A few years ago when I was running a recruitment business in Hong Kong the server went down unexpectedly one morning. I remember watching as many of my team immediately began packing up their stuff and heading for the door like it was the end of the day.
“Where’s everyone going?”, I asked casually as the stampede gathered around me as if there had been a fire evacuation.
“There’s no connection so we can’t work”, one of them replied.
“There’s absolutely no point just sitting around without Internet access”, somebody else chimed in, rallying the troops to all bail out with her.
If I’d had a whistle I would have blown it like a coach summoning the team back in off the field.
But I didn’t have a whistle so I just asked everyone to head straight back to their desks.
I suddenly realised that I had a team of supposedly experienced recruiters who actually believed they couldn’t work just because we’d temporarily lost our access to the Internet.
It was time for some basic Recruitment Training 101.
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