Every once in a while something so innocent and yet so disasterous comes up and this is one of them… it’s the idea of selling a “package deal”…
A “package deal” is the idea that a candidate goes in for an interview and finds out the hiring authority may need another person either like him or her or a complementary person to them… like any software salesperson finding out the company they’re interviewing with also needs a sales engineer… and then the candidate proceeds to try to sell both himself and another person he or she knows… he or she communicates the idea they can bring with them…
The candidate thinks they are enhancing themselves in the eyes of a hiring authority… but most of the time it either muddies the water or backfires…
Three weeks ago, I had a candidate who thought he would help himself out in the interviewing process by getting one of his previous associates involved in the interviewing process with the company I had sent him to… He was a salesperson, interviewing for a sales job and his previous associate was a systems engineer… he sold the idea that they had made a perfect team and had been very successful before working together…
I won’t get into the details, but in the final analysis they hired his friend and didn’t hire him… he’s pissed, the relationship is strained…i.e. he felt that after he got his friend the interview, his friend didn’t talk as wonderfully about him as he had spoken about his friend…
The moral:… sell yourself, get the job, show up for work and then if you feel compelled to bring a friend into the company to interview, do it then.
