111–120 of 209 posts
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.
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…
> 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".
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 positio…
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 positio…
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?
For tech, it's hard to know if someone is good in just a couple hours of interviewing.
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 differen…
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.
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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, bu…
I'm not sure what part of the story I just described was "bullshitting."
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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…
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…
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".
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…
> treat candidates with respect > 95% of clowns out there you interview What's your company affiliation?
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.