Late last week I received a phone call from Mark at Aquent’s Vancouver office. He was very pleasant on the phone and told me a story about how my post on Aquent (Aquent whiffs on making connections) had travelled through the email inboxes of a number of folks at Aquent that resulted in him calling me.

It sounded to me like I’d touched on a bit of a sensitive nerve. It also sounded to me, and here I’m just guessing, not repeating any of what Mark and I discussed, that the problems I pointed out were recognized internally and a source of frustration. They knew the experience they were presenting wasn’t very good and wanted to do better.

So what was holding them back? I don’t know. That’s their real opportunity, because if they can sort that out and improve how they get from knowing something can be improved to doing something about improving it, then they’ve created a culture with feedback loops and ongoing improvement will follow. How to do that? Well, they could think about hiring me to help them. Call it web strategy and we’ll identify and remove the barriers.

Mark made sure to tell me in our conversation that Aquent have a new website coming and it will improve the user experience of people searching for their jobs. Excellent! Now show me the easyness.

Mark also mentioned that ‘aquent’ is a real word and means roughly ‘not a follower.’ I can’t corroborate this with any of my own sources (online and reference here at Work Industries’ remote office) yet it seems plausible because I got the same definition from Jenny of Aquent when she called this morning wanting to know if I’d been able to apply on job m-01470-tm-27009, if I was interested. (I wasn’t because the job was too presciptive.)

So overall, kudos to Aquent for following up, taking action and being human. And good luck with the new website!