We have a agreed that she would start working from the beginning of the following week on Monday at 9:00 AM.
I came up to the office at 8:30. 45 minutes later, the new recruiter still didn't knock on Meijob door. I have decided to call her in order to find out if every thing was ok, but ooops, there was no answer. at about 9:50, I have received an email from the candidate that said the following : "i am sorry, but after i have considered, i have decided to take another job opportunity..."
There were may ways to behave differently in this situation that i would have liked much more:
1. Let me know during the interview that she is still considering other alternatives and the finals asnwer will be given after several days.
2. Let me know sooner, at least a day sooner.
3. Contact me by phone to tell me that another opportunity came up and she decided to take the other opportunity.
A similar story was told to me by many of my collegues that operate business in China. It is considered to be a common behaivour, and the main purpose of this post is to demonstrate the dammage an individual can cause his career by not respecting his own word. If you behave like that in the job seeking proccess, how will you behave during the work it self, how will you keep up your promises? or accomplish your goals? Can your boss trust you to keep up your word?
Answers.com provides the follwing definition for integrity:
I also choose to presnet the following quote by Les brown:Quality characterized by honesty, reliability, and fairness, developed in a relationship over time. Customers and clients have much more confidence when dealing with a business when they can rely on the representations made.
Honor your commitments with integrity. 
- Les BrownWe all have to remember that our word is us. If we respect what we promise, people will give us respect, but if we can't keep our word, we and other people will lose confidence in us.
1 comment:
This story indeed reminds us foreigners who work in China many other similar experiences. For a long time now we've been trying to understand the real reasons for this phenomena. And we all heard about the known Chinese concern of not "losing face" by saying "I can't", "I don't know", "I am not sure" etc. But what I still don't get is why an employee would not say "I don't know how to do it" and ask for help, and prefer to just do a bad work. How come giving poor results is less "losing face" than asking for help?
Another story I recently heard deals with a small scale factory in one of China's cities, where the manager preferred to commit oneself to a task he knows he can never deliver instead of admitting it is way out of his league - misleading a potential foreign costumer. All those examples made me get the impression that many Chinese employees/suppliers/candidates only think about their "losing face" in the short run, not the long one. This candidate you mentioned preferred to first say she wants it, so you'd stop looking for other candidates, and save her real answer to the last minute, not considering her integrity. And that factory manager preferred to say he can do it, not losing face in the immediate situation, but then disappear, thus risking in harming his business' reputation. I was wondering if the reason for those choices might be the size of the population here, the size of the market, that makes them think opportunities will never end, even if you burn some bridges now and then. And maybe here they just might be sadly right??
If so, the way to prove them wrong won't be a discussion of professional benefit, but indeed self integrity. Confucius' name is recently being invoked in any opportunity, but here it's especially relevant: 信...
Being trustworthy and a man or woman of integrity, you can never lose face. 是不是?
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