What Time Is It In...?

One of the most thrilling parts of recruiting in the technology consulting industry is interacting with people all over the world. One of the more challenging aspects on a day to day basis, is interacting with people all over the world.

Here's what this last month looked like:

• Recruiting near-shore Salesforce consultants in South America and Mexico.
• Working with executives in Switzerland for a project taking place in the Bay Area.
• I spoke to someone in Chicago that shared a mutual business connection in Italy, so I had to reach out to them right? What time is it in Milan? I didn't have time to look, so I just texted.
• I have an ongoing project with some contractors on it leveraged from China, with a PM in EST, I'm in CST, client in PST.
• Every single day here at Dynamics Door Hari plays a vital role in our organization from India. I speak with him daily whether via chat or phone
• The icing on the cake, is that I have a candidate that was in California that had to make an emergency trip to India last week and got stuck there with COVID and is interviewing right now from India as I write this.
• And the most hilarious part of all of this, is that I went to catch up with someone who I thought was in Florida yesterday, but turns out they moved to Texas recently, and of all the calls to mess up time zones on, that was the one.

Here's an Obscure Reference For What My Brain Feels Like Sometimes

On an average week I'll set up around 20-40 calls mostly across the continental United States spanning 4 different time zones, or 4 1/2 if you count Arizona. I've googled "time phoenix" more than I care to admit. If you extrapolate those numbers to a year it comes out to about ~1000 calls. I'll admit that about 8, maybe 10 calls or meetings a year will end up conflicted do to human error calculating time zone differences incorrectly. Going off the higher end of estimated time zone errors of 10x a year, that's a ~1% failure rate.

The vast majority of calls are set up from messages on LinkedIn Recruiter with candidates. You don't have their email yet, you agree on a time, grab a number and make a call. Sure, sometimes they prefer something on their calendar, or a Teams or Zoom and send you an email, but it's rare. So you do some quick arithmetic, put something on your calendar with a number to call and move on.

Then it's time to make the call, and sometimes the 1% happens. The existential dread seeps in, you blew it, you're an abject failure, how will we ever recover? Truth is the vast majority of people are understanding, but then there's still the small percentage of people that become irate when this happens.

"Life is 10% what happens to you, 90% how you react to it"

This giant orb we're all riding is spinning on it's axis 1,000 mph while simultaneously hurling itself around the sun at a whopping 67,000 mph. Despite these mind blowing speeds it manages to put us in contact with some of it's inhabitants that think it circles around them and they've never made 1 error in a 1000 times of performing the same task.

The physics of our solar system provides us with many fascinating business challenges on a daily basis, but none more prevalent than getting time zones right. But the real question is, when the 1% happens, how will you react to it?