SMS #4: How to Put An End To Shitty Interviews

Before reading on…Note that this article by no means represents a comprehensive business plan. Rather, it is the foundations of a full model that I give you complete authority and ownership to build from. In plain English, if you’d like to ‘steal my startup’, go ahead.

Have you ever had a negative experience when applying for a job or sitting through an interview? Was the experience negative enough to tarnish your opinion of the company?

Once upon a time, I was in the final round of interviews for an internship at a large-scale tech company — the “we-serve-lunch-and-have-an-unlimited-vacation-policy” type. I was told that I’d be on a video call with two of my potential managers (should I be successful) and that the interview would be conducted in two parts. For part 1, I’d be expected to present a software project I had worked on in the past and walk them through my code. For part 2, I’d be posed a challenge and given half an hour to solve it.

Throughout part 1, I stuttered my way through my presentation of a simple robotics project I’d worked on in the summer. One interviewer was pounding away at his keyboard (definitely not taking notes, I assure you) while the other rested his head on his palm with his eyes shut. I tried my best to keep my cool and finished by asking if they had any questions about what I’d just presented. They said “no” and bid me farewell without any mention of part 2 of the interview.

As hard as I was on myself in the wake of that interview, I was way more critical of the company. “We foster great personal growth in our employees” my ass…they didn’t even care enough to finish my interview. It took a year and several more positive interactions with the company’s product and several of its employees before I finally wrote off my experience as an outlier.

In the years since then, I’ve turned an empathetic ear toward friends who’ve complained about their negative experiences when on the job hunt and I’ve come to find that incidents of unprofessional conduct can (and do) emerge in all stages of the application process.

Candidates are stood up for calls and coffee chats.

Candidates are treated poorly during interviews.

Candidates are told “they’ll hear back next week” but never hear back at all.

As much as the hiring practices of some businesses adversely impact their applicants, it’s important that we frame this problem from the perspective of the businesses themselves in order to identify the opportunity.

The fact is, businesses are always negatively impacted by their own bad behaviour. They rarely want to discourage candidates and they certainly don’t want the poor press that results from repeat incidents.

There’s an opportunity here…

Our assumptions:

• Negative application/interview experiences damage a company’s reputation — companies would pay to avoid this.
• Increasing accountability would decrease the rate of negative incidences in hiring processes.
• Getting feedback from and conversing with applicants with negative experiences would reduce the likelihood of negative press/word of mouth about the company.

Before Reading On…Note that this article by no means represents a comprehensive business plan. Rather, it is the foundations of a full model that I give you complete authority and ownership to build from. In plain English, if you’d like to ‘steal my startup’, go ahead.

ELEVATOR PITCH 💬

Your company is hiring.

A bright young woman has researched your mission, culture, and available roles and has placed your company at the top of her shortlist. She receives no follow up over the next week and so decides to reach out to your Talent Experience Specialist over LinkedIn to learn more. With no response on that front either, she assumes that her application was rejected and begins to expand her job search, taking a closer look at her 2nd and 3rd most favored companies. A few days later, an email from your company appears in her inbox inviting her for a video interview. At the scheduled time, she’s sitting at her desk, logged into google hangouts and waiting for someone to enter the meeting. 20 minutes later she receives an email from your Talent Team explaining how ‘something came up’ and offering a new time to chat. At this point, she’s a little fed up but believes it’s worth another shot. The last straw is drawn when at the rescheduled interview, her interviewer acts disinterested in everything she has to say. Annoyed and embarrassed, she accepts the competitive offer from that other company which treated her with more enthusiasm and respect.

It’s upsetting to think that unprofessional conduct of this nature could happen at your company, but even more worrisome is the fact that if it were happening, you likely wouldn’t even know about it.

In this hypothetical scenario, the cost to your business is not simply the loss of good talent. Your reputation is on the line. What if while reviewing her contract for her new job, she makes a stop at Glass Door to vent about her experience? What if her guy friend is curious about applying himself and asks for her opinion on whether or not he should?

You have an entire marketing team whose whole purpose is to control the narrative surrounding your business, but when poor word-of-mouth and crippling Glass Door reviews are all it takes to drag your reputation through the mud, what good are the values you preach? The story you architect? The ‘winning culture’ you promote?

IntervU is here to intervene — the first candidate-focused hiring software that provides your business with the tools necessary to hold itself accountable throughout hiring practices, cultivate more positive interactions with candidates, and provides you with the infrastructure to receive and respond to negative reviews before they go public elsewhere.

VALUE PROPOSITION 💡

At its core, IntervU works to increase a business’ internal transparency and accountability when hiring. Clients create value for themselves as a result.

To do just that, IntervU offers three main features: Interaction Tracking, Automated Interactions, and Feedback Management.

Interaction Tracking

It’s common practice for companies to distribute job postings across several platforms to get their roles in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Popular examples include LinkedIn, Indeed, and AngelList.

I’m honestly unsure of the current tools and methods used by companies to sort, group and manage the submissions that come in from each of these platforms, but I can’t imagine that it’s an easy task.

IntervU will take the incoming submissions from all job positing platforms for the client’s particular role and present that info in an ‘Application Pool’.

All key decision-makers for the role will be able to view the applicants and cast their votes for who should move on to sequential stages in the company’s interview process. This provides a visual and collaborative environment for employees to work together and determine the best fit for their open role.

However, the most important reason for aggregating all submissions is to track interactions with each applicant.

Given the login credentials for a designated point-of-contact email that is used for fielding questions and dispensing interview information (e.g. talent@yourCompany.com), the IntervU platform can track the interaction history with each applicant — Gmail has an API (Application Programming Interface) that would allow you to do this.

Unfortunately, in the case of coffee chats and other interactions not scheduled or facilitated via email, it may require manual input.

Keeping an interaction history for each applicant is valuable for a few different reasons:

1. You can see who hasn’t been contacted in a while and prompt yourself (or someone else) to reach out with an update.
2. All interactions and conversations across different recipients and email chains and people can be shared and viewed together easily.
3. Other decision-makers can view an applicant’s interaction history to stay updated.

Automated Interactions

The number of times I’ve clung to the parting words, “We’ll get back to you Monday” but then Tuesday rolls around…having sat on the other side of the table several times before, I understand how these soft promises get broken.

• You had to push back a candidate’s interview so you can’t get back to the others until after that interview is complete.
• Your supervisor is gone for the week and you need to clear your decisions with him/her first before contacting the successful applicants.
• You want to send out invitations for the next round of interviews but you can’t until you know what dates work for the other interviewers.

As justifiable as these reasons may be, they don’t change the fact that every day you delay engaging with your prospects is another day where your prospects weigh the pros and cons of other options.

With IntervU automation, you can continue having personalized interactions with each of your applicants without taking your focus away from your other duties.

Example use cases:

1. Applicants who haven’t been interacted with for more than 10 days will receive a follow-up note thanking them for their patience and explaining that their application is still in review
2. Applicants who have been marked as ‘rejected’ will receive a gracious email thanking them for their interest and providing a link for them to share their feedback with the company.

And that last use case brings us to the final feature…

Feedback Management

“We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.” — Bill Gates

If you had the opportunity to stop a negative comment or review of your company from going public and poisoning the well, would you take it?

IntervU puts the framework in place for you to do just that. Once an applicant is no longer engaged in the interview process — either by being hired or rejected — they will receive an automated email that links them to a feedback form. To encourage as much candor as possible, applicants’ information can be anonymized if they so choose and applicants can also choose to not be contacted about their feedback.

With proper use of this feedback, companies can either reach out to mend a damaged relationship and/or use feedback to improve internal processes and have important conversations with the personnel responsible for the incident.

PRICING💰

In my time working as Director of my university’s incubator, I hadn’t encountered any student-run B2B businesses (at least none that were making sales). That said, I don’t believe I have much authority to advise you on how to price a SaaS product like this. But if you’re interested, here are some of my suggestions:

• Considering that your service to each client will be on-going (software updates, customization, technical support, server space, etc.) I’d strongly recommend going for a subscription model as opposed to an up-front cost.
• Have some component of your pricing structure be variable. Companies vary greatly in size, annual revenues, funding, etc. and while you can’t go around striking random deals with no system, you must also account for the differences in budgets across clients.
• Do a ton of research into alternative software and see how they are currently priced. DO NOT simply price your product cheaper as a ‘competitive advantage’ because then you’re stuck in a race to the bottom with your competitor, all the while not focusing on creating real differentiators.

If you want more info, I found a good article on enterprise software pricing. You can view it here.

RISKS & SHORTCOMINGS🤷🏽‍♂️

Every business idea has its risks and shortcomings. Here are some for IntervU.

• Anonymity may not be enough for honest feedback.

Successful applicants, as well as unsuccessful applicants looking to apply again further down the line, may find difficulty in sharing their honest feedback for fear of being exposed.

Unless IntervU becomes the ‘industry standard’ and applicants become more and more familiar with (and, therefore, more trusting of) the software, I can’t think of ways of ensuring that applicants believe in their anonymity.

It’s likely, however, that the most important feedback will result from the most critical cases of mistreatment. I’m confident that in these cases, disgruntled applicants will be ready and willing to share their unfiltered feedback.

• Manual input of non-email interactions require detail and context.

Coffee chats, phone calls, interviews. These interactions deserve more than just a ‘date & time’ in an applicant’s interaction log. Having employees self-report the details of these interactions will be (1) tedious; (2) incomplete; and (3) biased.

One way around this would be to have an audio recorder built into the web/mobile app that allows employees to simply record interactions as they happen. However, I imagine many applicants wouldn’t be comfortable with being recorded.

IntervU features may require API support that doesn’t exist.

For aggregating all application submissions from all job posting platforms, it would require API support from these platforms in order to pull this information. I haven’t done enough research to know if these API’s exist and if they would even have the needed functionality.

Another way of getting all application submissions in one place would be to include a link to ‘apply through IntervU’ in every job posting. This would require that a job application portal be developed for IntervU.

YOUR TURN✍🏽

Typically I’d use this section to ask for your assessment of my approach. But for this particular idea, I’m curious to hear of any application/interview horror stories you may have. For the CEO’s and founders out there, is this a solution you’d use?

Let me know in the comments.

Thanks for taking the time. Click here if you’d like a free copy of my new book ‘From Idea to Incubator’ and if you’d like to show your support, follow me on Medium!

Until next time…