You could cut me off in traffic, and I’d probably just look the other way. You could call me old, ugly, or fat, and I might get hurt feelings, but I wouldn’t knock your block off. Overall, I’m relatively unflappable… until I’m not.
I’ve got something sticking in my craw, and I’m feeling contentious about it. So it’s time for me to address a group of people who are not abiding by a social contract to maintain a polite society.
I’m talking about those of you conducting job interviews and hiring candidates with some questionable methods.
Not all companies subscribe to this practice, so let me explain who is in my crosshairs. First, you are breaking the collective pact if you do one or more of the following:
You require more than THREE interviews. If you can’t use a person’s cover letter/resume and three interviews to assess their abilities to fit into your culture accurately, the problem is YOU. I know someone who can find a life-long candidate for your company within two interviews. Let me know if you’d like to use her services, and I’ll get you her number.
You require every person on every team of your company to interview a candidate. The last time I looked, companies existed to produce products and services. How can you accomplish this if everyone is interviewing applicants all the time? It makes me wonder about the integrity of your product/service when nobody is working on it.
You require the candidate to do a project for your company, especially one specific to a current problem you can’t fix or an hours-long project. A candidate’s time is valuable too. Unless you have a 30-45 minute harmless project to see a candidate’s understanding of the job, you are asking people to do your job for free. Shame on you.
You either ghost a candidate after interviewing or reject them in a form email. If you make someone go through seven interviews, two projects, seven different thank you letters, and eight weeks of waiting, you owe them a call. If you say they didn’t get the job because of experience they admitted to not having on the first day of interviewing, you should have dropped them after that interview.
These hiring practices are yet another example of how little some people/companies regard others. People who condone the above tactics are broadcasting three obvious messages, in my opinion:
Our company’s time is worth more than your time.
We are more important than you.
You owe us everything, and we owe you nothing in return.
That is a bitter pill to swallow as a job hunter and human. But I have a message for those companies who prefer to break the social contract:
You are not more important than me.
I wrote the name of your company down on a list.
People talk about companies that they’ve met.
Karma’s a bitch, so good luck with that one.
What’s your worst job hunting experience?