More Fear and Loathing Job Hunting-

You are an employer. One of your staff leaves, filling a hole in one of your departments. The boss of the person who has left is now doing both her job and the job of the person who left, so is working 60-70 hours a week and obviously overworked. You call a recruiter who sends someone in who is a perfect fit for the job. This person has one interview, rocks the house and gets along with the potential new boss, so much so the boss says "great, this was fantastic" after the interview. Problem- the person they brought in, the same one who is a perfect fit for the job and has readily acknowledged the fact that he'd be willing to sell little Hans, Franz, Leisel or any other members of his imaginary family of the future (all named after members of the Von Trapp family, of course) to work there- has a job offer at another company, one that he has been stalling, stalling and more stalling all in an effort to find out the deal about the job.

Do you:

A) Get right on it, speed up the process, bring him in immediately for the second round of interviews and make a really quick decision, thus helping fill an important position and relieving another employer of having to work 60-70 hours a week. Not to mention relieving the potential new employee a lot of stress for having to sweat out a process for over a week, partially by trying to hold off the other job, and who has pretty much started spending money he hasn't made yet on the job he's pretty sure he's gonna get.

B) Putz around some more, not return phone calls, be in meetings all day, and pretty much give the general impression that there's far more important things to deal with. Thus ensuring that the person working 60-70 hours a week has to continue doing so and that the person who they interviewed- the one who is perfect for the job and really wants it- gets even more stressed out because they haven't heard back and have another employer they've been using every trick in the book to hold off giving an answer to.

B is, of course, the correct answer. Because it's a recession and people looking for jobs are a dime a dozen. And because everyone's too busy at big companies to worry about other people, like the poor suffering overworked employee or the stressed out, insomnia riddled, wanna be employee-to-be.

And yes, the job offer doesn't really exist anymore, mainly because I stalled for too long and lost it, but it doesn't mean I'm still not as stressed out about it. Or that if something goes wrong with this job, it'll suck on so many levels that it'll need a whole other word to describe the suckiness of the suck.