You are not fit to be my boss.
After two medium articles about how we hire tech people I’ve been getting a number of bad reactions about that process being inhumane.
With all due respect, the fact your advertisement directed me to this post and explained how you treat applicants like fucking sides of beef instead of people made me completely dismiss applying to your position. I might be a fit for your company, but you are not a fit for my boss.
And there are a few more, some more aggressive ones in my mailbox.
Although my posts were an attempt to make the whole recruitment process more transparant they might have an opposite effect.
I understand and respect the feedback. There are some bold statements in the articles. Oftentimes, when I am in recruitment mode, I do feel like I am dealing with rows in an excel over real people. People with feelings and emotions.
Our company cares about people: treating each other with respect and being nice in our core values, we actively encourage people to enjoy their lives and that there are more important things than work, we have an unlimited holiday policy… the last thing we want to do is make people feel bad when interacting with or applying for Prezly.
Is it too inhuman ?
After reading some of the feedback I received and with the posts I wrote last year I’ve been wondering if the overall process isn’t too inhuman. Are we acting like jerks ?
First of all let me mention that I am just a 1 person HR/recruitment team. We don’t have tools, process or expertise on best practices when hiring. I am also personally handling all applications, interviews and candidate feedback.
Then I need to explain how many job applications we receive by showing some stack overflow numbers. In addition to Stack Overflow we use Angel.list, LinkedIn and manual outreach (prospecting ourselves).
The most negative feedback about the article is about the exclusion criteria to move to the second round. It’s a non-exhaustive list of the rules I apply to filter out prospects from the total CV’s applications received.
I don’t think it is wrong to write about the rules we use to filter out that list of +3000 applications. Heck it even gives people that really want the job an extra edge.
The recruitment processes is broken
The recruiter/employer has a lot of power and people are treated as slides of beef. Jobs are kept open for way too long, job descriptions are inaccurate (copied from a similar position) and the ‘connected’ world makes it so easy to promote jobs or for candidates to express their interest.
The hiring scale is tipped in employers favour. The fact that finding a great fit isn’t a single-sided operation and means living up to your values even before new employee joining sadly slips unnoticed.
Quantity over quality.
The whole situation has resulted in applicants/job seekers changing their behaviour. Send your application to as many companies as possible, recycle the same cover letter or just copy/paste your first job application. Blast, send, and keep trying!
For us this results in 100s of candidates applying for the job every week. I think it’s fair to say this makes it impossible to handle every application in a personal way. That’s when we start automating things, finding a few hacks and shortcuts to make the whole process easier.
Easier for me but more impersonal for the applicant. Especially if you’re excited about the job and took time to apply properly.
Moving forward
Here are some things I will change to further optimise the process and reduce candidate frustration:
- Update all post listings about what they can expect and for more information refer to this post. In addition I will double check all job listings with a section clearly outlining the job, recruitment process and our exclusion criteria / expectations for applicants.
- Ensure that candidates that took time by writing a personal cover letter, filling in a questionnaire, taking an interview or doing a coding test get a personal response notifying them what’s going on. Even when they don’t get the job.
- Add an extra disclaimer to the jobs explaining that our recruitment process is a single person operation and takes time. That way we manage expectations to when/how they can expect an answer.
Let me know what you think.
