Re: Ten questions nobody ever asks a recruiter

[topsidefarm -at- mva -dot- net]

> "Mike O." <obie1121 -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:
> > 8. What happened to the last guy who did this job? What was his
> > reason for leaving? Can I talk to him?
> 
> Uh, I did ask this question once. Turned out the "last guy" died, and a
> lot of people were broken up about it.
> 
> > Tom Murrell
> aka Laughing Wise Owl
> --I touch other people, and other people touch me.--

A revelation like that would be as important as being told that they were
fired. If the last person in the job as a do-nothing bum who got fired,
then your stepping into the job would not be that difficult. Just be your
usuall professional, hard-working self and your predecessor's co-workers
will love you. However, if your predecessor was popular, hard-working, and
deceased, you might want to reconsider going for the interview, or at
least be prepared for some serious hostility from interviewers. In
addition, if you were to get the job, it could prove very difficult to
prove youself worthy, not impossible, but very difficult.

I saw something like this at a place I worked many eons ago as a
machinist. Old Rex had been the tool crib attendant for over thirty years.
Only a few people in the plant had higher seniority than Rex, and even
they could not remember who had filled the job before. Even though Rex had
never been a machinist, he had a knack for solving tooling problems, and
he would help anybody. To top it all off, he had a wickedly perverse sense
of humor that everbody loved.

One day, Rex had a heart attack right in the plant. Those of us on the
fist-aid team knew he was dead before tha ambulance left the plant, even
though the EMTs were still doing CPR. I saw grown men standing around with
tears in their eyes. What would we do without our Rex?

Within a few weeks, they hired a young kid off the street to fill the tool
crib position. He was reasonably competent and very quiet. He worked hard
to learn the layout of the crib (over 100,000 line items of tooling
inventory). And he lived in hell. "Rex would know which tool to use." "Rex
wouldn't take so long to find things." And worst of all, the kid didn't
have the joking sense of humor that Rex had. No matter what this kid did,
it wasn't good enough. He worked his butt off to fit in, but he lasted
less than a year. We went through three more tool crib attendants over my
remaining two years there.

Now the old guys were not being malicious. They weren't trying to make the
new tool crib attendants' lives hell. It was just that none of these
people were Rex. None of these people could measure up to the level of
service that had been there previously, or so was the old guys'
perception.

Now this may be an extreme example, few TWs are in the same position for
30 years. However, the issue remains the same. If you are replacing
someone who left under emotionally charged circumstances (whether popular
or unpopular), much of that emotional energy will still be being directed
at you when you step in to the position. I always want to know the
circumstances under which my predecessor left.

Jason A. czekalski

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