Just two hours before, I had received an email confirming the time and who I would be interviewing with tomorrow. It would be my 6th interview with the company about the job. I had spent hours over the weekend filling out the Caliper Profile as asked. I had already spoken with everyone conceivably related to the marketing position and even a stretch, VP of IT, so this next interview must surely be the last, as it was with the President.
A call came in from J*** ******* , but I was prepping for an interview that afternoon for another company and let it go to voicemail. Instead, I received a text from them, the very first person I had talked to in the process. Not the internal HR person P***** who had been arranging all the video interviews, but the HR person from the marketing agency they had been partnering with to do most of their digital marketing up to now. A text that said:
Hi Michelle, your interview with O**** scheduled for tomorrow is cancelled [sic] and they have decided not to move forward. P**** has informed us to let you know. If you have any questions, please call me back.
Well, that couldn’t be right. I called J*** and they shared no more information than had been included in the text. Having a history of misinformation causing havoc in my life (like when I moved out of my beloved apartment when it turns out that I didn’t need to), I reached out to the HR person at O****.
Hi P*****,
I just received a message from J*** ******* saying that the interview tomorrow has been canceled and I wanted to confirm with you that it is in fact canceled and not a miscommunication.
Thank you,
Michelle
Sent at 11:40 am, I had plenty of time before the 2 pm video interview the next day. I texted a friend who is also in the job market about my frustration.
But, Michelle, 5 interviews already in.
I hope it was a 6 figure salary.
Nope
In the meantime, I went to an interview for a company U** **** ***** that had dropped all communication with me for 4 weeks before calling me after hours on a Friday night. Just a few days prior, I had been told that I was no longer being considered for a position at K***** that I had gotten extremely excited about. It had been 23 days since the last interview with K***** and several courteous follow-ups from me.
I never did get a response before the time of the O**** interview. I showed up just in case, sitting on the Microsoft Teams video for 10 minutes, hoping. No one ever showed.
I deserve better. We all do.
I get that these are unusual times. I understand that companies are having to completely redo their job application process. But in the process, they are messing with the lives of those applying. If they aren’t showing basic respect for their potential employees, why should we believe that our time at the company would be any better? Whether they mean to or not, they are setting up a company culture before we report for our first day.
Of the jobs I have applied to, only 13% have gotten back to me to let me know that I am not a fit. The shortest application to interview to rejection process? 40 days. A current one is at 51 days and counting. A lot of us are feeling taken advantage of. There are so many of us actively looking for jobs. I know others feel like me, that the long waiting times are not a worry for the employers – if I disappear, there are 30 others like me waiting.
While these are difficult times for employers, these are devastating times for most job seekers. Like 2008 and the Great Recession, most of us didn’t expect to be in the job market. Many are learning how to be a job seeker for the first time in a long time. It’s already a daunting process. Often applying to jobs is the least time-consuming part of the process. We are also building portfolio websites, getting online certifications, editing our resume yet again, increasing our social media presence, attending virtual networking events, researching employees and companies for interviews, crafting follow up messages showing our expertise, figuring out at what point it’s appropriate to connect to the interviewer on LinkedIn, pretending not to be bothered when interviewers show up 10 minutes late. I won’t even get started on the nightmare that is unemployment certification in so many states.
To do all of the work, including the mental work to get up and face another day of uncertainty with perseverance, is already exhausting. Adding on these incompassionate interview cycles, that may be what breaks many of us.
Companies – it is on you to do better. You have the power, with so little work, to make an incredible impact on millions of lives right now. If I were to offer a few suggestions:
- The right to be told promptly that we are not being considered.
- The number of interviewers should match the salary one is applying for.
- If there have been 2+ interviews, the applicant deserves constructive feedback. I have contacted every company that I interviewed with after being rejected. Only one person has taken the time to give me feedback.
- STOP creating new job posts for the same job. If the job posting isn’t getting you the right applicants, that’s a “you” problem. Its time to look internally to figure out the dissonance issue.
- Make sure that the assessment tools you use aren’t unfairly judging your applicants. The Caliper Profile felt very biased against those with social disorders and introverts. I’m an introverted marketer and I’m great at my job. Don’t fall into ableist stereotype traps.
For more thoughts, follow people like Brigette. An HR expert and author, she has 3 million followers on LinkedIn that she actively engages with and provides a light at the end of the dark tunnel for many of us.
We can come through this, all of us, better than we were before. But for that to happen, employers need to take a good hard look at their recruitment process and be honest with themselves about how daunting it really is.
MarketingMichelle 