Fireblog

What a way to start the week!

The recruitment process was doing fairly well... Not many complaints or questions from the candidates. We had found no problem.. Until it was time to tabulate the data.
On Monday, we found one information was not inserted into the database. This data was quite crucial as it was one of the information to be used to filter the candidates.

So to get this data, we had to contact 1600 candidates that had qualified using other filters. One person is about 10 seconds, so that would be 16000 seconds, or 4.5 hours right? wrong. DEAD WRONG! many people did not pick up the phone and when they did, they seemed reluctant to put the phone down until they ask every single detail. 1 hour and only 60 people called with 45 answers. It was around 6PM when we started to do this.

Find plan B. My wife helped out by looking for a sms broadcast software and finding a way to connect the phone book to the database contacts. I then made a sms format that basically says "we are verifying the candidate data for the XYZ recruitment. Please reply to this text message with the format #name#[required data]#. thank you."

On Monday, we were at the office until 12AM++ doing this. Making sure the sms broadcast worked before daring to leave it. We were a bit edgy because some candidates tried calling the number, causing the sending to pause. We were afraid it might disconnect. Finally got home around 1AM and woke up early to reach the office at 7AM. This is because the report deadline was on Tuesday.

We sent this to all 1600 and received around 1200 responses within 2 days. The next thing to do was to parse the data and update the database. This took a bit of manual labor because some candidates sent the sms using a different number or did not use the correct format. This accounted for about 10% of the responses. It wasn't a difficult job, just takes a bit of time to do.

The whole incident was actually fun, in a way... but unfortunately my cellphone and my wife's had been used as a media for sending the sms so I had been unreachable since Monday night. Because we want to get as much data as possible, it will not be reachable until a couple of days.

A lot of thanks to my wife, coz without her we'd have to manually call 1600 candidates.

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