Dear Liz,
I haven't job-hunted in five years, and now that I'm on the job market again I've been surprised at how cold and callous employers and their representatives can be.
I've been involved in five interview pipelines so far. Two of them are still grinding along. None of the five employers has been especially easy to deal with. Two of them were such negative experiences that I took myself out of the running.
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I had no choice. I could tell that I would hate working for those companies if I got the job. One of the internal recruiters was extremely rude, and when I wrote directly to the hiring manager at that company she never wrote back. Finally I told the recruiter to take me off the candidate list, and she sent me back a one-word email reply that said "Done."
The other organization looked promising but after I had finished two rounds of interviews, communication dried up. A full month after my second interview, the HR person called me out of the blue and said "We've got you scheduled for a third interview tomorrow afternoon. This is your interview with the VP."
She made it sound like a huge honor. I said "Unfortunately, I'm booked tomorrow. I hadn't heard from you in a month. I assumed you had hired someone else."
She said "This is your career we're talking about! Can't you change your plans?" I said "No." She said she would see what she could do, but I don't really want that job anymore.
What is going on with employers these days?
Yours,
MacKenzie
Dear MacKenzie,
You have discovered something every working person needs to know. When the people in an organization show you who they are, you have to believe them!
Great employers treat job-seekers well. Lousy employers treat job-seekers like garbage. There is no doubt about which type of employer you are dealing with, right from the start of the recruiting process.
You don't have time to waste with lousy employers. Often the larger the company is, the worse they treat job-seekers -- but that is not a hard-and-fast rule. Sometimes larger organizations do a better job than smaller companies at hiring.
Sometimes even start-up organizations can start to believe their own press releases. They can start to believe that you'd be lucky to get a job working for them. That's not a good sign!
Here are five heartless, talent-repelling recruiting practices that have no place in the 2017 market for talent.
Employers that use these outdated practices are not tuned in to the importance of hiring great people. You can tell them to hire someone else, and keep your search going!
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1. Deciding which candidates to interview by keyword-searching their resumes or applications. Good employers know that reviewing resumes is a human function!
2. Structuring job interviews as formal, uni-directional Q & A exercises. Good job interviews are two-way conversations between equals.
3. Making job-seekers wait in silence for weeks between interactions. Smart managers stay in touch with job-seekers and make the recruiting process as fast and nimble as possible.
4. Expecting job-seekers to work for free during the interview process, by creating a marketing plan or an IT strategy without compensation, for instance.
5. Treating job-seekers like cattle by implying through their words and actions that the employer is mighty and the job-seeker is nothing. Run away from any employer who treats you badly on the job search trail!
If you read job ads you'll find that a lot of companies are hiring right now, and lots of other companies that don't have job ads posted might nonetheless respond to your Pain Letter and Human-Voiced Resume.
Just because a particular employer begins to move you through its recruiting process doesn't mean that they are a good employer for you.
You may be better off telling that employer "no thanks!" and using your precious job-search time and energy to search for better opportunities. Not everyone who wants to interview you deserves your talents.
Don't forget to order some consulting business cards and to think about yourself and describe yourself as a consultant. You are a consultant, even if you've never worked as a consultant before.
It's your career, and it's your job search. Don't waste time with people who will never see your value. Saying no to the wrong opportunities is the best way to bring the right ones in!
All the best,
Liz
