OK'I've been patting myself on the back about being Lazy and Dumb but I was totally Stupid today.
We're hiring 2 co-op students here at TG. Since I'm trying to be a good Lazy Manager, I saw this as a great opportunity to get a bunch of developers involved in the interviewing process. Each rookie interviewer was paired with somebody that had some interview experience. I assigned two resumes to each of the teams and they were responsible for contacting the students and conducting the interviews.
Once this process was finished, we all got together and rated the individual students. We ended up with three potential recruits. So, I sent off e-mails to the top 2 and kept the third in reserve in case we had a rejection.
I also had the interview teams contact the students we were rejecting to give them the bad news. Here's where I got Stupid.
One of the students got back to me and said that she already had an offer that she had accepted. No worries, I thought. I had already planned for this and promptly contacted our #3 student.
As I talked with a couple of other developers, a situation came up ' what if we were turned down by another student' I'd already asked the developers to send out their rejection e-mails to the other students. If either of these remaining 2 students turned us down, then I'd have to send some sort of 'uhh..we made a mistake' e-mail to a developer that wasn't in our top 3! Crap.
Lesson of the day ' don't actually reject co-op students until you have an acceptance from your top picks. Too bad I had to learn that through trial and error.