It’s a hyper-connected world, deal with it!
It’s 2008, yet I’m constantly surprised how much some organizations don’t think about how much we’re all connected to each other, and to information. Seriously, if you feel like it’s important that someone receive news from your organization directly, in a personal phone call, don’t issue a press release, post it on your website, and then call with the news. There’s a pretty good chance they’ve already seen it, and they’re not going to be impressed with you.
Then, in turn, they’re going to talk about how you treated them, and maybe even blog about it or post it to a social media site. They might even use the name of your organization, and that discussion could become a pretty good search result for your organization.
Now, I heard the details of this story second or third-hand, it didn’t happen to me, so I’m not going to get into any specifics. But I could. If it was happening to me, and I had gotten that far in an interview process, I probably would have setup a Google News Alert or possibly used various other tools to keep track of what was going on with the organization, so I would have seen your news release somewhere long before you ever called to share the bad news, and I would be highly annoyed with you.
I guess this just goes to show that some organizations don’t understand the level of communication the Internet provides. I’m sure it never occurred to anyone that the information would reach the other candidates before they could make a phone call. That level of shortsightedness when it comes to Web 2.0 communication might just come back to bite them in the butt someday too.
