How to make a bad impression

I receive more calls every month than one would expect in English, given that I work for almost exclusively German-speaking clients. Over ninety percent of such calls to my work number are basically marketing cold-calls.

Just such a call came in at the start of last week from Bharti Consulting Services SARL in Paris. (The first indication that the company wasn’t a viable provider of internet services is that they don’t have a working website.)

The company had seen that we are advertising for new programmers and wanted to offer resources based abroad to fill the spaces. I said that if they could offer programmers based in Switzerland who would work in our office, then we could perhaps discuss it: they confirmed that this would be a possibility, so I said I’d get back to them.

Within three days of this call, I received three more phone calls and two emails, asking if we had made a decision and urgently requesting a meeting. On all of these occasions, I requested that the caller to stop harassing us, and that we could get in touch when we were ready. The last time, shortly before a meeting; twenty two minutes later, I received yet another email asking how we were getting on and demanding another answer.

Based on the aggressive approach, it was pretty clear that the company couldn’t work professionally and so I wrote a brief email to advise them that we were withdrawing our interest. A very short time later, I received yet another email: this time from the CEO, requesting a meeting. When I tersely responded to this email telling the sender to stop contacting us, I got an absurdly arrogant email back.

I applaud companies which are pro-active in finding people’s requirements and trying to meet them. But the worst opinion of all is held for companies who won’t take no for an answer. By acting like this, these companies aren’t going to get business. By acting like this, they are doing the potential employees for whom they are acting a disservice. They are trying to get people work, but acting in such a way as to make it obvious that they are not interested in anything else except what they might earn from a deal. That’s no way to be successful.

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