Ambiverts or Freaks?

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Often when they ask what my personality type is, my response is candid, “I am an Ambivert”. The biggest surprise for me is to know most of them muddle ambivertness with dual personality disorder and curiously ask me, “So you mean you have a dual personality disorder?”

After coming across this response several times, I started wondering, is it absolute to be only on one end of personality continuum (extroversion or introversion). 

The distinction between extroversion and introversion always leave me detested because I believe people can never be on their single mood extreme all the times and a middle ground does exist which directs our behavior.  For instance, on filling the personality type questionnaire, I am always unsure how to answer, “will you prefer reading a book or going to a party? All I think is “well depends on my mood, or the book of interest, or the group of people who threw that party”. A lot of you can relate with this I believe. Hearing and reading about the term “ambiversion” provided me clarity and a sigh of relief too on this disconcert. There is a little written about ambiversion, but as far as I have read, Ambiverts are those individuals who posses traits of introverts and extroverts at varying degrees.  However, dual personality disorder is characterized by more than one distinct personalities taking control of an individual. The unity of consciousness by which people identify themselves does not exist in dual personality disorder.

On the spectrum of social relationships, Ambiverts enjoy conversations with people, but at one point, they get tired of being gregarious. They try to have a balance between their social and personal time smartly. In contrast to extroverts, the Ambiverts seek time and space to make sense of information instead of fully relying on people. When observed in the perspective of job and person fit, Ambiverts can be ideal choice for the recruiters. The HR personnel have always been in search of the right personality types who are thoughtful, pleasant and gregarious yet self understanding, and all of it together lies under ambiversion.

People who know me well are aware I am the very definition of Ambivert. I enjoy all the hubbub and partying as long as it does not make my head pound and if it does, all I want is to be left alone to hum, read or to create imaginary characters in my head (yes I do). I feel comfortable talking to strangers but at the caution of not giving away too much of myself. I had been both sporty and a loner during play time at school, and sometimes what excited me most about play times was a chance to sit back and write short stories. All of this does not make me a dual personality freak. Does it?

And now some common sense?

There is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert. Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum-Carl G Jung. After all Carl Jung was not a lunatic to say so!

Have been waiting up? Carry on!

You were called for an interview. The HR executive assured you of communicating your evaluation within a week, but it has been a month since then. Should you follow up yourself? Would you sound desperate?

Wait! Why have not “they” followed up as promised?

This trend is often discerned in recruitment today and most of you must have gone through this several times. By follow-up here, I connote recruiters’ post interview follow through with the candidates to which even the top employers are often impervious. 

I am not sure how frequently this oblivion goes on everywhere else, but at least in Pakistan we do not frequently come across anything closer to employer follow up. Unfortunately, if not all, a healthy percentage of the recruiters fall into “hey I am the recruiter who does not ever follow up” category!

The question is, are we not habitual of always being followed up on how we did on evaluations or tests? Whenever we apply for a loan, the representatives follow up if we qualify or fail in availing the facility; similarly after every medical test, we expect our physician to follow up on our health. The examples may sound trivial but the same goes for interview follow-ups.

When I set out to probe into “no follow up” practice, I received interesting responses from a couple of HR and recruitment personnel: feast your eyes!

“Staff’s day is jammed packed. Follow up becomes an added responsibility”.

“It would not be economically wise to follow up especially on as many as 50 candidates who had been interviewed in a single time. It is one heck of a task!

             “Interview follow up should not be a big deal. It is just a simple courtesy which you receive, and if not, you find it rude”.

             “It always makes me sad to hear this. The candidates are obviously appalled by this silence especially when they have gone through several rounds of interviews. It leaves them frustrated and the recruiters earn a bad name at the same time! This is the reason we try our best to follow through!”

             “We do not want politeness to become an added expense. However, it does not in any case reflect we are unprofessional”!

Candidates expect to see the outcome of their efforts and most of them do not mind if they are politely told, “We are sorry, you lacked XYZ”. All that matters is to let them know if they are hired or excused for proceeding further. Recruiters make this mistake of thinking that candidates do not note this simple ignorance, when in reality, they do. In their minds, they can easily start blacklisting the recruiters who do not succeed in fulfilling this simple professional curtsey.

A pinch of humble advice to the Recruiters!

Candidates look up to honesty, even if they did not do very well. If the candidates' skills do not match with the desired position, tell them. If they do not turn out to be compatible, communicate their weaknesses for the position applied for, they might start working on the shortcomings right away. If contacting on phone sounds tiresome, you can always send a modest email. (For further convenience, you could have sent a pigeon with a post it note tied around its neck, but this medium is obsolete, pity!). Use any mean, it should fulfill the purpose of following up.

And for the candidates, the best way to deal with this silence is to keep looking for other opportunities without dwelling on the non-response attitude. Know that there might have been other reasons for which the employers didn’t contact you back besides the reason of non-compatibility.

Here I raise a cup (*of coffee) to the hope that next time, a recruiter will make me write on how well they followed up and failed to earn a name in my “non professional recruiters” black list.