Glitch in the system

It was not like any other day. A cross functional qualified and experienced assessor's gathered early morning to kick off the day's session filled with multiple exercises consisting of group discussions, fact finding exercises, individual presentation and strategy planning meeting. As usual, the Talent Manager ensured everyone knew detail of the day's agenda e.g. who goes to which room at what time slot, who observes and assesses which candidate in which exercise etc. and was also coordinating the day's activities. Briefing was also carried out to all the candidates the day before in the head office to ensure that even the candidates are fully on board with the daylong assessment center proceedings planned at an off-site location.
I was one of the assessors and was supposed to join during the second half due to some other urgent work back at office while someone else was giving proxy on my behalf in the first half. Just after the lunch, I rushed straight in the individual presentation session where another colleague was waiting. While we were trying to align ourselves a candidate peeps through the door and greeted us. We immediately welcomed him and asked his name to confirm if he was the right candidate. At that the candidate nodded and we asked him to start his presentation by taking his acetate sheets from the table beside the overhead projector. The candidate grabbed the sheets and started the presentation.
From the very beginning, the delivery of the presentation was poor and he was just reading out the slide contents as if someone else prepared them. We were getting very disappointed and stopped him when he finally got stuck with a particular word and said he wasn't sure about the meaning of the word. The obvious reaction from us was “if you did not know the meaning of the word than why did you write it?” The candidate then said what was extremely difficult for us to accept. He said that the slides were neither prepared by him nor he was the person we were expecting.
Moment later we all realized that we made a big blunder which we were carrying on unknowingly for some time before putting an end to this snug. Small error in coordination led to this unexpected situation which could have been avoided. It was one of the biggest learning in my HR career.

The writer is currently the Head of Human Resources of Nestlé Bangladesh.