There was a time, not so long ago, when you could expect a polite acknowledgement of a job application, an explanation of the process and steps involved, and feedback if you weren’t successful. These days, ghosting candidates seems to be the norm. Hiring managers will claim that they are inundated with responses, so it’s just not possible to acknowledge every application, or inform people when they have been unsuccessful. They’ll also claim that overly aggressive legal requirements and an increasingly litigious environment means it’s no longer possible to provide candidates with feedback. Personally I don’t buy either of these arguments.
The volume of job applications has always been high, and if talking to hiring managers is anything to go by, the challenge they face is having too few qualified candidates rather than too many. While it used to be the case that applicants would apply for jobs via email, a large part of the process has now been automated. So the use of hiring tools with their set processes and templated responses, makes it harder to hide behind the excuse of volume.
I can sort of understand why, if you’ve received over a hundred applications for a specific role, it may not be practical to respond to everyone individually. However if somebody has taken the time to come in for an interview, I think you owe it to them to let them know why they failed to make the cut on this occasion. It’s not only polite—and generally the right thing to do as a human being—but failing to respond with the appropriate level of care and attention can have negative results.
The feedback I’ve heard about interview practices isn’t much better. Overly long, marathon interviews where the candidates are left feeling broken and exhausted by the end. No offers for tea or coffee, no breaks, just a revolving door of stakeholders peppering them with a seemingly random barrage of question. The lack of any coherent narrative makes these team interviews especially torturous. Randomly jumping from topic to topic with no logical segues, or being forced to answer almost identical questions posed by people who weren’t in the room to hear the answer you gave 20 minutes earlier. This unrelenting style of interviewing feels at best like a popularity contest and at worst like a form of interrogation, intended to break the will of an unsuspecting candidate.
In a time where team diversity is an increasingly important consideration, overly combative interview processes that favour certain personality traits like aggression, ego and resilience, seem like an especially bad way to go.
While some hiring managers may be impressed by one candidates ability to bullshit their way through a series of essentially random questions, it’s not an especially good indicator of future success.
This brings us nicely around to the issue of interview tasks. Now I’m actually in favour of tasks in certain situations, particularly when you’re hiring junior roles where people have talent, but lack a broad portfolio of work to show. It can also help level the playing field between agency designers with lots of exciting bands in there portfolio, and people who have been in-house for a long time working on a single product. However I also admit that in most cases, tasks are planned and delivered poorly, and can have a negative toll on the recipients.
One big problem with tasks is when they focus on a real problem the company is facing, and end up feeling little more than spec work. Here is a poorly stated problem, and the person who comes up with the answer we like the most wins. Another common problem are tasks that are set a week in advance, and given fairly tight deadlines. Some people will be able to fit this work around their existing work and family commitments, while others won’t. As such, I tend to prefer whiteboard tasks that take place during the interview process itself. Even then, these things are often dropped on candidates without any notice, a process which borders on abusive in my book.
As product people and technologists, we’re meant to have empathy and understand the human condition, yet little if any thought goes into the candidate experience. I guess this wouldn’t matter so much if you had hundreds of qualified candidates knocking down the door, but this often isn’t the case.
It’s easy for hiring managers to forget that candidates are assessing you as much as you're assessing them.
Often more so. I’d argue we’re in a supply driven economy at the moment, where the best applicants will be choosing between 4 or 5 employers. In this situation, it's your job to sell candidates on your company, and no glossy vision deck or lists of aspirational values will subvert a painful and broken interview process.
It’s also worth remembering that the digital industry is highly networked and super tight. If an applicant puts a tonne of work into an application, undertakes a remote task, and comes in for an interview, only to be ghosted by the company, you better believe they’re going to tell their friends. The old marketing adage goes that a happy customer will tell one of their friends, while an unhappy customer will tell ten. The same is true of the recruitment process.
I know a surprisingly large number of influential people who feel aggrieved towards certain, well known companies, because of the way they were treated during their recruitment process. They’ve told their friends over coffee, shared their experience in closed networks, and put dozens of people off of applying in the future. This isn’t where you want your brand to be.
Even if the experience wasn’t so bad as to be noteworthy, a lot of candidates will feel so bruised and battered by the experience they they’ll be put off from applying again. This is a huge loss as, just because the candidate wasn’t right for you now, doesn’t mean they won’t be right for you in the future.
Not wanting to blow our own trumpet, but at Clearleft we regularly have repeat applicants. Why? Because we try and make the process as humane as possible and give good feedback.
We explain what we liked about the candidates–and what they needed to work on–while making it clear that we really valued their time and would gladly consider them for future openings.
So rather than ghosting or hazing candidates, and leaving a bad taste in their mouths, we need to try and create the best recruitment experience possible. So even if the candidates aren’t successful, they leave thinking that you’d be a great company to work with, will recommend you to their friends, and jump at the chance we a future job opportunity comes along. This isn’t just a case of playing the long game—It’s the fair and decent thing to do.
This was originally posted on my blog
