One of my top lessons I've learned doing successful startups:
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.
Almost every place I’ve worked (early at startups later at megacorps) there were never enough recruiting resources. So eventually I just got my own recruiter account on LinkedIn and started using my knowledge of the industry and state of hiring to make my own search queries and reached out directly. I had an incredible conversion rate - the senior person actually hiring saying “hey you look like you could fit in here” was very powerful. It was a hell of a lot of work, but I could fill seats faster than anyone around me with high quality people and my projects landed successfully. At a certain point I became too senior for that as my direct teams became smaller and more senior, and I’ve never been able to convince a single other manager to do it. Not a single person. I’ve since switched back to IC at a super senior level so am even further removed from direct recruiting, but I can see even more broadly. All I see now is engineering managers whining about recruiting, and I’ve still yet to see another manager take direct control of their recruiting. Why? The only thing I can guess is they don’t actually care about being successful at what they’re doing, they just care about successfully doing what they were hired to do, which doesn’t include recruiting.
I have a story from a client I worked with. They had 3 or 4 positions they needed filled for their team ranging from Jr to Sr level. But because they worked at a big company they couldn't do the recruiting directly, everything had to be through HR. While the problem was their assigned HR person was unresponsive and slow on the uptake and then took a huge vacation. So they just started looking at the applications that had been submitted through the portal and asking the division's secretary to reach out and start setting up appointments. Time to interview and make a decision on people went from literal months to 2-3 weeks.
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 observation has been that if the company has fewer than 100 employees, yet has a director-level or VP-level "...of HR", you will watch candidates one after another slip through your fingers. When you don't have enough employees worthy of a "VP of HR", then that VP will find busy work to justify their existence.
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".
100% with you, but it’s not always easy to get control of your own recruiting. I’ve also seen HR get upset when their involvement is not what they expected.
Agreed, which is insane! We'll spend untold zillions fine-tuning and A/B testing the process by which we get users, but when it comes to getting coworkers it's "Well HR says the applicants have to make an account to apply so I guess that's just the way it is".
It will be that way inevitably as an organization grows, usually it's an investor requirement to prevent outright nepotism hires or discrimination. No one cares too much for the first few dozen employees but anything larger usually will come with "ffs go and implement at least some basic hiring standards to reduce the legal risks".
For what it's worth, in the US, the legal risks are negligible.
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.
Note I used HR for everything other than sourcing. The bottleneck is usually identifying people and initial phone screens. The rest of the process is legitimately HRs job.
This. I gave up working with external recruiting agencies even if budget allows it for exactly the same reason. They just can’t beat me and my team in productivity and opportunity costs are high. Investing 40 hours of personal time to close a vacancy 1 month earlier means being able to delegate 1 month worth of work earlier.
>Almost every place I’ve worked (early at startups later at megacorps) there were never enough recruiting resources. So eventually I just got my own recruiter account on LinkedIn and started using my knowledge of the industry and state of hiring to make my own search queries and reached out directly.
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?
Yes, it happens in tech. It's not even all that rare, really (at least outside of the FAANG crowd). I've reached a place in my career where I'm well-established and known enough that I don't really need to hustle to find good dev jobs anymore, but for most of my career, I got most of my jobs by being my own recruiter in that way.
> and I’ve never been able to convince a single other manager to do it.
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?).
There are only a few bigger companies than the ones I’ve been at.
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.
Ah, you're doing the sourcing part, which indeed is the thing i-house recruiters are worst at (despite being compensated just for that!). Sorry I misunderstood.
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.
Almost all companies prevent hiring managers from receiving bonuses for their own referrals. I was hiring my own team, rather than using internal or external recruiters.
My experience in a large corp is that whenever we can hire, we never have any issue finding very good candidates. The difficulty is getting approval from HR and management to hire externally.
In the last year of my last job I took on recruiting and mentoring tasks as one of my goals for the year. Management encouraged it, I got great feedback all year, and in my annual retrospective I highlighted it as a big win. When the annual review came around though it got no mention and I was basically punished for taking on those tasks because my billable time went down a small amount, even though we all knew (and agreed) that would happen. That, and other reasons, are why I found a new job the next month.
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?
> 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".
You'd think if professional sports could figure out how important this is we could too, but for some reason there's a tendency to give it lip service then put absolutely no effort into doing a good job. Scouting and screenings are done by people that companies treat like dirt, we incentivize them only for body count, interviews are done by low experience employees and employees who don't even like interviewing. We don't know how to identify and cultivate talent in this industry yet, it's clearly dysfunctional and deprioritized.
In professional sports there are objective metrics and performances are largely in public. In knowledge work there are no reliable metrics that apply on an individual level and you have to rely on candidates themselves (plus perhaps some unreliable references) to understand work history. It's a fundamentally harder problem.
I agree it is much harder, but no less important. Engineering orgs at most companies are no where close to even being good at identifying success or talent in their existing employees.
It's not an excuse. Everyone in tech acknowledges that effective recruiting is important. But beyond doing basic stuff right like not ghosting candidates, that knowledge isn't actionable. No one has found a reliable, repeatable, scalable solution. If you can figure that out then you'll be a billionaire.
> We don't know how to identify and cultivate talent in this industry yet, it's clearly dysfunctional and deprioritized.
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.
Every successful athletic team makes player scouting and development a core function, not only the elite levels. In the US that means minor league baseball teams, university teams from volleyball and fencing, to football and basketball. Pro cycling teams that pay almost nothing and aren't competitive world wide.. It's not just the elite teams that make this top priority. They ALL know that the most driven talented players they can get at their level is what will make them win.
Most of your examples are talent pipelines for the top leagues. Regardless I think you made my point for me at the end:
> 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.
The difference is being Stripe where part of the reason they won was that they are considered extremely excellent at developer experience and technical execution. Or Netflix where they beat all of the legacy companies to a great platform doing something no one had done before, and retained the advantage to the point where they seem like they're going to make it through the die off of streaming platforms.
Neither of those examples is particularly convincing. Stripe succeeded because it tackled a famously difficult and annoying set of business problems; the technology is important and they're reputed to be top rate, but that's not why they've succeeded as a business. Netflix has no technical moat either; there are half a dozen streaming services that, on a technical level, are completely interchangeable with Netflix. The only difference between them is their respective content catalogues, and while Netflix probably has some advantage in being able to drive content decisions with customer data, that only gets you so far.
> There is absolutely no upside to doing a good job, and it takes a lot of time to do so.
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.
I have the same experience. Interviews are very time consuming (prep 30 min, interview 1h, fill out the feedback form 30m-1h), and having several interviews each week means I spend ~1 day weekly on something that's not going to benefit me directly in any way (excluding the benefit of potentially working with good engineers I helped hiring).
So unless the incentives change, I don't see this process improving in big tech.
Yes exactly, the interview itself is a bit less than half of the work surprisingly and then you do need a real break after all of that very intense concentration anyways. 1 interview = roughly half a day gone, that's what I've experienced.
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.
Agreed. I mostly conduct system design interviews which already have a smaller pool of interviewers at my company. This contribution has been included exactly zero times in the countless review cycles I went through.
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.
I think the last paragraph is blunted in companies where teams recruit/interview for their own team (as opposed to recruiting/interviewing for the company in general).
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.
You forgot about fair remuneration. Most employers think that they are doing potential employee a favour and the employees should kiss their feet just for reading the offer.
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.
But that's exactly what it is then: a check mark. I can interview dozens of candidates, and then add a total count to my self review. There is no incentive to do a good job (how would that even be evaluated?..).
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.
I am sure what you are describing is being tracked at my company. The concern with misaligned incentives I have is that there is a vast gap between conducting a passable interview in terms of engaging with the candidate and actually investing yourself in the process. So it's not really about being a bad interviewer (as in rude, openly biased, etc) but about having the energy to do the best job you can - which all candidates deserve IMO.
>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.
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.
This is so true it hurts.
If you get burnt once with hiring, it’s something you’ll never forget but could destroy the startup/small business in the process
I worked at a rocket startup. 1/3 ex SpaceX. 1/3 ex Google/Facebook.
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.
> "wasn't sure how to look through the grid in a circle pattern"
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.
This was part 1 of a 2 or 3 part question. First we literally iterate through each element, keeping track of the max. I use this question for interns, too, so it's intentionally super easy. It gets harder in part 2.
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
No tricks. Just an initial weeder question for interns before we move onto the real question.
Ah, makes perfect sense, thank you for clarifying. Your pseudo code solution confirms that I understood the problem statement correctly.
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.
I think the point of the OP was A the person wanted to solve this in a spiral pattern, which isn't necessary. And B didn't know how to do a spiral pattern, which is fairly simple.
As to your other question, unless it is directed you need to look at each element. The real question is how to iterate over a 2d array. There are several methods and really that is all this question is looking for.
Most day-to-day coding is simple and boring. Your interview questions should be, too. I've interviewed 100's of candidates over the years. Many of them had trouble writing a couple of for loops. This was for a somewhat similar problem. I would stress "we don't need an optimal solution, we just need a working solution."
Honestly, at this point I stopped making strong conclusions about candidates based on a single interview. I won't recommend to hire but also won't judge their abilities overall. Interviews can be very stressful, candidates overthink and often get fixated on a random solution they think the interviewer expects, etc.
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.
IMO this way of looking at it is indicative of a lack of respect for candidates, even if communication is superficially respectful. If someone performs badly in an interview then by all means don't hire them, but it's both unkind and irrational to jump to the conclusion that they're a 'clown'. If someone is making such a harsh judgment about 95% of their applicants, on the basis of an interview process which we know to be highly imperfect, then I would not want to work for them.
The new normal? This has been the case for years for almost all job applications. Maybe if you're lucky and the company has put you through like 4 rounds of interviews you might get feedback, but the general rule seems to be that useful feedback for an interview is the exception rather than the norm.
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.
This was my first thought; I've been working as a dev for almost 20 years, and "ghosting" is the norm.
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.
When I was a pilot just starting out, in 2007 I’d see a human response maybe 1/100 applications.
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.
This isn't really about applications though - not getting a human response at the first step has always been common, especially with electronic postings. It's as easy to apply as post, so you do get a lot of spam applicants.
If you've had human contact and then radio silenc - IMO that's inexcusable.
It was not that great in tech. I interviewed during the same time in tech and got limited responses even after what appeared to be positive interviews. There wasn't quite as much of "we completely do not respond", yet it still existed. Mostly a vacuum of rejections with no context. Very little other than "no" in most cases.
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?
Yeah, it sucks lol, I can’t fly anymore due to illness, and the demand is crazy I still get called to this day. Now if you can finish fogging a partially fogged mirror you’re hired at a major.
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.
Feedback can be very useful in order to let you see things you may be doing wrong in the interview process that you're unaware of. Perhaps you are emphasizing the wrong things, or failing to highlight the right things. Perhaps there are social aspects, customs, other norms that you're deviating too far from. Perhaps you go into an interview without a good knowledge of the company you're applying to, etc.
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.
Worse yet - getting ghosted after submitting a take home assignment!
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.
That's also rather common. Happened to me with one of the jobs I was interviewing at in the early days of the pandemic, and a few more in the years before that. Sometimes it even gets to like, a telephone interview, take home test and 2 live interviews, and they still ghost you.
Both of the following can be true at the same time:
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.
If you want to inure yourself to people ghosting you, spend some time in a sales gig doing cold calls. The vast majority of people will not respond to you and that is not only OK, that is a good thing. You want to be with people who give you a positive return on your energy, not people who sink your energy.
I mostly agree with the sentiment. But I'd say the difference with the kind of ghosting he's talking about is you're already (well) into the interview process. So you've invested a fair bit already. Like in sales, getting ignored or told to get lost immediately is easy to shake off, going deep into the process and then not hearing anything is different. You don't know if you should still expect something, you've got to balance persistence with being professional, you were to some extent counting on it at least possibly happening.
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.
My Rule: The nature of a negative (i.e. final) communications should equal how personal the relationship is. If you applied electronically and we stated "only those considered will be contacted" or you cold-emailed me some sales pitch, we don't have a relationship at all and you deserve nothing. If you contacted me and I responded with a short email, my final answer should be a shjort email. If you spent several hours in face-to-face interviews and we're not moving forward I owe you a phone call or email with some explanation of why - in a TIMELY manner.
Not getting responses from cold calls or applications isn't ghosting according to the author of the article (and I agree):
> 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.
People not responding to cold calls isn't ghosting, though. Ghosting happens when there's an established communication that gets dropped without explanation. A cold call is not an established communication, it's a solicitation to establish communication.
I don't think ghosting has anything to do with 1 or 2. And there is a huge difference between cold calling someone without getting a result and meeting someone face to face and then being ghosted.
Personally I'm not to hung up on small companies that do it. But later companies or recruiters, there is just no excuse. Especially for a recruiter, who's job it is to communicate with potential employees. Who knows maybe you'll find a different job for me down the line?
The problem really comes into play when they say they will get back to you in a few weeks... And then never do..
I once interviewed with the owner of a small tech company. I thought the interview went well, and the owner said he would get back to me the next week. But he never did. I never heard another peep from them.
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.
This is a pet peeve of mine. In the olden days, pre-digital, companies would send you a proper letter back together with your application documents so you could possibly reuse them. That was actually a little work for them to do!
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.
I recall being taken aback to receive a dead tree rejection letter in the mid 2000s (the only interaction had been me emailing my CV)
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?
I once applied to a position in the IAEA. I didn't get the job, but they sent me a letter. I kept that letter for a decade because it was such an unusual occurrence in my carreer.
I got a nice letter from a UN agency, when local companies couldn't be bothered to send an email.
Can’t expose the precious organization to any form of liability. What if you accidentally leak the internal communication about the candidate *eyeroll*
100% in the "nobody remembers what you did, everyone remembers how you made them feel" camp.
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.
I completely agree with this. I have only been ghosted after the interview stage twice but both times left bad feelings in my mind. I did try to contact people but did not receive a response obviously. I never applied to any jobs at those organizations again. I think many companies and other organizations need to realize that even an automated denial is much better than nothing.
I've been ghosted twice lately. One was someone reaching out via Hacker News for an initial chat where they said "let's put you through our interview process" and then ghosted. The other was for a startup, similar situation, "let's set up a chat with our CEO", then ghosted.
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.
Often it is not about people not being honest, but about them having bad task management processes and things falling through. There is so muvh inefficiency and incompetency in basic skills it's crazy.
If you get ghosted it usually means that you were almost good enough, or it was something unrelated to you.
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.
Every time I've been passed over for a job, I've been notified in a timely manner. I would consider anything less to be grossly, outrageously unprofessional. It's never happened to me, but if it ever does, you best believe I am going to name and shame the hell out of that company. Everyone deserves to know, and people like this don't deserve to have anyone working for them.
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.
again, hearing nothing is not the issue. I still think these companies should send you a canned automatic response, but it's about relationships, and the degree of personalized communication needs to match this.
The whole point thing about having half a breakdown after being ghosted is not going to be remedied by receiving a generic rejection email.. even the actual response he did get after pestering them was just "you were good but another guy was better" and yeah this is 90% of all anyone will ever say anyways. Like you can simply assume that 1. a better candidate was found or 2. the job opening was already closed because already hired or budget or role reconsidered if it helps you feel better.
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".
Thanks for the implications on my character in the work place. Written very courteously yet not so nice.. maybe that's the key difference in perspective. I don't care about politeness I care about kindness.
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.
> I don't care about politeness I care about kindness.
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.
It's also a liability thing. Keeping the legal attack surface minimal. It can result in you getting junk responses if you ask for feedback too. I've referred several friends to jobs who then got rejected, and they're almost always given the wrong reason when asking for feedback.
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!
It's not just about personal feelings. It's about not being left in the dark for a decision that affects your whole life. When you're ghosted you're just left wondering whether or not you got the job, whether or not you should start to look for a new place to move to, whether or not it's worth pursuing other opportunities. It adds uncertainty to one's life and therefore unnecessary stress that could be avoided if the company bothered to write a 30 seconds email.
Rejection emails still hurt feelings but at least you get a clear answer and can plan your life around it.
This is NOT the new normal, and we should NOT accept it. Everyone here should do their part; for example, I'm more often a hiring manager and will not tolerate ghosting anyone who gets to any interaction with engineering. IME it's lazy recruiters who are responsible for this, and they're about as big of a part of tech as an accountant, i.e. very little.
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 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.
> I don't understand why many people are hesitant to name and shame the individuals and companies.
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.
In my experience companies with bad practices (be they recruitment, or otherwise) are named and shamed frequently - but only locally, and in-person.
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.
I've had strange success walking up to the guy, telling him I want us to deliver fantastic work together, I want to work with you - together. What I don't want is to go to the boss and tell him you've fucked up, you are lazy, that you are doing a poor job and that we would be better off without you. This is the last thing I want. The best outcome is that we get someone else who knows nothing. If that doesn't happen you would blame me. Then I give him a detailed list of things I think they should have done differently.
It costs a few relationship points but they do respect the practicality of it.
There should definitely be a larger effort to name and shame. I'm not currently job hunting, but in the past I have considered starting a site to document companies and the individual recruiters that are ghosting. It might be worth-while for anyone job hunting currently to start a google sheet or something along those lines to do just that since it's so common now.
So glad I wrapped up my 6mo job search lol. It was an extremely dehumanizing process. I think Ive mostly repressed my feelings since it ended, part of me wishes I wrote about it.
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.
What I've never really understood is that though recruiters (external but also in-house) are typically paid on hiring candidates, much like sales people.
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)_/¯
In-house recruiters I have much better experiences with. Recruiters working for staffing/headhunting firms in my experience tend to:
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.
Much like sales the professionals establish a pretty rigorous funnel and pay no attention to anyone who looks like they will fall out of the funnel. They optimize for offer and if they sense the candidate won’t get there they are better off trying to find one who will.
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.
recruiters are a lot like real estate agents - there's very little barrier to entry or exit, so the good ones do well in both hot and cold markets, while the shitty ones exit when times get tough and compete like crazy for limited supply when they are good. The former builds value in their network and will likely never ghost you; you'll earn them several commissions over a career. The bad ones get fired or voluntarily leave so the network has no value. I suspect we're seeing an uptick in ghosting right now because:
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.
At every company I worked at, each interviewer would have gone through training to do interviews, write feedback, participate in debriefs and actually do those things in a timely fashion. Senior people would have participated/chaired in semi-formal or more-formal hiring committees and helped make hire/no-hire decisions. And the hiring tools we used showed if the candidate has applied earlier for same/different roles, and did interviews and what were the feedback earlier. There would also internal confidential ref-checks based on overlap in candidate's work history with anyone at the company currently. If the candidate was rejected at any stage, the recruiter is informed and they have access to almost all of these data in the same tool. And they are expected to communicate that back to the candidate. And there is a feedback tool for the candidate to rate the whole experience and this feedback is analyzed carefully, and processes tweaked accordingly, especially if the company is growing and expected to continue to grow for a while.
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.
Jeez. On one hand, sure, it’s frustrating when this happens. But for everyone trying to get hired out there: don’t just sit passively waiting for results - call your damn recruiter on the phone! Recruiters are human and yes they make mistakes. Sometimes a phone call may actually result in jiggling you along in the process and actually make the difference between getting hired or not.
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!
I didn't even realize that this had to be said until you said it. Yes, you should 100% follow up on this stuff. Looking for a position requires being proactive, and the effort required doesn't end when the interview does.
I think its cultural. Disrespect has become normalised as part of
"fast paced modern life".
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?
Almost as bad IMO are companies that auto-respond with messages like "we'll contact you in the next few weeks to discuss next steps". Next few weeks? Are you under the impression that your competitors are all sitting around twiddling their thumbs?
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.
> under the impression that your competitors are all sitting around twiddling their thumbs?
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.
I think this would matter more to me if the feedback was ever useful. The feedback from these "no" is more cliche and less useful than a Dear John letter. All I ever hear are "another more qualified candidate", or rarely the slightly more useful "culture fit".
Having been in industry 30 years, it’s only about 15% of the time that I have any specific constructive feedback that’s worth sharing. “When you’re talking about problem X, first make sure you understand the problem because it seemed like you jumped straight into a solution that missed a key element of the question.” Or something similarly specific.
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.
And often it boils down to an intangible "we felt a better vibe with candidate B" and that's probably something they will never come out and say.
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."
I recall getting feedback from one or two companies at which I attended day-long interviews. I had to ask, and after the "well, we can't tell you that," got a couple of "we hired someone with more specific experience with XYZ".
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.
Sometimes they just aren’t sure, or they have a couple other candidates in the pipe that seem good. I’ve been on the other side where we didn’t hire the person for random reasons that I try to not take it personally. But it is frustrating for candidates for sure.
Here's a relevant experience. I applied for a job a few days ago. The recruiter reached out to me through email to schedule a phone call and I scheduled a time through her online calendar. To give you some more context in terms of timing: she emailed me in the morning and I responded in the afternoon. Less than 24 hours after she reached out to me, the job ad on the company page is taken down and now says the position is filled. No response from the recruiter.
My guess, you were not fast enough? Imagining myself as a recruiter, I would probably be working with a fair number of leads at the same time. Any of those who are a good fit and quick to respond would get sent to HR.
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.
>she emailed me in the morning and I responded in the afternoon
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?
>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?
sorry that happened to you. most likely they had a candidate deep in the pipeline with an offer out, and they were hedging their bets in case they declined. this is surprisingly common, though its shitty behavior for the recruiter to ghost you
As someone who interviewed in the bay for the last 7 years, ghosting is pretty normal on both sides of the equation.
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
> ghosting is pretty normal on both sides of the equation.
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.
Could be worse, interviewers could be bullying and degrading interviewees they don't like ... on a wider level.
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.
This has happened to me multiple times, including from large YC-funded companies. I'm tempted to name-and-shame, but I doubt it would do any good.
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.
In 2020 here in Austria I had people clearly tell me when I was a fit and when I wasn't and with a reason. As a background I'm working for 20 years so I'd call myself very senior for a typical dev job.
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.
My company ghosted me for an internal advancement opportunity. A short interview with the HR recruiter then silence for 2 months, even from my manager. I had to complain to the head of HR to get a response letting me know that they're going with an external hire.
one seldom-mentioned reason employers ghost candidates deep in the process SEEMS silly, but is selfishly rational: they are hedging their bets. you came in second place, and they are waiting to see if their preferred candidate accepts before getting back to you.
A "few" years ago (back in the last economic crisis) I was job hunting. Interviewed with a ton of people, and almost no one would get back to you. A few did, but most just ghosted me.
I just found myself back in the job hunt, but this time almost everyone sent me a response. It sucks getting a "no" but I'd rather get a "you are the worst programmer in the world, go jump on a lake" than get boring at all.
I did one interview, had to give a presentation, out a lot of time into it. Never to hear from them again.
But the point is, it was definitely better this time around (well better in the housing sense)
My first rule of recruiting for my own technical teams: don't let a recruiter be the face of your company or team. Set rules on interaction, follow-ups, etc. Insert yourself or someone directly from the team into the process as early as time allows.
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.
I’ve been ghosted a few times over the years. It stung at first but now that I have grey hair, I no longer take it personally. I actually started ghosting job offers and invitation to continue to the next phase of the interview process. If they’re really interested, they’ll find an alternate way to contact me.
Responding with “Yeah, nah.” or a more formal equivalent is hardly going out of your way to operate with integrity in a manner that will get you massively fucked.
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!).
My experience is that operating with integrity in a domain where nobody else is gives you a tremendous advantage over "the competition" and can be self-protective.
Here is a truly stupid idea: What if you could buy a job interview. You pay say 100 bucks, you get the deluxe tour, all the attention and dedication you deserve, a nice letter highlighting your qualities. Make the process into a real product that is worth buying.
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.
Agreed. A bit besides the point, but I'm dating a recruiter that has worked in a few industries, but not tech. She says, as a rule, she doesn't provide feedback. People just don't listen or accept it, they just use it as an opportunity to argue. So what's the point?
This isn't personal on their part. It might be a bit rude but if you're going into the corporate world, get used to that. Just move on, if you're sitting there stewing about getting "ghosted", you can be sure they are not. I don't think it would bother me any more than getting a templated, cliche rejection letter.
It's less about the feelings going around, and more that the hiring committee managed to meet, decided against a candidate, and then the recruiter can't be bothered to give a candidate a canned "no"? What does a recruiter do? Doom scroll on Linkedin for $70k/yr?
Yeah the recruiter could spend some time preparing and sending communications back to all the candidates who were interviewed and then rejected, or could spend that time working on finding candidates for other positions he's trying to fill. What is he going to be incentivized to do?
I had my first interview for a faculty job in 2001. I sent a couple of emails to find out where they are in the hiring process. Still waiting for a response.
The ghosting problem is fixable in 2 seconds with any LLM + AI recruiting pipelining tool. That is the solution to this. Someone will figure it out in the next three months or less.
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 everyone engaged in this perverse machine is to blame? I mean not the individuals. We all have to eat. But the category as a whole.
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.
Why do you need an LLM for that? This functionality already exists in tools recruiters use. If a candidate is crossed off the list, the system sends them a pre-written rejection email. Simple.
This logic doesn't really scan for me. If you care about optimizing your time enough to not respond to the deluge of unqualified candidates you receive, then you might benefit from an ATS, which will make it trivial to send a polite rejection to multiple candidates with a single click, whilst also enabling you to progress others more efficiently.
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.
Do you ghost people whom you already talked to in the past or you misunderstood the article? Not responding after an interview cannot be a bandwidth problem.
What do you mean by candidate? Applicant, or interviewee?
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.”
> 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.
The article is specifically talking about ghosting people after a mutual process has been started, such as after an interview or coding assignment.
Not responding to every resume received isn’t ghosting by the article’s definition. But going through an interview process including a take home assignment and getting no response is.
From what I’ve read, hiring was already difficult prior to the wave of layoffs. Would you say it became more or less difficult to find a target skillset with a larger pool of candidates, regardless of comp?
once you've identified an applicant is not suited, it takes zero time to to copy-paste thanksbutnothanksgoodluckinyourjobsearch.txt and hit send. don't be a dbag.
If you have enough candidates that it's too much work to reject people, you likely have enough candidates to merit at least a simple templating and candidate management app or plugin. It is absolutely trivial to one-click reject groups of people.
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
If you’re too pressed for time to do that…maybe you should be hiring someone who can.
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.