Employable in what capacity and for what compensation, though?
For example, I’m sure I could get a job flipping the proverbial burgers, if I really wanted to (or perhaps even managing people who flip said burgers). However, jobs that pay very well, such as coding / development / design / etc., generally have obstacles that look more like “pass a bizarrely contrived coding interview” than “show up on time or at all”.
Then again, it’s not just high-paying jobs that have this issue. Here’s the key bit of your post, in my view:
As a result of all this, we only ended up doing two in person interviews. … One of them seemed acceptable in a punch. The other we hired.
Consider that first of these two people. Would you tell this person, “you are much more employable than you think”? Consider the matter from their perspective. I gather from your post that they did everything right, like having a profile without errors, responding to phone calls, not being rude, etc. Yet it seems like they turned out to be less employable than they expected. Hmm.
Furthermore:
We ended up with a wonderful woman we found through a personal recommendation on a local mailing list.
Now imagine—as seems like it plausibly could’ve happened, and no doubt does happen many times in analogous situations—that you got this personal recommendation before you went to Sittercity. Consider, then, the situation from the perspective of an aspiring nanny who reads this post, takes your message to heart, and makes a profile page on Sittercity, spelling and grammaring everything correctly, intending with all sincerity to be polite to inquiring callers, to respond promptly, to arrive punctually to interviews, etc.
In this plausible scenario, this person has zero chance of being hired by you. Hm.
As I understood the post, they ended up hiring two people (presumably for two different time periods), one from sitter city, one from personal recommendations, though I might be mistaken here.
Employable in what capacity and for what compensation, though?
For example, I’m sure I could get a job flipping the proverbial burgers, if I really wanted to (or perhaps even managing people who flip said burgers). However, jobs that pay very well, such as coding / development / design / etc., generally have obstacles that look more like “pass a bizarrely contrived coding interview” than “show up on time or at all”.
Then again, it’s not just high-paying jobs that have this issue. Here’s the key bit of your post, in my view:
Consider that first of these two people. Would you tell this person, “you are much more employable than you think”? Consider the matter from their perspective. I gather from your post that they did everything right, like having a profile without errors, responding to phone calls, not being rude, etc. Yet it seems like they turned out to be less employable than they expected. Hmm.
Furthermore:
Now imagine—as seems like it plausibly could’ve happened, and no doubt does happen many times in analogous situations—that you got this personal recommendation before you went to Sittercity. Consider, then, the situation from the perspective of an aspiring nanny who reads this post, takes your message to heart, and makes a profile page on Sittercity, spelling and grammaring everything correctly, intending with all sincerity to be polite to inquiring callers, to respond promptly, to arrive punctually to interviews, etc.
In this plausible scenario, this person has zero chance of being hired by you. Hm.
As I understood the post, they ended up hiring two people (presumably for two different time periods), one from sitter city, one from personal recommendations, though I might be mistaken here.