly-experienced recruiter who understands your specific needs and can attract and pre-screen candidates for you, so you can spend more time doing what else is important on your plate. If you “call your ex,” you’ll regret it–and you’ll only waste your time and theirs in the long run.
Next time you are tempted, just remember—do you really want to be calling your ex?
