Tis Thursday
TGIT – Today is the last work day before going to Bangkok. Our flight is about 10am tomorrow (our Friday) … with a connection in Singapore. We are all so happy to be going. And, I need the break SO bad. I will take my blackberry with me, but am not sure if we are taking a personal computer or not (definitely no company computer). So, if you don’t hear from me while we are gone, now you know why. We will be back in Jakarta on the evening of the 30th (Jakarta time).
The last two weeks have been incredibly frustrating at work. We have started another round of recruiting/hiring. This time we hired a professional consultant to help us screen and test the candidates – this was supposed to save us time and energy. Initially there were 4,000 applicants and we were expecting to receive information on about 400-600 of the best candidates (we only need to hire about 8-10 folks). What we received was a series of disparent and different databases covering 1,300 candidates.
There were many fundamental issues with the databases. First, we had expected one database so we could slice/dice the data – but there were seven. Second they were of different designs/structures, so we couldn’t easily consolidate the data. Third, the consultant did not filter on GPA as we requested and did not correct any erroneous data (garbage in = garbage out). And fourth, it appears the consultants used a series of excel “filters”, “sorts” and “column hides” to get to their “final result” which corrupted the data.
After 3 failed attempts at reorganizing and analyzing the data (conducted by about 6 people) requiring who knows how many hours over the last two weeks (at least 16 hrs by me – mostly at night and on the weekends), we have given up. We have talked to our Human Resources group and have insisted that the consultant start over and rebuild the database from scratch. We have zero confidence that any of the data is correct …. as we have been given multiple versions of the database and the information is not the same between the versions. That being the case, we have no way to judge which information is correct and which is incorrect.
The above is incredibly frustrating … it has delayed our hiring process and has wasted many hours of critical work resources … of which we don’t have any “spare capacity”.
With that … I need to close … time to wrap up and go to work.
ciao ciao
