I recently received a phone call from an individual and it ended up that they were looking for some contract work and thought our business might be interested in hiring them. Well even before he started speaking to me, I was wondering what the purpose of the call was because on my caller id it showed “TORONTO ON” as the caller ID. This isn’t normal unless the person is trying to hide their identity. Well, that was just the first thing that made me wonder about things.
The person asked to speak to either of us and when I said speaking, he seemed a little confused but that didn’t bother me too much. Sometimes when people are calling a business, they don’t think that an owner is going to be picking up the phone. When it’s a smaller business there are going to be lots of time that the individual answering the phone might just be an owner or key person of the business.
The person then went on to say that they have found our company on-line and was wondering if we needed any project management assistance. They were looking to assist us if we needed that type of role. This is when I started to wonder about the individual, so I asked them if they had looked at our website and saw what I did as a role. His comment was yes, “You’re a jack of all trades and don’t do anything”. Well, that is one way to make sure that you don’t in my good books especially when Project Management is one of my roles that I do for our business.
So, when I continued to speak to the individual, they said that they were calling to see if we were overwhelmed with projects and needed help with them. My simple answer was no I can manage the projects that we currently have and if I needed assistance, I would be looking for help through LinkedIn and our personal connections not someone just doing cold calling.
Now here are some of the red flags that made me wonder about
this individual:
- Call display hiding the
individual’s name
- When I said it was my speaking,
they never said their name.
- Sure, they looked at the website,
but you should never say you are a jack of all trades because in small
businesses a lot of us do multiple jobs.
- Didn’t like it when I asked
if they were from a business or were they looking for contract work, and
they had a hard time saying that they were a consultant and they were
looking for some work.
- Didn’t appreciate it when I said I didn’t appreciate cold calls from individuals looking for work.
It is so important when you are calling a business and
looking for work, you are prepared to show you are confident in who you are as
well as you have done your homework about the business. Telling someone that
they are a jack of all trades and don’t do anything isn’t a great way to make a
good impression. As you can probably guess it, I didn’t ask the individual to
send me their resume because they didn’t make a good first impression.
