Caterwauling

Everybody’s been up my butt about hiring help.

Which, who benefits most when I do? Exactly.

HR wants me to not let applications get stale. Boss wants to expand a colleague’s duties ASAP. Colleague whose duties are to be expanded is a good worker but who never did manage to get to “back me up enough for me to take a day off” status.

But, you know, let’s promote them. 🙂

My fault as a manager? Partly, maybe. But I won’t own it all.

This week colleague says, yeah we need the help. Where are you with this? And can you hire two?

I think everyone’s under the perception that I am hiring said person to help us both. Um, no. Most monkeys I try to give away come running back. The help is for me.

My favorite candidate pulled out today. Most candidates found out where we’re located and said no fucking way to the commute. (Job security for me!)

My second favorite candidate failed to dazzle with the editing test. But this reminds me of when I applied to a competitor about three years ago …

I came highly recommended. Sailed through interviews. Got an editing test as a formality.

The thing was, the article sample was pretty good. I did a light edit. I honestly didn’t want to fuck up something that actually had a clear beginning, middle and end.

They stopped returning my calls after that.

I could never figure out why. A friend said YOU ALWAYS RIP APART THE EDITING SAMPLE, GODDESS. ALWAYS.

Well fuck me.

So my one candidate did a proofread. And missed “piqued” (I put in “peaked” — nobody ever catches it.)

Basically I didn’t have the history on her that Other Company had on me. I thought they might have come back to me with a writing test. But no.

So now I am left with being like “meh” about contacting her. But I realize she doesn’t have my industry experience and she didn’t realize that:

A. I sent two tests for them to choose from.
B. I hoped they’d pick the harder test.
C. If they picked the easier one, they could jazz it up with pretty much no effort.

I had a guy pick the harder test and ROCKED IT. And he’s like, yeah, I don’t think I want to haul ass out there. But thanks.

I have another gal who isn’t too bad and a guy who is great. I just, while I’m trying to get the most out of this experience, feel like I’m wasting so much time.

And I’m tired of being made to feel (inadvertently or otherwise) that I’m being too slow about all this.

Look, we have a delicate ecosystem here. It’s not always fun. It’s never boring. It’s always an adventure and one that doesn’t allow for downtime. But I am FIERCELY loyal to my team and the experts I supervise. I would not STAY if not for our bizarrely codependent relationships.

We cannot do this without the trust and loyalty and frankly ADMIRATION of each other.

To add another personality — the wrong one — could destroy us if I’m not careful.

And it’s for US I’m being careful. I don’t need a warm body. I’d rather have no one than the wrong one.

Same as in my personal life.

Go figure.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2014 at 1:41 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.