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Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

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Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#121

Post by oramit »

frognumber wrote: post #20

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…

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?

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#122

Post by malfist »

CM30 wrote: post #19

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 t…

The article is specifically talking about ghosting that happens after an interview.

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#123

Post by sevagh »

optymizer wrote: post #105
momocowcow wrote: post #99

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.

I sincerey hope nobody reads this and thinks "I should start ghosting too". We want less ghosting in this process, not more.

Operating with integrity in a domain where nobody else is is a shortcut to getting fucked.

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#124

Post by nradov »

Solvency wrote: post #82
nradov wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet those sports teams still spend millions of dollars and expertise on it (recruiting). So what's techs excuse? It's harder so we don't bother?

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.

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#125

Post by rossdavidh »

CM30 wrote: post #19

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 t…

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.

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#126

Post by barbazoo »

kleiba wrote: post #33

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. It's indecent.

Can’t expose the precious organization to any form of liability. What if you accidentally leak the internal communication about the candidate *eyeroll*

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#127

Post by LargeTomato »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #54

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 sham…

SpaceX.

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.

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#128

Post by varispeed »

frognumber wrote: post #20

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…

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.

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#129

Post by realusername »

1920musicman wrote: post #106
realusername wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 te…

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.

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#130

Post by dspillett »

kstrauser wrote: post #3

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.

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