Where Hiring Goes Wrong
Last year, our blogs focused primarily on giving an edge to applicants. We wanted to provide our readers, subscribers, and clients guidance while they maneuvered through a job market where an overwhelming number of applicants vied for only a few open roles. That was the hiring world just as Covid-19 vaccines began proliferating. But in the eight months since, the job market has changed drastically.
Resignation levels and openings are at record highs. Most every industry is being affected by the massive number of open positions they need suddenly to fill, openings at all levels. We’ve entered a candidate’s market, which means it’s crucial that you and your firm act quickly to keep qualified candidates interested. How, as interviews and hiring managers, can we ensure that our hiring process puts our company in the best position to do so?
It is our opinion that there’s no “secret sauce” required to entice applicants to your firm. And it’s not solely a matter of better benefits, higher salaries, more PTO, or other tangible assets. The approach we suggest is simply a critical retooling of our hiring practice, one which takes a highly humane approach to your interviewing strategies, application process, and hiring timeline.
For example, after debriefing with many candidates throughout this past year, we found a consistent lack of applicant feedback from companies and interviewers, even those applicants who made it through multiple rounds of high-pressure interviews. Candidates spoke of either being “ghosted” by interviewers, or even being given false information r.e. their application status, their strengths and weaknesses, and their expected response time. And although nobody likes communicating to candidates that they are being rejected, shying away from these conversations inspires massive distrust and malcontent in applicants.
But more importantly, it’s plain rude, unprofessional, and unbecoming of a serious organization. It disregards the fact that applicants talk. They talk, text, and post about their negative experiences during the hiring process. We often encourage applicants to reach out to those within a company for hiring advice, or for information about the culture there, and this kind of treatment is inevitably communicated. It’s inevitably publicized. And it inevitably becomes part of a company’s image. Candidates often take their experiences to Glassdoor or Linkedin or Indeed, if not openly posting about them on social media. Understand, these candidates are disappointed. They’re angry. They exhaustively prepared for this process and still didn’t get the position. If we’re not sensitive to their situation, and if they feel poorly-treated, there will be consequences when these candidates take their experiences to the market. Just as bad online reviews can shutter a restaurant, negative social media feedback can lead to future hiring difficulty, a bad reputation, and a loss of top-tier candidates.
Too many firms simply lose interest in so-called “runner-up” candidates, making an understandable, albeit misguided, business decision to cease communication with a candidate once they have been passed over for a position. But a personalized email to these candidates will go a long way. Not every applicant, of course, but those you’ve interviewed, or begun forging a personal relationship with. Honesty will go a long way, too. Providing specific feedback about positives and negatives throughout the application process may be a lot of extra work, but it communicates to both the applicant and the entire market that your firm cares about people, their betterment, and their closure. Landing top talent is invariably important to your business, but that doesn’t happen overnight. It requires active culture-building, of which compassionate communication is a paramount component.
Because if another position suddenly opens up, wouldn’t we want to maintain an open channel to past almost-hires who we’ve already vetted and screened and gotten to know? A company displaying genuine kindness throughout the application process is rare, and when it happens, applicants remember. They remember, and they prioritize. We may not think of our hiring activity as having the potential to burn bridges, but individual applicants don’t consider the mountains of applications we have to go through or the effort required in finding time to conduct interviews, they remember only the hurt of not hearing back. They have staked their hopes on us, in one way or another. We have to respect that.
There’s no better time to begin than now. This is the ideal moment to start spending serious time and resources on evaluating your hiring mechanisms. That means training interviewers to be more compassionate and communicative. It means reading what is written about your company online and identifying the areas which require improvement. It means asking candidates to answer survey questions about their experience.
There is no indication that this candidate-centric hiring shake-up will end soon. Those who adapt to the changing circumstances, who truly prioritize people in the hiring process, will stand-out, and will be better able to attract top talent in the long term.
If you’re a hiring manager or interviewer interested in an outside eye on your hiring practices, reach out to us at www.idealinterviewco.com/contact. We’ve talked to countless candidates. We know what your firm needs to do!