Bad Hire Day - Resolution to Horror story and thanks to all re On line/Handshakes/Recruiters et al

[Ed Manley <EManley -at- Solutionsplus -dot- com>]

Thanks to all of you for your ideas and suggestions. There's a lot of good
stuff here - some amusing, some profound, almost all helpful.

As to the suggestions you gave me on the dud TW I recommended for hire, I
think I am going to take a different tack - one that nobody suggested, so I
don't know how well it will work.

After much consideration and having listened to your opinions I have decided
that I admire chutzpa. I don't support or appreciate someone claiming skills
they don't have, and wish I could apply the word "spin" here instead of
"lie", but looking back at her resume and cover letter spin just doesn't
stretch far enough.

I do, however, admire somebody who will stretch their capabilities and reach
for self-improvement. I try to be a "go for it" type of guy. I can't say
that these were her motivators, but I am willing to call it that. Lord knows
I have many sins for which I need forgiveness! 

I remember twice doing something akin to this myself...

I got a call from Vincent's Market (an up-scale subsidiary of Bruno's
Supermarkets) many years ago, saying that they needed a FOCUS database
person for some maintenance and enhancement stuff - I think it was adding
some reporting capability to an inventory system. 

The call came in on a Thursday afternoon and they needed somebody by Monday.
I had never heard of, much less used, FOCUS, but I told them "Sure - I can
do that!" 

I spent that Friday and all weekend reading, calling friends and desperately
searching the 'net for anything I could learn about FOCUS. Bright and early
Monday morning I appeared at their Atlanta IT shop ready to go. I did tell
them that I was a novice with FOCUS, with limited experience in the tool,
but that I felt like what they wanted was within my capabilities as I had
done essentially the same work with similar tools many times. 

I didn't tell them that by "novice" I meant three days of cramming! 

In two weeks I was done and the client was happy. I used them as a reference
for years afterward.

Then one day about four years ago I saw a job listing for Rational Requisite
Pro. This time I had at least heard of it, but never seen it. ReqPro was a
brand-new product at that time and was catching a lot of attention in the
bigger corporations; my peers were talking about it and the industry rags
were billing it as the next big thing for requirements management. 

I had been working as a Business Analyst and preaching the gospel of
improving requirements elicitation, documentation, and traceability
strategies as a way to ensure project success to government and corporate IT
shops for a while, so I applied for the job. I listed ReqPro in the Tools
area of my resume and said no more about it. I got the job on a Wednesday
afternoon. 

Now, since Rational was new, and ReqPro newer still, there wasn't a lot
about it to be found on the net. I finally found a peer Friday afternoon who
used it, and drove to Jackson Mississippi that night to pick up his manuals.
I had called Rational's office Thursday morning and discovered that they
did, in fact, offer training on ReqPro, but that it was weeks away and
thousands of dollars.

So, I hired their corporate trainer to meet me "off the books" on Saturday
at a hotel near their Huntsville Alabama office, loaded a time-limited but
fully functional evaluation copy of ReqPro on my laptop, and spent the
entire day drilling with this trainer. He had the workbooks for a three-day
class on ReqPro and we went through them in a day. Again, I got the job, did
it well, according to the employer, and have been learning and working with
Rational products ever since. That experience led to my working as a
requirements specialist and trainer off and on for years.

He is no longer there, he's making mega-bucks on the left coast now or I
wouldn't be so specific, but I will never forget the trainer who was willing
to violate a long list of his company's policies and spend his day helping a
stranger. The three-hundred bucks I paid him were less than he made in a
day, so he didn't do it for the money. He saw someone who wanted to move up
in capabilities and was willing to go out on a limb to help me.

Therefore, I am going to throw my support behind teaching her what she needs
to know; to working in the background to make her an asset to myself and to
the organization.
One thought here is, better the devil you know....

We've been in the hiring mode now for months, seeking TWs, BAs, DBAs and VB
coders, and I know how hard it is to find qualified people, so in this case
I think I will be better off leveraging the skills she does have and
building up the areas in which she needs help.

That may be wishful thinking - but I am going to try it and see. It makes
more sense to me to work with what I've got than to demand perfection. If my
team demanded perfection of me I would be in a world of hurt!

Have fun folks, and thanks again for your input.

Ed



Ed Manley
Senior Business Analyst
Solutions Plus, Inc.
Suite 250
3595 Grandview Parkway
Birmingham, Alabama USA 35244
205-439-5764 Voice
205-439-5769 FAX
emanley -at- solutionsplus -dot- com 


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