Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting
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medium.com
1. Recruiting is the #1 job of any startup CEO, and the #1 determiner of corporate success.
2. Up market, down market, side market, it doesn't matter: You will get better employees if you treat candidates with respect and you will be more competitive.
3. It's a lot of work for the 95% of clowns out there you interview, and there's a push towards automated process, but it will hurt your business.
4. There's a lot more to recruiting than just treating candidates with respect. It involves how you present yourself as an employer (participating in conferences / meetups / etc.), how you find candidates, checking references, reviewing github repos, etc. It's a crazy amount of work.
5. This is hard, but if you can do this, you will have a huge edge.
The flip side is that as an employee, doing a good job interviewing / recruiting, especially at a big company, is one of the lowest value-add tasks you can bring on, from a purely selfish / incentive structures perspective. This friction, I think, is a major reason why recruiting is handled so badly. There is absolutely no upside to doing a good job, and it takes a lot of time to do so.
In the former, if I do a good job, at least I get better colleagues on my team, making my daily life better and giving my team more chance to be seen as successful.
At one place I worked, interviewing was one of the check marks you could participate in for promotions.
Depends on the company. At my current workplace, the candidate is given an option to provide feedback at the end (either through a form or an email), and all interviewers are also required to submit written notes on how everything went down.
Given that a candidate at the onsite will get interviewed by 4-5 people, with each of them providing a very detailed set of notes, it would be fairly trivial to smell out a misbehaving interviewer, if one cared to do so. What actually happens at the end of the day with those notes and candidate feedback, that’s the part i am not sure about. Once they get submitted to the hiring committee (or HR), it is out of my hands.
But just saying, they do have ways of evaluating it, just on a less precise scale and more on a “bad/good enough/amazing” scale. With only the “bad” outcome raising any eyebrows/having any meaningful effect, and with 99% of them getting the “good enough”/“amazing” ratings. And how often the signal for that “bad” rating gets caught is also not something I know much about.
P.S. Your assessments and notes are all preserved in the centralized hub, so you (and some others) can always access them later as well. And, sometimes, you indeed have people checking them out for assessment or such. Especially during your first couple interviews, you have a person supervising you and taking notes in parallel as well, and then you discuss them and they give you improvement suggestions and such.
> 95% of clowns out there you interview
What's your company affiliation?
> Say hello to you new best friend.
I interviewed a guy and asked him, essentially, "find the biggest number in a 2D array". This guy spent half an hour struggling because he "wasn't sure how to look through the grid in a circle pattern".
You'd be incredibly surprised who gets interviews.
I had several odd experiences myself in the past, as a candidate. The funniest one was when I interviewed at a prestigious company I thought was hiring only top talent. I spent an hour trying to come up with the most efficient Sudoku solver, got completely stuck on some arbitrary algorithm that I came up with on the spot. It wasn't a "circle pattern" but close to that. Wanted to impress the interviewer and also did not sleep the night before overthinking the process.
Now I am curious to know whether I am too dense to get it or if the candidate was just that off the mark.
Is circle pattern sorta like iterating through a 2d array like a spiral (i.e., outer layer of the 2d-shape first, then one deeper, etc.)? And if yes, why would that ever be useful for just searching for a specific value in a 2d array?
I get how it could be useful for some more niche/specific problems where the layering of the 2d array would actually matter, but is it just entirely off the chain to recommend it here? Because I cannot for the life of me figure out why you would want to do that instead of just iterating, especially considering how significantly less trivial it is to code-up that “circular” iteration (as opposed to just a regular linear iteration).
Sidenote: Is there even a more efficient way to solve that problem, other than just sequentially iterating through the 2d array and simply tracking the value/position of the largest number until you finish iterating over the entire 2d array (assuming it is non-sorted)? It seems way too simple, so I feel like either I am missing something about the problem statement or there is a better solution than the one I proposed.
For clarity, the pseudo code solution to the question is
for row in a[0]:
for e in row:
max_so_far = max(e, max_so_far)
return max_so_far
Out of pure curiosity, what were the follow up (part 2 and 3) questions? Not looking for a solution, but if you could post the problem statement, it would be very appreciated. If you feel uncomfortable sharing it publicly out of some concern, that’s entirely fair, no worries.
> They ALL know that the most driven talented players they can get at their level is what will make them win.
This is not how normal employment works. Sports are competitive by nature so the difference between a 60th percentile player and the best player is the difference between winning and losing. But for most businesses, the difference between the best frontend developer and the 60th percentile frontend developer is close to zero.
For tech, it's hard to know if someone is good in just a couple hours of interviewing.
Do you even watch professional sports? Professional sports is not great at identifying or cultivating or recruiting, and the incentives there are far simpler, and the performance metrics generally easier.
Take the NBA. A handful of teams are famous for cultivating talent, but mostly because the modal nba team is terrible at it.
Even the best regularly completely mess up. The team of folks that put together the Warriors -- a franchise that dominated the nba for a decade -- completely blew a #2 draft pick, who is close to being out of the league. They gave Jordan Poole a huge contract and then were forced to trade him because he decided to stop playing defense and start taking terrible shots. He's busy being a tank commander in Washington.
Hell, Michael Jordan -- my take for the greatest of all time, and, at worst, the 3rd best basketball player ever -- famously didn't go #1, and that's with one of the best college coaches of all time (Bobby Knight) telling anyone who would listen that he was an extraordinary basketball player. Hakeem went first (ok, that's not a disaster) and a complete bust went second (complete disaster).
Lots of GMs struggle with really basic roster construction issues (Russel Westbrook on the Lakers). etc.
iirc, only 4 of 30 coaches (Pop, Spo, Steve Kerr, Malone) have held their jobs for more than 4 years.
edit: It's very common for top-25 all time players to not be drafted first, or often, even all that high. Steph Curry, with a decent shot at top 10 all time: #7. Jokic: 41st (!!! -- essentially every team passed on him). Giannis: 15th. Luka: 3rd, after winning euroleague mvp at 18 (yes, I'd confident he'll end top 25). etc.
I've also learned this the hard way. I've conducted about a 100 interviews in 2 years and didn't get compensated any for it despite being one of the most critical part of the company.
Conducting interviews is also very tiring and time consuming, I'm estimating that two interviews in a day and your day is gone. I also evaluate it 2x more tiring than coding personally.
It wasn't a complete waste of time though, I got a lot of experience from that which will be very valuable in future management positions.
So unless the incentives change, I don't see this process improving in big tech.
And then it's indeed never valued inside the company, worse than that, it might be counted against you since you will achieve less in your team where all the evaluation will take place...
I really don't understand why companies don't value engineers capable of conducting interviews because it's really not an easy task, you need much better than average interpersonal skills and much better than average tech knowledge as well.
So why would you do it? Such a big red flag. It means that employers will expect doing work for free (in some countries this is illegal) and potential employees should know about it.
Despite not helping in this current company, conducting a lot of interviews taught me a lot for sure.
So long as you don't discriminate against a protected class, you're usually good to go. Nepotism is bad business, but it isn't illegal.
Investors do care about bad business decisions, so it makes sense for them to require good hiring practice. However, if a sole proprietor -- or a business with all its shareholders -- decides to hire inept cousin Vinny to keep him from idling about the house, that's usually legal. In a family-run business (where there is a paper-thin wall between business and personal finances), it may even make financial sense.
This differs from almost any other jurisdiction in the world.
Especially when the communication required to delegate it well is more work than just doing it.
Unfortunately this isn't a happy ending to the story. HR threw a hissy fit that they were being sidestepped (because they were completely incompetent ninnies.) And management had to come down on the manager who was doing it and tell him to follow the process.
My poster child is a company of about 30 that had a "VP of HR". I can't count how many candidates took another offer while she sat on her ass "checking references".
I've never worked for a tech company. But I have worked for two bulge-bracket investment banks.
In the first case I'm pretty sure the person looking to fill the role personally contacted my college's recruiting service (because she had received her MBA from there). In the second case I saw a Craigslist listing either by the person himself or his assistant, talked to someone I knew at the firm who worked near him, then reached out to the person directly. In both cases the person hiring did my first (and, in the second case, the only) interview, and I never talked to a true HR person, let alone recruiter, before receiving the offer. Does this sort of hiring never happen in tech?
I agree with everything you wrote, but if your company is big enough to have in house recruiters they probably don't want you doing it!
Not because they don't want to be able to hire great candidates efficiently. But because you presumably don't maintain the statistics they need to keep. For example, say (I don't know you and am just making this example up), you might without realizing it only be contacting candidates who have names that you recognize as male, while they want to make sure they are pulling from a wider pool to improve their chances of getting the best candidate They may have other reasons for collecting such statistics (SEC filings? Who knows?).
I only do the sourcing, and the HR side I leave to recruiting. The bottleneck in the process is the sourcing, and I have no desire to do HRs job.
On statistics, they only care about the statistics for their own sourcers and processes. There is no regulatory reason for collecting such stats.
Another thing to remember is HR is the weakest organization in any company, and recruiting the weakest in HR. Any manager worth their salt pushes recruiting around, not the other way around.
With reference bonuses, I think most companies do appreciate having their employees do sourcing, which makes your observation that you can't get others to do it all the stranger.
If 20 candidates enter your funnel before you hire one in a screening-technical-offer flow, that’s maybe 5-6 hours per week spent on recruiting in 1 month. You can even send a few personalized rejections to worthy but unfit applicants, sending 80% of applications to trash. The effort is noticeable, but it is not a lot of work with good automation, planning and interview design.
My experience is the same as yours OP. Hiring just isn't treated with any respect and your career will probably suffer if you take it on.
Now that i've finished complaining... I think there's a good reason for this behavior. In the US, where most of our posters are from, you can fire people for any or no reason. It's true that you can put in more effort at the beginning of the hiring process to find better candidates but you won't really know if they are a good fit until they work there for a while. You can have great candidates on paper who don't work out in person, and terrible candidates on paper who are great on the job. This randomness to the hiring process means that people don't treat it as a real discipline. And if you do hire a dud, you just fire them. Is it really any wonder that most recruiting processes are so callous?
It's just the same in Europe with way higher standards on recruiting (i.e. anti-discrimination laws are actually enforced) and employee protection laws. Recruiting, accounting and IT are usually seen as a "cost center" by the remainder of the employees instead of being respected as vital contributors to the business, so it's inevitable that people eventually "check out".
I don't respond to job offers that don't include _minimum_ pay (not "up to") and I don't respond to low-ball offers.
Fair remuneration should also include true equity in the business as otherwise it is exploitation, as at software business the profits are typically not linked to rewards for people creating those profits - it's all get creamed by shareholders.
So if your company generates millions or billions and you only offer a salary? No thanks.
And heck, even that isn't something you can rely on. I've had a fair few interviews get about 80% of the way through the recruitment process, then just ghost me without a trace. The main reason I have my current job is because the other company I was interviewing with just kinda faded away at the end of the application process.
If being ghosted is the new norm for you, you must be insanely lucky.
It’s pretty gross out there for people other than tech employees.
What’s pretty funny is now that I’m changing into this field it seems to be adjusting to treat people like crap. So, I guess you’re welcome guys and gals - it’s my fault.
If you've had human contact and then radio silenc - IMO that's inexcusable.
At least in my case though, it just got to "putting in 2-3 customized applications a day, can't really stop to worry about the type of response, unless its helpful. No's a no, next application."
Plus, 2007 was the era where Google's puzzles and homework assignments were what everybody was fighting about. Which company's got the craziest hiring homework and weirdest math puzzles that have almost nothing to do with your job?
Having seen it from the other side, one oddity I've noticed is that being "ghosted" usually means you were being considered; if they get back to you with a "no" it means they don't think the person would work out, and even if nobody else comes forward, they don't intend to hire that person. "Ghosting" is typically what happens when they are thinking "well, maybe", and they keep looking for an even better fit and then find one. Either it's been long enough that they've forgotten, or it's been long enough that they assume (usually correctly) that the person has figured it out by then.
I'm not saying it _should_ be that way, I'm just saying it's not "new". Letting this mess with your head is a bad situation, because it won't be that unusual. Just keep in mind that it typically means "near miss", and keep looking.
Every company is different and will have different requirements and expectations.
Unless you are doing something universally bad (like didn't shower before going out), there is not much that feedback could help you with other than make you start acting like someone you are not.
If you acted on the interview and you got hired, you'll be expected to continue the act probably for as long as you work there. Which ultimately leads to quick burn out and self-hate.
There are a million little things that can be easily adjusted to improve your chances, and feedback is the only way that you'll know which ones matter. The feedback from a single interview isn't helpful, but the feedback from many interviews lets you spot patterns.
> If you acted on the interview and you got hired, you'll be expected to continue the act probably for as long as you work there.
There is a small kernel of truth here, but this overstates it immensely. Firstly, you shouldn't ever "be someone you're not" -- but adjusting your tactics and adapting to your audience does not have to mean pretending you're somebody else. Second, interviews are performative and everyone knows it. In an interview, you're engaging in a sales presentation. Nobody expects that people will behave identically in everyday work as they did in the interview.
Has happened to me a couple of times.
Look, it's OK if you just found your dream candidate and the job is no longer available, but please tell me that and tell me whether the code I submitted is good or sucks.
1. I personally owe a response to anyone who reaches out to me, in a timely manner, even if that answer is no, because to intentionally ignore a request is unethical.
2. I will strive to have built up many and different areas in my life, such that my sense of confidence is not impacted by the actions or inactions of people who are, in essence, strangers.
Move on.
I've been looking for a job recently, and was also surprised about how much ghosting seems to to on, especially after already talking to people but also never hearing at all. The best application experience I've had recently was probably one that 24 hours after I applied told me no. There I at least could move it out of my mind entirely.
I do agree for sure that it's not personal. And how you're treated during recruitment is also good information.
> In order for it to be ghosting, the ghosted party has to expect the conversation will continue. This means that if you apply and never hear back from a job, that’s not ghosting, a conversation never started. It only becomes ghosting when there is an expected next step that never happens.
Seems pretty easy to me.
Months later, I saw that the company had hired someone for the position, and the person looked to be very qualified, impressive credentials, so I had no complaints about being passed over. All they had to say was that they decided to go with another candidate, yet they didn't bother to treat me with a modicum of respect.
Fast forward to a year later, it turns out that their new employee left the company, and they had to advertise for the same position again. Guess who did NOT apply this time. Karma.
These days, sending an effing canned email to all applicants that didn't get hired costs a company next to nothing, and still ghosting happens.
It's indecent.
I got a nice letter from a UN agency, when local companies couldn't be bothered to send an email.
The recruiters that meet you in person, talk a big game and then complete silence annoy/confuse me the most - possibly they get commissions for signups?
The problem is on both ends and stems from rewarding quantity over quality.
An automated no is such a no-brainer versus the reputational risk of being seen as a bad or callous employer.
And people have looooong memories / impressions created in this space. I honestly have no idea if General Electric is a good or bad employer, but the Jack Welch era still lingers in my mind.
The commonality here is an inability to just be honest and say "doesn't seem like a good fit". Disappointing, and ironically, an indication that it really wouldn't be a good fit. I don't want to work with people who are unable to deliver uncomfortable news respectfully, or even, at all.
The bad candidates get an immediate rejection.
The best candidates get offers quickly.
Candidates that are kind of good enough, but not amazing are the ones who get ghosted. The employer doesn’t want to say yes in case they find someone better. They also don’t want to say no because you are “good enough” and if the next 3 candidates suck then you’ll get the job. Then they forget to tell you when they hire #3.
The other ghosting is when the whole project gets cancelled mid interview. Often people involved aren’t sure if the project will be cancelled so they don’t tell the candidates early. Then when the cancellation is in full swing everyone has forgotten about the candidates.
I mostly hear nothing. It is incredibly unprofessional.
Ghosting is suddenly leaving you in the middle of a conversation. For example, not showing up for a scheduled Zoom interview then not replying to your concerned email, asking to reschedule. And yes, that's happened to me.
The whole idea that we can apply the norms of personal relationships to a business transaction like this with 100s of candidates, no pre-existing relationship beyond 1-2 calls at mostand at best a generic rejection is basically displaced disappointment turned to resentment and anger. To which I say, you can either rant about it online and hope they change, or you can learn to regulate your own emotions.
> The effect of getting ghosted for me, and likely others, is impactful. The narrative in my head played out like this: “was I really so bad that they wouldn’t even tell me no?” It was also a chilling effect for my projects that involved generative AI. I didn’t want to work on them. Every time I logged into my Github, I was reminded of the company because I still had a fork of the take home assignment. It took about a month for my project work to feel normal again, but I shelved some of my LLM projects and moved on.
How is this "half a breakdown"? They stopped working on their side projects for a month. That's a completely understandable result after having spend hours of your life interviewing and not even getting the courtesy of a "no". I'm happy with myself when I make any significant movement in my side projects within a month, so I can certainly imagine that a disappointing professional experience would zap my personal coding motivation for a few weeks. That's a not a breakdown--that's human nature. Most people aren't coding on the side at all.
> The whole idea that we can apply the norms of personal relationships to a business transaction like this with 100s of candidates, no pre-existing relationship beyond 1-2 calls at mostand at best a generic rejection is basically displaced disappointment turned to resentment and anger. To which I say, you can either rant about it online and hope they change, or you can learn to regulate your own emotions.
What? We can't extend common courtesy into business transactions? You sound... tough to work with. Yes, resiliency is important and great and we should all strive for it. That doesn't mean we should throw away longstanding norms of professional decency.
Also, calling this a "rant" is unfair. It was well-written and calmly worded. A lot of people are reading it. Some of them might go back to their job Monday and think "oh, I should ask if the recruiter ever followed up with the rejected candidates".
When someone writes a kind or genuinely useful letter with feedback when I get rejected, I greatly appreciate it. An automatic or generic rejection is the same as nothing to me. It has no actual information in it. And requiring a recruiter to reply to all rejections personally might feel nicer to you and less nice to them.
Your original comment is not kind either, my friend.
Genuinely useful feedback is the best, for sure. But hearing a generic "no" still makes it easier to take a deep breath and move on as soon as they decide against you rather than weeks later when you've decided it's appropriate to give up hope.
Especially if there's a perceived culture misfit or some manager thought we both would leave at the same time for a startup after a few months (this happened me more than once!) they all got insulted on their skillset instead by the recruiter. And sometimes even skills that weren't even in the job description!
Rejection emails still hurt feelings but at least you get a clear answer and can plan your life around it.
I don't understand why many people are hesitant to name and shame the individuals and companies. It doesn't matter if it was intentional or accidental the outcome is the same, and I have consistently been very vocal with my being ghosted experiences. Surprise, surprise: they're consistent on a company-basis and highly corelated to other shitty experiences, both before and during employment.
I would much rather be ghosted than waste time communicating poorly for an extended period of time.
The risk for repercussion isn't worth it. Your going to go online and stir up shit? Corporate culture is way to risk averse. If you are the kind of person getting ghosted and rejected from interviews you evidently aren't a person with any leverage in the hiring market.
I'm not going to relocate from my current city (Helsinki), though perhaps I could go back to working remotely 100% of the time in the future. So really the only companies I'm ever going to apply for are based locally.
I think via IRC, facebook, random geeky chats in pubs, and other face to face conversations I'm slightly familiar with most of the big players. There are certainly companies I've heard of that I'd never consider applying to, and would outright reject if a recruiter tried to head-hunt me for. And I think the reverse is true - some companies are well known locally for having fun challenges, awesome people, and a good environment.
It costs a few relationship points but they do respect the practicality of it.
Haha wow.
I interned in 2018. I was told jobs were available for interns but I never heard back.
They contacted 12 months later for an interview but ghosted after the phone screen.
Contacted again in 2021 for an interview out of the blue. I complete the cycle and they say, verbatim, "you made a great impression on the team and they would really like to hire you. ... We will send over the paperwork later this week."
No paperwork. I get a call 2 weeks later that the VP thought my GPA was too low so my offer was reneged. The recruiter apologized and asked if I wanted to re interview for a new team. I ghosted her.
These companies acting like everything they do is so important and urgent that they cant be bothered to give real feedback or tell me no. I suspect part of the lack of real feedback is that most people have no clue how to interview, even these large companies.
Companies should run their own employees through the hiring process or something. This would definitely show how bad almost all tech recruiters are along with their interview process in general.
I ended my search with a couple companies I don't want to work for now. Meaningless I guess, I'm sure they still have an endless stream of candidates and these large companies past a certain point will never actually die. They make worse decisions then being rude to applicants daily and have no real repercussion.
And in that paradigm, why is ghosting so common? As a recruiter, a lot of your value is your professional network that you can pull from to place candidates. Why would you ever ghost people that, while not a good fit for this role, could be a good fit for a different role in the future?
Even as someone not in recruiting, I've made several connections with folks in the interviewing process (both as interviewer and interviewee) that have led to either new business deals or job placement later on.
Just never really made sense to me, interviewing is "free" networking. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
1. There are a lot more newer people in tech today who are now going through their first downturn and involuntarily looking for a job. As a stereotype these people are far more public on the interwebs and sharing their experiences.
2. We're still in the downward trajectory so the crappy recruiters haven't been purged and companies don't have to compete on quality of service to get limited talent... yet. Wait until the next upswing - I'd bet far less people got ghosted on job applications 2-3 years ago.
1. Be focused on high volume, hence the ghosting. They save time by ghosting you and spend that time on candidates which are sure bets.
2. They ask to be friends on LinkedIn up front (probably even if they know they are going to ghost you). This is to take advantage of your network. They get something out of the interaction; you get nothing.
3. They sometimes line you up for interviews which you aren't a good fit for. What in the actual fuck.
I don't friend recruiters from anything but the tech companies hiring. At my career stage, I won't even talk to recruiters which aren't working directly for the company doing the hiring. I would happily go back to this if I was at the phase of "I need a job; any job for now".
The icky feelings I've gotten from recruiters over the years is akin to the icky feelings I've gotten from car salesmen and real estate agents.
As I am writing this now, I am reminded of some of the headhunting/staffing firms I've talked to over the years. I just removed all of those recruiters from my network.
Also, honestly, a lot of recruiters suck. They are often hired with no qualifications and really not even any serious education. It is routine to hire people who formerly worked in retail or whatever for these jobs so on average they are themselves fodder for the process and often don’t last long.
In companies that had to do aggressive cost cutting, the recruiters were the first to be impacted. These roles have had high churn and sufficient training and experience quality monitoring may have suffered during this period. That could be the reason why the certain steps in the process involving recruiters (like communicating back to the rejected candidates) may have suffered w.r.t quality of interactions.
Don’t sit at home and feel sad and stroke your beard and neglect your side projects. Communicate, sell yourself, don’t be afraid to be a bit pushy!
If we give toddlers a TV or tablet to play with instead of attentive parenting they grow up with damaged attachment patterns. We stop them playing outside and interacting with other children. They go through metal detectors to attend hostile schools in a locked-down environment and communicate only through text messages. They are watched night and day by CCTV cameras. They're made to feel ashamed of simply existing because they're using up air and "killing the planet".
Do this for 20 or 30 years and we have a generation of timid, avoidant people with no interpersonal skills who as Julia Roberts' character in Sam Esmail's new movie "Leave the World Behind" puts it just "hate other people".
And then we use dating apps that reduce other humans to a dismissibe swipe. Those are our peers today. We treat each other like machines and mutual threats, because that's all we've ever experienced.
Is it any wonder that people in companies are too terrified to engage in a risky human-human interaction?
Spot on but not new
Yes, it's a hirer's market today, but that doesn't mean you can take your sweet time eventually getting around to interested applicants.
If the premise of the article is correct (that ghosting, and by inference other poor communication, is very much the norm) then that impression would hardly be massively inaccurate.
In most cases, it’s more “you did okay, but someone else did better in this noisy, wide error-bar interaction”; giving someone feedback of “just be better next time” isn’t particularly helpful or motivating and some candidates will take that as a invitation to press for further details which may not exist and certainly won’t be coming.
In cases where there is specific feedback, I give it to recruiters who hopefully share it with the candidate. (Anecdotally, I have talked with recruiters who have done just that, which is how I know that some candidates just won’t drop it.)
If you’re never getting specific feedback, it’s probably the case that you’re consistently doing fine in interviews and someone else just wiggled a little higher on that particular day.
My reaction to the feedback he got when he finally jogged someone into responding was like yours. It was the typical cliche rejection letter. Maybe a bit more personal than some. I'm sure that the "wires got crossed" and the "email never made it to your inbox" are just a smokescreen for "we hired someone else and didn't bother to let you know."
Otherwise, many days sent down a black hole, followed by beers, to recover from the day's ordeal.
My wild-ass hyperbolic guess is that once they make a choice, staying silent is their way of grabbing a beer or two and forgetting their own ordeal, and having no regrets. "We hired a genius. All the others were run of the mill"
They're human, after all, but maybe humans won't be involved any more. Machines decide who will serve them.
What the hell was that?
My recent job I landed because I was pushy, I called the recruiter by phone and sold them on me, got the contact for the company manager, called them too and got hired. I got decent technical skills, but talking to people is what gave results.
Just one thing, "talk the talk, walk the walk" is real. Bullsh*ting will put you in a bind sooner or later.
Real question: How long should she sit at her desk and twiddle her thumbs, waiting for your reply, before she moves on to emailing/phoning/interviewing a different candidate?
Or perhaps she should pursue multiple candidates at the same time, to immensely speed up the process and reduce her time wasted just waiting to hear back from potential candidates who may never respond back?
Huh? Of course she should pursue multiple candidates at the same time. I can hold that belief and simultaneously express frustration with the above story. Do you think this is some sort of dichotomy?
It totally sucks when you go through the process and don't hear anything back but I also take it as a sign of feedback that I didn't kill on the interview.
I have ghosted a ton on interviews, never purposely but things get lost in the shuffle if you aren't super passionate about the company
It isn't a great habit/practice on either side, but by any means this isn't new
I like that you mentioned this. As a job-seeker, if you've interviewed at a number of places and decided to take a position with one of them, letting the others know that you're no longer on the market is just as important as them letting you know if they've decided not to hire you, for all the same reasons.
sigh 2 really good interviews, and then that. Work in my field, with tech I'd had decades on, and that. Worse experience of the last year of unemployment, and worst interview ever. I had a rough time with google interviews because I don't have a PHD (or degree of any kind) but nothing on that level, ever, before.
I've been in the industry for a very long time, and being ghosted has always been my standard experience when I didn't get a position I interviewed for.
I don't consider anyone obligated to respond to a resume or application, but stopping communication in the middle of the interview process is utterly disrespectful and does not speak well of your company's values and culture.
The only exception was Automattic. They are very proud of everything and how clear their communication is, which it was for most of the time. I got invited to slack, got links with a lot of information. Then I had the interview, which from my point of view wasn't too bad.
After the interview I got told that they won't move forward. I can apply again after a year after I improved my skills. No word about what they thought didn't match the position. Slack channel closed, no response to my email asking what they were missing.
Also, don't let a recruiter contact candidates on your behalf. I've seen this go sideways several times where unprofessionalism can be conducted IN YOUR NAME by the recruiter.
Recruiters this day are using one of a dozen or so recruiting platforms, all of which either have or ought to have functionality that tracks communications.
"Slipping through the cracks" isn't the issue. The issue is a lack of professionalism and diligence, which aren't things I want to see from someone that is going to filter out future employees.
Yes, ghost those who don't take “sorry, but no” (or more succinctly just “no”) for an answer, especially those who have done so repeatedly (those are a time sink and deserve ghosting), but I wouldn't take it as my default position. Try not to become what you hate.
OK, so I tell a bit of a lie: ignorance is my default and only response wrt LinkedIn these days. I see the “you have messages/requests / people are looking at you” alerts regularly by mail, but I've not logged into the site in half a decade or more which anyone looking at my profile (rather than just being a gattling-gun invite spammer or similar) could probably tell with ease (the fact they bother contacting me is a good indication that they aren't a useful lead!).
I've never experienced it and I don't know if they still do it but I hear in Belgium they do a lot of things over dinner. If nothing useful comes out of it you split the bill.
I can't see a single way this could go wrong.
On the other hand, here is the reality:
In a "hiring company friendly" environment, where they cut all their expensive recruiters / or all recruiters / or simply don't care / or treat recruiters as disposable this is what you get.
We are seeing a rising trend, which may reverse in a "Good Market" but part of me wonders if it ever will.
White Collar workers are becoming / have become more and more "disposable."
As disposable as recruiters.
White Collar workers are not used to being disposable, we think we are unique and special butterfly hires. And much of silicon valley used to be structured around the messaging: "Your talent is so useful and valuable that we can't live without you."
That pretense was never really true but they sort of put on an act to keep things friendly.
Lately, that pretense is completely gone. And dropping.
At some point employers, in my opinion, are going to find hires speaking out publicly.
And naming names directly.
Why? No consequences and the employers have nothing, as a class, to offer.
I got to this point in my own professional career. I was treated so badly at one company, I saw no point in not directly naming and shaming them. I didn't even care if "their friends" didn't want to hire me. I didnt want to work with anyone who would be friends with people that evil.
Here is the deal silicon valley wants:
"We treat you like shit and you are expected to take it as a normal part of "professionalism," or we will black ball you and you will be deemed unhireable because you are unwilling to take being treated like shit gracefully, and we (employers) need employees who we can shit on and dispose of. If you complain after this treatment, you are a liability since you think you are worth literally anything as a human being ... when we require disposable parts."
Even THAT contract, which is a VERY BAD AND ONE SIDED DEAL is fraying.
I expect that you are going to see more and more people speaking publicly and directly naming these companies.
Once THAT happens then you KNOW ITS ON.
I suspect venture capital portfolios are going to need to directly tell CEOs not to do this because they are "angering the sheep."
Shitting on applicants, if it continues to escalate, will become a net liability.
Venture Capital companies and Venture Capital firms want to cut corners, access cheap talent and avoid treating employees like they are human beings. They will push this as far as possible until it becomes a net liability.
I think we are going to see people getting so fed up they begin naming names, and THEN it will change.
Maybe if we would just avoid this SV hellish circle and find places or modes of work that are in direct opposition to that, we can at least reclaim our sanity back.
I assume people accept these shitty conditions because this is where the money is at? So maybe we won't get rich avoiding these working environments, but live comfortable enough? We might even have enough energy and time to devote to side projects, our community and such.
Maybe the obscenely fat paycheck isn't the only way to go.
The article is specifically talking about ghosting people after a mutual process has been started, such as after an interview or coding assignment.
While I’d love personalized feedback, all I really want is for your Applicant Tracking System to fire off a short email from noreply@company.com, bcc’ing everyone other than the person getting an offer.
Subject: Your Application to $company
I regret to inform you that $position at $company has been filled by another candidate. We appreciate your interest in working with us.
[Add other platitudes, info about reapplying or whether you’ll be considered for other jobs here…if you want].
—- $Name or HR department
OP was writing about interviewees, not applicants:
“In order for it to be ghosting, the ghosted party has to expect the conversation will continue. This means that if you apply and never hear back from a job, that’s not ghosting, a conversation never started. It only becomes ghosting when there is an expected next step that never happens.”
You don't have to use Lever (just noped out of using them at our company bc they don't put any pricing data on their website + refused to answer simple questions over email, insisting on a "sales call", which is an even clearer indicator of a company which doesn't value my time than one which does not reply to an application altogether) – there are plugins like Streak which can make this effortless.
If you are experiencing an influx of unqualified candidates, you might also consider making your requirements much more explicit, although you'll still get people trying their luck.