What do you do while waiting for your weekly conference call to begin?
We do some real work, or we email or text as the hold music plays on, subtly affecting our mood. One in five people say the hold music is not just mindless, they’re totally negative about it. A curious little fact that may explain why some people come across a wee bit churlish once the call begins.
Who, you may be wondering, would care about such things? InterCall does. Hardly to be unexpected considering it’s a conference call /communications management company. The rest of us, which is most of us, likely never gave much thought to the intricacies of conference call activity.
Having now studied the survey findings, I, however, now will be comfortable joining the 54 percent of invitees who hang up after waiting six minutes for a no-show conference leader. If it’s the boss, close to a third will wait as long as 10 minutes. And most of us will text or email a colleague before giving up.
If you find yourself on hold during one of your six weekly conference calls (19 percent of big-company workers attend that many), click into the InterCall blog where all sorts of conference call factoids are now available, including the really fun part: a list of some of the weirdest things people have heard while on a conference call.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled recruiting programming. Topping this segment of our show is the career site of a cosmetic surgery and treatment review and referral firm called RealSelf. (You catch the irony?)
You look at the site as a possibly interested job candidate and the first thought is, this is, um, different. The site is replete with before and after pictures of boobs and butts and abs and such.
There you are, trying to recruit programmers, marketers, and community managers to a company whose site plenty of parents would be embarrassed to mention to the neighbors. What do you do?
Make a video acknowledging the unusual nature of the company.
“I was a little bit taken aback,” admits one employee, by “all the images I saw.” Another remembers his first impression: “Oh, my goodness, that’s a bunch of plastic surgery.”
But then, in less than two minutes, the video transports you from how weird to how, if not ordinary, then at least how human. The message is powerful: RealSelf makes a difference to the people who are its visitors and members.
It’s not the only video. Three others convey both the fun value of working at the company — that’s the rockin’ Code Tuesday video — and the meaningful work it does.
Persuasive? You bet.
