It might not be too late…

Something happened to me that is totally unrelated to recruiting, but naturally because I dwell on things too much I made it correlate.

Some info to keep in mind throughout this story…I am a psycho when it comes to being early for appointments/meetings. I have never shown up less than 30 minutes prior. Anyways, I had scheduled an appointment to take my car into the shop because of a recall I received a letter about. We made the appointment for Friday, Jan 18th. That morning, we woke up to our dog having a seizure. We were terrified and contemplating what we could do for her, so we decided to push back the car appointment to Friday, Feb 1st. On Friday, Jan 25th, I panicked and was convinced that the car appointment was that day. Normally the shop would send me a reminder the day before but I thought something had gotten messed up because I rescheduled it. We got to the shop and the attendant told us we weren’t scheduled until next week. We could wait, but they might not be able to take us for at least 2 hours and that was IF someone else didn’t show up for their appointment. So we said we’d be back next Friday.

Friday, Feb 1st rolls around and I never got my reminder. It completely slipped my mind that we had an appointment and at about 3pm that day, my stomach dropped as I realized we had missed the appointment…AGAIN. We no-called, no-showed. I was living my own hypocritical nightmare. I was furious that I wasn’t getting my “reminder” emails to tell me I even had an appointment, grasping at any straws for someone else to blame. I stumbled into my “Promotions” folder in my Gmail account and there they were, all the reminders they had been sending for the week. I was so embarrassed that I had rescheduled, shown up on the wrong day, AND missed the appointment that I still haven’t even called back to reschedule. I’m risking my life in a recalled vehicle because of sheer embarrassment.

I related this to recruiting because I thought about all of the single parents, the double-jobbers, the folks trying to handle 800 other things on their plate on top of finding a place to work so they can bring home enough income to put food on the table. I thought about them all and how many times somebody might have no-called, no-showed for an interview because simply, life happened. I thought about how they might have been so embarrassed or thought that the opportunity was off the table because life’s mess got in the way. I wish I would have followed up with some of them instead of putting them in the pile of “not interested” candidates. We learn from life’s mishaps and I hope that people don’t get discouraged (like I did) and keep going after what you want. Prove to everyone that you can handle the mistakes and what life throws at you. Even if you just call in to apologize about missing the appointment, you’re already braver than I am. Kudos to you.