I have a friend (I’m going to call her Tara) who is a Recruitment Manager/Director and who is on the job market. Towards the end of last year she was approached by and recommended to a recruiter at a multinational technology business. During the approach call Tara asked if she could see the job description but the recruiter said there wasn’t one and asked for her CV. Apparently the CV went down well and Tara was told the Global Heads of Recruitment. would like to conduct phone interviews. Seven phone/skype interviews were booked. Tara had to actually sort all the time zone juggling herself in order to schedule these over a three week period (they also pushed her to do some at weekends and during her holiday). Each interview lasted around 90 minutes, the Global Heads didn’t compare notes (she was repeatedly asked the same questions) and they didn’t share the same understanding of the role and there was still no job description!
After the last interview Tara was told by the interviewer that all the Global Heads would be having a recruitment planning “meeting” and that she’d get feedback shortly. Nothing was heard for two weeks. Tara emailed and called the recruiter and a number of the Global Heads but NEVER heard a single thing back from them. She subsequently heard someone else got the job.
This is a global firm who use twitter to promote their employer brand, they even have some #wearefab type hashtags. This role was within the recruitment function and all the line managers involved were recruiters who really should know better.
No job description, over 10 hours of interview and NO feedback at all; how not to do candidate experience
PS, Before I started writing this I actually had a blog drafted out on why giving feedback, even of the “no news” variety, is so important to candidate. However, I remembered that Greg Savage beat me to it and wrote this excellent and relevant post.
I have had occasion to chastise employers over their shambolic approach to multiple interviews in the past. In one instance, however, a candidate of mine, who liked to take charge of things, did so during his 2nd interview. On seeing that they had no idea what they were doing, he asked them to spell out their plans to assess him, and made sure that the process was logical and effective. Frankly they were taken aback by his boldness, but couldn’t deny how amateur their hiring process had been.
Suffice to say he got the job, on his terms, and went on to become the firm’s Managing Director.
I would now say to candidates; by all means defy the employer’s hiring process, if you think the current one is not serving you well. If you don’t think you’ll get the job doing it their way, then speak up, and make yourself be heard.
Definitely impressed by your candidate’s approach Stephen, sadly a the need for a well structured/thought out application experience is often ignored…
This is my hobby horse for 2015! Agencies are often blamed
for a poor candidate experience when in many cases the employer is to blame. A small example: my daughter is applying for internships: with KPMG she spent ages filling out forms, uploading CVs, drafting covering letters. She then completed an online questionnaire which immediately rejected her as part of an automated process: I’m pretty sure no human bothered to look at any aspect of her application and they could have saved her a lot of time if they had this stage right at the initial registration. Needless to say she was most unimpressed.