One suggestion: You might want to keep a glossary of acronyms handy. Those of you who can correctly identify ANSI, ATS, SaaS, and SMB — you are excused from the glossary requirement.

Freshening Stale Resumes

When a resume is stale, but the skills and experience are just what the hiring manager ordered, what do you do? You call, you email. You don’t hear back. Or if you do, you find out they’re perfectly happy in the new job they started six months ago.

There goes your time-to-fill right down the drain.

Of course, the bright move (watch what we did there) is to keep up with your prospects. BrightMove, the talent acquisition and staffing software vendor, thinks so, too. So just this week the company added a “Social Bar” to its toolkit. With a click of the ‘sync” button, BrightMove will pull in your prospect’s updated info from Facebook, LinkedIn, and other sites.

Now you know without waiting for that callback that your prospect has a new job and a better title than what you’ve got to offer.

Sure, this is something you can do on your own. And, you will, the first time you pull up a resume. Once you tag it, the process is automatic. BrightMove’s COO Mike Brandt says everything could have been automated — no human touch required — but then no system is smart enough to know which of the hundreds of Michael Brandts on LinkedIn is the one in question.

It won’t make sense to make the effort for every resume you get. But for your hot, if not immediately placeable prospects, tagging them when you get them and letting BrightMove update them for you, is, well, a bright move.

Jobaline

Matching, as anyone who has ever dated or recruited can attest, is an imprecise art. Yet that doesn’t stop anyone from insisting there’s enough science about it to improve the odds.

For hiring, I won’t argue against it, which is why when I checked out Jobaline last year I admitted not knowing quite what to think. Besides the usual requirements matching and ranking, Jobaline introduced a “seriousness” quotient. On the theory that the more interested and committed a candidate is to a particular job, the more time they will spend filling in all the info the employer demands.

Whether there was any validity to a seriousness ranking, even the founder wasn’t prepared to say.

A year later and Jobaline, as they say, has gone in a different direction. Today’s Jobaline is a sort of job board servicer, where employers post jobs for free, then get to review the basic info about applying candidates. When you see what you like, you pay.

Founder and CEO Miki Mullor calls it “pay-to-pick.”

The Interviewer Who Fell Asleep

There’s nothing like explaining to an interviewer just what it is you can do for the company to make a difference — only to discover they’re sound asleep. That’s a pretty clear hint of what your job prospects are like.

Alas that happened to poor Irwin, who was on his first interview after graduating college. Turns out the interviewer was a narcoleptic who, after snoring away for a few minutes, awoke and resumed where he left off.

I don’t know if Irwin got the job, but he did win $100 from OneWire for telling the most memorable interview story in the firm’s contest. OneWire, as we noted in last week’s Roundup, is a sourcing, tracking and, most significantly, matching system for the financial industry.

Quick Hits

Unrabble, the un-resume, SaaS ATS for the SMB market (we are partial to acronyms here at ERE), has just introduced a free version. It doesn’t do a lot, but it will give you a taste of a world without resumes.

Looking for a way to measure your branding efforts, or the performance of your career sites (besides just counting apps), or your social media significance? Here’s a list of 20 free tools. The list is intended for marketers, but then, isn’t that what we’re all becoming?

SHRM’s latest ANSI standard proposal is available for comment. The draft proposal is on workforce planning.

What’s wrong with corporate job interviews? Pretty much everything.

Interviews are the second most used and “flawed” tool in HR (right after performance appraisals). They are used and relied on around the world for hiring, transfers, promotions, and for selecting leaders. After studying and researching interviews for over 40 years, I find it laughable when people think they can become interview experts simply by conducting a few of them.

Despite their many flaws, the purpose of this article is not to tell you to stop using interviews. Instead, the goal is to make you aware of the things that can negatively impact the results of an interview. My premise is that if you encounter these problems and you understand their causes, you can take steps to avoid or minimize them.

A Complete List of the Top 50 Most Common Interview Problems (split into five categories)

A) The 15 most critical problems that can occur with interviews

1. Some things should not be measured in an interview – few start an interview with a list of the things they want to assess. Many things just can’t be measured accurately during an interview including: many technical skills, team skills, intelligence, attitude, and physical skills. Giving them a work sample or test is often superior.
2. Using historical information to predict the future — interviews cover what happened in the past. Unfortunately, “the way you did something yesterday” simply wouldn’t work in today’s “new normal.”
3. Interview questions are not directly related to the needed skills – most questions and “solve-this-problem” scenarios are developed independently and are not tied to a specific “required” skill or knowledge. There is no script or plan to ensure the right things are covered so that interviewers don’t just make up whimsical questions.
4. Inconsistent questions – there is no interview question script prepared for most interviews, so that the same questions are not asked of each candidate, which causes serious comparison and reliability issues.
5. No weights – interview questions are frequently not “weighted” or prioritized, so minor questions receive the same weight in the final rating as the most important ones.
6. No scoring sheet — there is no scoring sheet to ensure that interviewees are rated consistently on the same factors. Many final decisions are made based solely on memory. Scoring sheets forces the interviewers to make their decision based solely on the factors on the scoring sheet.
7. No agreement on good answers — almost universally, interviewers asked questions without first determining what is a weak, good, and great answer. As a result, the exact same answer will get different “scores” from different interviewers.
8. Interviews are inherently misleading – the basic foundation of the interview is based on the premise that during the interview, candidates are acting normally and are telling the truth. This is unlikely because most candidates are scared to death before, during, and after interviews.  The interview situation is by definition “unreal” and words often should not be taken as proof. It is not “the job” and therefore what happens during the interview might not be representative of what one would actually do on the job. The goals of many interviews are unfortunately focused on finding faults in the candidates, as opposed to finding their positive aspects.
9. Saying what they want to hear — interviewees frequently provide the answers that they believe that the interviewer wants to hear, rather than the most accurate answer. Interviewees frequently lie or omit key facts; unfortunately, interviewers do the same.
10. Non-job related factors influence decisions – numerous subjective factors like body language, accent, height, handshake, dress, and coming late may distract from a focus on the answers provided. Because of stereotypes, demographic factors (race, sex, age, national origin) may also impact the results.
11. Practice makes perfect – preparation changes interview results. So if you think you are getting spontaneous answers, be aware of the thousands of Internet articles, sample questions, and videos that can super-prepare candidates for anything. Individuals who have not been in a job search for a long time might be rusty in their interview skills. While unemployed candidates that have recently gone through numerous interviews could benefit from their extensive practice and do better.
12. Your specific interview questions may be known in advance — in addition to generic questions, with the use of glassdoor.com, be aware that whatever specific questions your firm has asked in the past (and their answers) are likely to be posted.
13. Behavioral interviews have inherent weaknesses — behavior interviews rely 100% on candidate-provided (and possibly exaggerated) descriptions of how they handled a problem in the past. Also be aware that they may have acted that way because of cultural rules and constraints that would be completely different today, at your firm. Extrapolating forward on how they would act six months from now, even though they have long since changed, and in your unique culture/environment can be misleading. Asking candidates to describe how they “handled” a certain situation has some serious inherent problems. First: what the candidate is describing to you may have happened, but you can’t actually know the extent of their contribution to the described action. Second: if their verbal descriptions or their delivery happens to be clumsy, their accomplishments will likely be underrated (even though they actually did what they described). And third, in our current fast-changing world, you might not even want them to act the same way.
14. Lack of future view — most interviews and all behavioral interviews focus on the past but whoever is hired will be working in the present/future. Most interviewers fail to ask candidates to forecast the future and to provide an outline of the plans that they will use to identify and solve upcoming problems.
15. Not hiring for “this” and “the next job” — hiring managers can be shortsighted. They frequently interview and hire based 100% on their own short-term needs. Companies should hire individuals for both “this” and a future job but most interview questions are not designed to assess future competencies that will be needed in their next jobin the company.

B) Problems with the interviewer

1. The interviewer – the sex, age, and experience of the interviewer dramatically impacts their assessment of any candidate. If the person they are interviewing is different than them, the result will also be different. All too often, interviewers act like they are junior psychologists and may make snap but inaccurate judgments about candidates.
2. Bias and prejudice — some interviewers have biases or make stereotypes that eliminate individuals for nonbusiness reasons.
3. Interviewers are not trained – almost everyone assumes that interviews are easy and don’t require training. Managers only receive cursory training and don’t know the pitfalls that can lead to bad interviewing and hiring results. Because “mystery shoppers” are not used, HR has no direct way of knowing what might be happening during an individual manager’s interviews.
4. The interviewer has arbitrary knockout factors – many interviewers seem to arbitrarily make up subjective “knockout factors,” which prematurely and often unfairly screen out qualified candidates. Many of these knockout factors are based on personal prejudices.
5. Interviewer fatigue — after many interviews in a row, the interviewer is tired and their judgment weakens.

C) Common interview process errors –the actual design of the interview process can cause many problems.

1. No structure — the less structure, the less reliable are the results. Using the same structure around the globe may be a problem because local cultures and laws vary.
2. The timing – the time of day that the interview was held has an impact upon its results because the energy level of interviewers and interviewees changes. Someone that has gone through five back-to-back interviews will perform differently than someone who had a break. And because multiple candidates are involved at different times of the day or on different days, it makes accurately comparing interview results that occurred at different times or days difficult.
3. The length of interviews varies — interviews are often very short, making realistic assessment difficult. And due to time and business pressures, managers often eagerly make snap, first-impression decisions, which can be inaccurate. Comparing candidates who had interviews of significantly different lengths is also difficult.
4. The order of the interview — If you are the first among all candidates in the interview process, you’re less likely to be hired then if you are the last candidate. Unfortunately, where you appear in the order of interviews impacts your odds of success.
5. Consistent location – even the place where the interview is held (if it is not consistent for all candidates) can influence the candidate’s assessment (i.e. lunch interviews produce different results than conference room interviews).
6. Interviews are held in person — This makes them expensive, because of the use of an interviewer’s time. Also requiring an in-person interview means that many working people simply won’t show up. Advances in technology now make it possible to hold inexpensive live video interviews over the Internet. Live video interviews and telephone preliminary interviews can save both travel costs and candidate time without impacting quality.
7. Travel fatigue — often interviewees are flown in for the interview the night before and jet lag makes them underperform. Interviewers can suffer the same issues.
8. Selling is limited – not enough time is spent during the interview selling the candidate, so those with multiple choices might not accept.
9. Skills demonstrated in the interview are not required for this job – interview scores tend to vary based on the candidate’s interpersonal and communication skills, but this particular job might not require even average interpersonal skills. Thus some jobs (i.e. receptionist, salesperson, and recruiter) lend themselves to being assessed through interviews, while for some other jobs (like programmers, artists, and meter readers), interviews may be horrible predictors of the candidate’s on-the-job success because they work alone.
10. Panel interviews – panel or group interviews are often intimidating because of the number of people in the room hurling question after question at the single interviewee. Often an assumption is made that panel interviews reduce the chance of bias or prejudice, but that is not automatically true if the team leader is powerful and successfully encourages others to share their bias. Candidates can also become frustrated when “the wrong person” asks a question (for example, when an HR person asks a technical question and a technical manager asked a question that should have been asked by HR).

D) Psychological issues and problems –if you study the research on interviews, you will find that there are many psychology-related issues.

1. Looking for reasons to reject — often interviewers spend almost all of the time trying to find a reason to reject the candidate, and as a result, they miss the candidate’s positive aspects. In some cases, negative responses are given twice the weight, so a candidate can be mentally rejected after a single error.
2. Halo Effect issues — often the evaluator is overly impressed by one or more personal characteristics (i.e. great looks). And they mistakenly assume that everything about the candidate is positive because of that single exemplary factor.
3. Recency comparison (the contrast effect) – if an interviewer has several bad interviews in a row, the next person who performs much better may be inaccurately rated as outstanding, simply because they are so much better than the recent poor performers. The reverse effect is also possible.
4. Personalities come across differently — shy, nervous, and slow people can be assessed poorly even though the job does not require speaking up or boldness.
5. Fooled by enthusiasm — some interviewers are so smitten with candidate enthusiasm and passion that they fail to accurately assess other important job requirements.
6. “Fit” assessment — many managers use interviews to measure an individual’s fit with the team, job, or the corporate culture.  Unfortunately, there is little evidence that untrained managers can accurately assess “fit” in 60 minutes. In addition, if innovation is being sought, individuals who do not “fit” may instead be the correct hire. Often candidates who are “just like me” (the interviewer) are automatically given higher ratings even though the job does not require someone “just like you.”
7. One-way conversation – unfortunately, many interviewers spend more time talking then listening during interviews.  Most interviewers don’t leave equal time for the candidate to ask questions and to present information that they want to present, which can frustrate them, and then limited information is used to make the decision.
8. “Too perfect” performance — occasionally interviewees with a lot of experience interviewing (often from HR) get extremely high ratings but they are rejected because they are “too perfect” and the evaluator assumes that something is wrong (cheating).

E) Legal issues

1. No accuracy check – the validity or the predictive ability of interviews are not checked by later on comparing whether those who received high interview scores turn out to be top on-the-job performers and vice versa. Interviews are a test, according to the EEOC, but most firms do not formally validate interviews or individual questions. The reliability of interviews is also not assessed.
2. Illegal questions – it’s not unusual for illegal questions to “pop out.”  It’s also possible for candidates to inadvertently volunteer illegal information.
3. No written record – because most interviews are conducted without being taped or even with a written record, there is little evidence (should legal or EEOC issues arise) as to what actually occurred or didn’t occur during interviews. When notes are taken, the unfettered handwritten notes taken by interviewers can be embarrassing should they see the light of day in a court proceeding.
4. Language, cultural, and disability issues — interviewees who normally speak a different language may be slower and may provide less precise answers merely because of language or cultural issues. Disabilities that affect speaking may impact scores, even though accommodation may be required and speaking is not a major job requirement.
5. Icebreaker issues — the interviewer may offer an icebreaker story or joke that may be inappropriate or illegal. It may negatively impact the responses from the interviewee.

F) Candidate-experience related issues – most candidates either hate of fear them. Further angering or frustrating candidates may cause you to lose top candidates, hurt your employer brand, or even harm product sales.

1. Candidates are forced to lie to their boss — because most interviews are held during work hours, currently employed candidates coming to an interview are essentially forced to lie to their current boss as to why they are away from their current job.  This can cause them to prematurely drop out of the hiring process.
2. Uncertainty and being kept in the dark — abuse of candidates occurs when managers keep them in the dark about the interview process and what is expected during it. They are not told what will occur during the interview and what skills will be assessed. In addition, they are not told who will be there during the interview, the role of each interviewer, and who will make the final decision. Failing to educate the candidate may cause them to under-prepare in key areas. Candidates also get frustrated when they are left in the dark and not given feedback about where they stand after an individual interview or after the process is complete.
3. Candidates are given no input — the interview process and whom they will interview with is determined by the organization. However, top candidates should be asked for their input, who they need to talk to, and what information they need in order to make their decision. Because without this information, they may drop out or reject your offer.
4. The number of interviews for each job — “death by interview,” which is where an excessive number of interviews over many days wears out a candidate. There is also death by repetition, when candidates during multiple interviewers get frustrated when they are asked the same questions over and over because interviews by different managers are not coordinated.
5. Scheduling difficulties prolong the process — when multiple candidates are brought in for interviews, the time that it takes to schedule all of these interviews almost always stretches out the hiring process to the point where most top candidates will be lost because of the long time delay.
6. Managers act inappropriately during interviews – sometimes interviewers act inappropriately by taking phone calls during interviews, canceling and rescheduling interviews, appearing disorganized, or even asking illegal or silly questions. Such behavior is disrespectful but it may also scare away the top candidates. Candidates often say they rejected an offer because of the way that they were treated during the interview process.
7. Ghost interviews may frustrate — in order to meet legal requirements, external interviews are often held even though an internal candidate is already preselected. This wastes candidate time and adds to frustration.

In my experience, most interviewers have a cavalier attitude toward interviewing. That is partly because they will never know if a major mistake was made and a top candidate was never hired. However, if you 1) study and fully understand the potential problems; and 2) have some empathy for what the candidates are going through and how much they will suffer when rejected, the quality of interviews will automatically increase.

I’ve learned that mistakes can often be as good a teacher as success.

Jack Welch said that. It’s a good reminder of that old aphorism about learning from your mistakes.

What about those times when no one believes in you? When you fail when no one expected you to succeed anyway? Ted Turner has been there: ”All my life, people have said that I wasn’t going to make it.” Today, there’s no doubt that he’s made it, and like Welch, helped transform an industry.

How many successful “failures” get hired is anyone’s guess. Recruiters look for them; try to separate a winner from the others with interview questions like that classic, if overused, “Tell me about a time when you failed and what you learned.”

Good interviewers are looking for winners who have the character strength to learn why they failed, what to do next time to succeed, and who will then get back up on the horse.

But exactly what are the specific traits that lead one person to try again when others just give up?

Industrial and organizational psychologists have spent decades researching that very thing. Today, there are any number of tests from dozens of firms, purporting to help employers solve problems (retention being a key issue) or hire people who will perform just like the company’s current top performers.

There’s no doubt that these work — at least to some degree. Try, though, to describe the specific traits of success and you quickly find how elusive and complicated an exercise it is.

Months ago, the New York Times wrote a long article about the search for measuring and teaching success and character at an exclusive private school in The Bronx. The article cites the work of Prof. Angela Duckworth:

People who accomplished great things, she noticed, often combined a passion for a single mission with an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission, whatever the obstacles and however long it might take.

That quality she called “grit.”

Duckworth developed a short, 12-point grit test that proved to be a better indicator of success at West Point’s freshman summer training than the Army’s Whole Candidate Score.

Grit eventually became one of the seven key character traits the school determined were the most important underpinnings of success, and would be the traits the school would seek to foster: zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism, and curiosity.

“The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure,” the school’s headmaster told The Times, which closed the article with this observation: “Randolph (the headmaster) wants his students to succeed, of course — it’s just that he believes that in order to do so, they first need to learn how to fail.”

So the next time your hiring manager rejects all your candidates, and your hot prospects go to the competition, and the only seat you’re getting at the table is in the lunchroom, watch the video and think of what Oprah Winfrey once said:

Be the one thing you think you cannot do. Fail at it. Try again. Do better the second time. The only people who never tumble are those who never mount the high wire. This is your moment, own it.

The question is: why haven’t these tools and technologies made any significant difference?

If we look at other professions, it is clear that technology is not what makes the real difference. Take building as an example. Using only primitive hand tools, carpenters and masons from Roman times on crafted buildings that are enduring and emulated. The construction methods they used are studied and copied, while their tools gather dust in museums. Chinese accountants used abacuses to keep their books and sailors had glorified rowboats to explore the world’s oceans. It turns out that knowing how to do something is a far more critical skill than what tools are used to do it. Tools do not cause change and transformation, but methods and processes do.

The skills involved in building, accounting, or sailing are what make the difference between success and failure and often between life and death. Those who have improved the methods of building — the ones who figured out how to build skyscrapers and elevators — have contributed more to our progress than have the tools they used.

Technology saves labor and time and often lets us do things we could not do with our own muscles or brains, but it is not a substitute for core knowledge or for understanding how to do something or for human behavior.

And that is most likely why recruiting has not changed. While recruiters have many new tools, they are using traditional processes and methods without much innovation. This is most likely because, despite the hype about a talent shortage, there is really not a major problem finding talented people. If fact, most recruiters would be bored if their job became too easy — and many enjoy the hunt. Innovation usually occurs when there is an unsolvable problem or a major problem or a crisis, and recruiting has yet to run into any of those.

But what could be is still interesting. What would an efficient, updated recruiting process look like? Here are a few ideas that I think might work.

If anyone has already tried them or plans on giving them a try, I would like to hear from you in the comments section.

Idea 1: Stop any branding activities and focus totally on referrals. If you are in a nationwide or global firm with a known reputation, branding is a secondary concern. You already attract people because of your product or service brand and most likely have a pipeline of good candidates. Whenever you have an opening, just let employees know and ask them to use their networks to bring in any additional people you might need.

Referrals are free, fast, and effective. Incentives are not really needed and may actually cause employees to reach out to less-than-optimal candidates in the chance of getting whatever reward your offer. Instead give the employees who refer the best candidates, whether they are hired or not, a title such as “Preferred Referrer” or “Trusted Referrer,” and give anyone they refer priority consideration. This will incentivize others to become a titled referrer and raise the bar on the type of candidates you get.

Idea 2: Use online assessments and reduce interviews. Forget screening interviews, meet and greets, and extensive resume reviews. Instead invest in developing one or two screening tests that can be given online, are scored instantly, and provide both you and the candidate with feedback.

These kinds of screening tools can reduce your workload, improve the candidate experience, and result in much better candidates. The challenge is to develop the right tests that actually screen for the characteristics that are important for the job or for the organization.

There may need to be several tests for different positions or levels, but none of this is more costly or time-consuming than endless phone screens and interviews. I would go so far as to say that recruiters should never interview anyone in person. By implementing online screening and eliminating face-to-face interviews, you could potentially expect a recruiter to handle 20-50% more open requisitions.

There are many firms who can do this for reasonable costs, and the online testing and screening business is growing rapidly. Charles Handler, one of the other writers on ERE, has just released a book cataloging and commenting on most testing services available today.

Idea 3: Use video interviews heavily. Video interviews are a powerful and effective way to do more with less and improve legal compliance.

Video interviews are no longer taboo, and many candidates find them much more effective and less stressful than face-to-face interviews. Face-to-face interviews are expensive and time consuming and most of the time lead nowhere. Probably 75% of all interviews do not lead to an offer because of poor screening and poor candidate qualification. By conducting one live interview that is recorded, many people can view the same interview and evaluate the same responses. This leads to consistency, the lack of which is the greatest legal issue with multi-person, live interviews. By recoding the interview, there is proof that the interviews were done legally and that no discrimination occurred.

Idea 4: Train recruiters and hiring managers thoroughly on closing candidates. Make sure every recruiter and as many hiring managers as possible know how to identify potential acceptance issues and how to overcome objections.

Most acceptance failures are because someone — a recruiter or a hiring manager — did not pick up on signs that a candidate had reservations or issues that would be difficult to overcome: perhaps a reluctant spouse, a nagging doubt about the organization or the project, a desire to stay at their current employer, and so on.

It takes practice and training to notice these things and many recruiters are not well trained to not only notice the potential problem, but to deal with it. I often recommend that recruiters take a traditional sales training class where these skills are and the methods to overcome them are taught.

Idea 5: Communicate with mobile technology and via social media. Getting feedback to candidates regularly and fast is one of the ways to differentiate your organization from other and to get first-mover advantage with a candidate.

Most candidates today are more than willing to receive feedback and updates via their Facebook, LinkedIn, or other accounts. Email is fine, but experiment with other methods that cut down the time you spend and get the word out faster. Hiring managers should consider interviewing candidates using Skype or other tools. You could develop a mobile app to provide feedback or updates.

There are probably at least a dozen more ideas that you could try that would lower costs, improve speed, and provide higher quality candidates. But, then again, by doing it the way we always have, we ensure job security — for a while.

Think that’s an odd question? How about this one: What do you think of garden gnomes?

Glassdoor has 23 more questions just like those, compiled from thousands of interview questions posted to the employer review site during the last year by job seekers, some charmed, others perplexed, and some completely flummoxed by these kinds of oddball questions.

Pity the poor job seeker who did just what all the advice books and columnists advise — researched the company, read up on the industry, prepared for the inevitable “Tell me about your weaknesses” — only to be asked, “Please spell diverticulitis.”

The candidate didn’t get the job, but rated the interview “easy.” The relevance of the spelling test to the position as an Engineering Account Manager is hard to fathom.

However, more than a few of the questions that made the Glassdoor list evidence some connection with the underlying job. There’s the engineering candidate asked to solve this puzzle: “Given 20 “destructible” light bulbs (which break at a certain height), and a building with 100 floors, how do you determine the height that the light bulbs break?” And the candidate for a position as a demand planning analyst who was asked, “How many planes are currently flying over Kansas?”

Like Google’s famous (infamous?) interview questions, which are intended to elicit a candidate’s analytical skills, some of the Glassdoor questions fall into that category. What’s more, these kinds of oddball questions are becoming more common.

The Wall Street Journal says, “Weird interview questions have become a meme, like a joke or a viral video. It’s catchiness, rather than proof of their effectiveness, that keeps them in circulation at many companies.”

The notion, though, that the traditional interview doesn’t really yield a whole lot, is gaining mainstream currency. The Journal article describes a Harvard experiment in which observers who viewed 10 seconds of an interview had similar views of the candidate as did the interviewer themselves. Thus the effort to find alternatives.

In the Glassdoor collection, the planes over Kansas question seems intended to see how well a candidate for a job planning for consumer demand can analyze fuzzy situations. The breakable light bulb test tests both math skills and a candidate’s skill at engineering simplicity. (Incidentally, here’s a solution that takes only 14 bulbs.)

While questions like these have a connection to the jobs, and others are intended to test for fit, more than a few give every sign of being conjured by interviewers for no obvious good reason. The candidate with the garden gnome question described it, and others, during two days of interviews for a clerk position with Trader Joe’s as “bizarre.”

Even so, it wasn’t the questions that left the candidate with a sour taste for the experience. Instead, it was the classic case of failing to communicate. According to the review, even though promised a response, and even after repeated contacts, it wasn’t until weeks later that the candidate learned from an employee at the store that the position had been filled.

About that elephant, “open the door and tell it to go in.”

However, if you consider omitting information that could directly help the applicant successfully understand the process or land a job to be a lie, then there are quite a few areas where corporations are omitting the complete truth.

I call them “dirty little secrets” because insiders are well aware of them, while most applicants and business reporters are not. If you are a recruiter, you may find that this list includes over-generalizations, but in my experience, the problems in this list are certainly not unusual. My recommendation is that corporate leaders need to identify the areas where there is a distinct lack of openness, candor, and authenticity in the recruiting process and instead to proactively provide that information to applicants.

Recruiting Dirty Little Secrets

Here are a dozen areas where corporate recruiting could improve.

• The corporate black hole — because of recruiter overload, the volume of applicants, and technology problems, a resume submitted to a corporate career site may actually have a zero probability of being reviewed. In the industry, it can be referred to as “the black hole.”
• Looking for an excuse to drop you — there are books written about the need to focus on the positive aspects of individuals, but the entire screening process is often focused on finding a single error or lack of “fit” to quickly eliminate any applicant. If you are categorized as a job-jumper, you are unemployed, you have bad credit or Klout scores, you live in a distant zip code, or they find weird things on Facebook about you, you will be immediately rejected without knowing why. As a result, those who fail to make a single mistake during the process, rather than those who are the best, are the ones that are most likely to get hired.
• The rejection letter is designed to avoid complaints, not accuracy – if you actually get a rejection letter or e-mail, you should be aware that canned phrases like “we decided to move in another direction” or “there were other more qualified candidates” are pretested or lawyer-approved phrases that are designed to quiet you and keep you from making a follow-up inquiry. In many cases, the person sending the letter won’t even know the actual reason for your rejection.
• The interview process will likely be disjointed – applicants invited in for interviews routinely complain about disorganized interviewing, death by interview (having to go through 10 or more interviews), continually getting the same repeat questions from different interviewers, and having to return multiple times on different days. If the process seems poorly managed and disjointed, it is probably because it usually is. The overall corporate interview process is more often more whimsical than scientific and integrated.
• Some jobs are not really available to outsiders — although legal requirements may require an organization to post all open jobs, in some cases, the hiring manager has already predetermined that they will hire internally. There is no way for an external applicant to know when a job is “wired,” so applying can only lead to frustration and you will never know that you did nothing wrong.
• Some companies are blocked — if you work at a company covered by an informal “non-poaching” arrangement where two firms agree not to hire from each other, your chances of getting hired are near zero. Even though these agreements are illegal, they are secret, so your application will never be considered and you will never know why.
• Recruiters won’t know if you are a customer – you might think that being a loyal customer might help your application, but most corporations have no formal way of identifying an applicant as a customer.
• We will keep your resume on file (but we will never look at it again) – is certainly true that when they tell you that your rejected application will be “kept on file” it will be. However, it will be kept almost exclusively for legal reasons. The odds of a recruiter scanning through a corporate database of thousands of names in order to revisit a resume that has previously been rejected are miniscule. Unless a recruiter remembers you by name, assume that your resume has been dropped into the “black hole.”
• You will never know the real odds – although corporations regularly calculate the percentage of all applicants that are hired, you will never find that number on the corporate website. Although the lotto is required to publish your odds of winning, corporations keep it a secret. For some jobs, the odds are well over 1,000 to 1.
• Technology may eliminate you — and most large organizations, resumes are initially screened electronically. Unfortunately, if the software is not fine-tuned, the recruiter is not well-trained, or if you fail to use the appropriate keywords and phrases, no human will ever see your resume. In one test, only 12% of specially written “perfect resumes” made it through this initial step, although in theory, 100% should have made it.
• Busy people are forced to take shortcuts — during a down economy, the volume of qualified applicants can force recruiters and hiring managers to take shortcuts. For example, recently a coordinator asked the recruiter which one of a handful of resumes should be invited in for an interview. The response was “I don’t have time to look at them; just flip a coin and pick them.” Hiring managers are also known to make choices based on snap judgments or stereotypes that add a degree of randomness to getting a job.
• Don’t call us, we’ll call you — if an applicant is rejected at any stage, there is no formal process to help you understand where you need to improve in order to be successful when applying for a job in the future. Unlike in customer service, there is no 1 -800 number to call, and because of weak corporate documentation, recruiting might not actually know (beyond a broad reason) why you are rejected and how you could improve your chances.

Final Thoughts

Almost without exception, corporate recruiters are hard-working and ethical people. But most are too overworked to be able to take a step back and to formally assess where the recruiting process could be more open, honest, and transparent. Unfortunately, most of the current “candidate experience” efforts that I have seen are focused more on increasing courtesy and politeness rather than being significantly more open, honest, and transparent. If you would like to add to this list of “secrets,” add them to the comments section immediately following this article on www.ere.net.

It all depends on what we currently know and don’t know about the position we are recruiting. List the things we do know about the position to make filling in the gaps much easier when discussing them with the hiring manager.

Let’s take a look at some topics that we may to discuss depending upon the current relationship we have with the hiring manager.

If we have not worked with a hiring manager in the past, then we will need to discuss all of the following with them.

List of Competitors or Target Companies

Have a list of 3-5 competitors ready for the meeting, even if we aren’t sure those should be on the list or not. Sometimes a target company may just be a company that is local and not necessarily in the same industry.

• Discuss the competitor list with the hiring manager.
• Are any companies he/she has hired from in the past?
• Which, if any, companies listed would be most preferred for their next hire?
• Do they have any additional companies they would like to add to the list that are also highly desired for the target list?
• Also, very important, are there any companies on the list that he/she would not want to see candidates from?

*Note, oftentimes if a particular company has lower hiring standards and a hiring manager knows that already, it can save us from wasting time trying to present those candidates upfront.

Take 3-5 Profiles to the Meeting With You

Make sure the profiles you take offer a slight variety, to give you a hint of what the manager will bite on. Ask the hiring manager if they have 2-3 example profiles either from current employee resumes or someone who has left the company who had the right resume profile for you to compare your sourcing with.

• How flexible are they on the educational background?
• How flexible are they on the years of experience?
• Which skills are most important to them?

Required Skills & Educational Background

Ask questions around the skill/educational requirements to identify where this hiring manager is flexible.

• For example, if a requirement says MBA in Accounting, would they also consider someone with a master’s degree in Accounting?
• Or if the experience level says bachelor’s degree with 5-7 years of experience, would they consider someone with a master’s who has 3-4 years of experience?
• What are the absolute skill requirements you need in this person — e.g. software knowledge or industry knowledge?
• What is the minimum educational requirement?

Ask for Names of People

Oftentimes, a hiring manager has the name of at least one person in mind who they have either previously worked with, or know through others, or even know them as they are an internal candidate working in another group.

• Do you have any names from your past or current staff who you would like to be contacted about your opening?
• If so, do you know the name of at least one company they have worked for?
• Do you have any contact information or even a resume for any of these people?
• How do you know them or know of them? (This is key information you can use for your cold-call).

Inquire About Past Hires

Recycle what is known and then add to it. If a hiring manager has had success with particular resources in the past, then don’t discount them as a “repeat resource.”

• Where have your best hires come from in the past?
• Existing employee referral? Who?
• Did they come from networking or advertising from any organization or association?

Associations & Organizations

As staffing professionals, we need to ask the hiring manager for names of organizations and associations. We can definitely conduct our own research; however, there may be a particular group the hiring manager already knows. You need to get that information from them.

• Are you personally members of any professional organizations or associations? Which ones?
• Is there anyone from within those organizations who you would be interested in considering for your opening?
• Which company do you know they have worked for in the past?

Describe a Day in the Role of This Person

This will give you some understanding of the departmental culture to gauge the type of person who will “fit in” to this team.

• What are the day-to-activities this person will be involved in?
• What other areas of the company will this role interface with?
• Will this role require traveling? How much on average?

As a recap, below is a list of things you should know after an initial hiring manager intake meeting:

1. List of target companies
2. 2-3 example profiles
3. List of names to contact immediately
4. Resources for both advertising & sourcing
5. Blurb about the day-to-day of this role for both evaluating and selling to passive talent

As recruiters, we do not have the luxury of time to have gaps in our initial intake meeting with a hiring manager. Be organized and ready for both our advertising and sourcing efforts after the first meeting with the hiring manager. If we have an organized list of what we need ready for our meeting, we will save time in the long run being able to identify the right slate of candidates the first time around and fill the requisition more efficiently.

Job Failure and Job Success

My profession is studying jobs and designing tests/exercises/interviews that measure both skills and attitudes. Extensive job experience and exhaustive graduate studies have brought me into contact with hundreds of managers in large corporations. One of my first activities has always been to interview people, either in the job or supervising the job, and ask: “What are all the reasons employees succeed or fail in this job?” The following responses are typical:

Can’t manage time, Makes bad decisions, Can’t get along with people, Doesn’t seem to care, Can’t sell, Can’t lead others, Poor communicator, Not honest in dealing with people, Poor communication with customers, Poor planner, Doesn’t follow up, Can’t learn new information, Poor attitude, Doesn’t show initiative, Can’t see the forest for the trees, Doesn’t consider enough information, Never anticipates consequences, Has poor judgment, No tact, Not a “people person,” Ignores deadlines, Inflexible, Doesn’t like the work, Not a team player, Doesn’t support organizational goals, Can’t see the big picture, Can’t make a decision, Bad fit

Now that we know what people who supervise (and do) the job say, let’s look at how HR usually answers the same question:

No one helped them, Not given direction, Bad management, Never trained, Bad fit, De-motivated, Not really sure, Personality conflict …

(Yes, it’s usually a very short list.)

Notice the difference? Managers and job-holders cite about 80% skills-related items and 20% attitude-related ones. HR, on the other hand, almost always attributes performance to victimization. I think this is a pretty significant finding, don’t you? Now consider the following claims from the email vendor:

The vendor says:

• Our research shows 89% of bad hires are due to attitude such as coachability, emotional intelligence, and temperament.
• Source credibility for this data is attributed to articles in Fortune, IndustryWeek, and other newsstand magazines.
• Almost everything about job attitudes can be discovered from an interview.
• You can learn all your need to know by attending a 60-minute webinar.

On what planet?

Obviously the vendor’s body of research has been kept completely secret from the hiring-science community. Sure, if an employee arrives on the job with a full complement of skills, attitude can have a big effect. But, by completely ignoring ability, do you think this vendor is appealing to people who supervise the position, or the HR community? More to the point, if this product ignores 80% of job experts’ data, do you think their product can possibly be as good as they claim?

I’ve been on the end of many of interviews and can say with certainty most magazine authors are less-than-expert in the subject matter. In fact, they work hard to find simple sound-bite answers to complex questions, seldom caring about hard research because it makes for dry and uninteresting reading. In short, articles published in mainstream media are a better indicator of clever PR than expert peer-reviewed research. If you want opinions, visit the newsstand or bookstore. If you want facts, read unbiased hiring research studies.

Measure attitude using only an interview? Sure. For one thing, everyone knows a smart candidate can dance rings around a typical interviewer. For another, interviewers neither have the training nor the experience to be personality psychologists. Anyway, abundant literature (I know… booooring!) shows clinical evaluations (e.g. trained psychological experts) are inaccurate predictors of job success. You won’t find this information in the WSJ or HBR because it is not “catchy.”

Hard Facts

In my experience, there are thousands of training-program vendors, thousands of junk-science test vendors, and a few hundred professional selection tool vendors. Seldom will you find both training and professional selection technology coexisting — the technology and philosophy is totally different.

If a vendor’s website talks all about training, it’s a good idea to pass. You see, developing a professional hiring test takes more than drafting a few questions. It takes months of editing and statistical analysis to demonstrate it actually predicts some aspect of job performance. BTW: This would be a good time to revisit the manager’s succeed-or-fail list.

If you are responsible for making hiring decisions, be careful of self-promoting vendors entering the hiring and selection marketplace. Professionally, I never found one sufficiently qualified in the science of test development to develop a product that will eliminate dead-wood candidates. And believe me, if you use junk-science tests, you will learn the hard way they don’t work as advertised. Furthermore, all that dead-wood will be on your payroll.

This warning is true for all products that suggest they can teach you to analyze a candidate’s motivations, use self-reported personality surveys to match performance with a data base of job titles, predict job performance without actually measuring skills, or use any other method that is less than comprehensive or validated. From a legal perspective, the user, not the vendor, is always responsible for test use.

I have been accused by some of promoting “assessments?” Get real. It’s semantics: Interviews, resume reviews, application blanks, surveys, tests, sourcing, and so forth, all all assessments. Assessment is just another word for test, and, valid tests are useful tools for evaluating qualifications. If you don’t have proof your test/interview/assessment predicts job performance for your job in your organization, then you will assuredly turn away good people and hire useless ones.

Why should you worry? Experts estimate poor employment decisions cost about six month’s salary, not to mention perpetuating HR’s professional reputation for quick, ineffective solutions to complex problems. Forget vendor hype. Simple, one-step hiring solutions are nonsense. They don’t deliver.

Cpl. Todd Green, left, and Pfc. Kevin Adams on the South China Sea

Unlike a civilian resume that often culminates in the highest level of responsibility to date, the military resume is often a collection of seemingly unrelated experiences and must, therefore, be considered together as a whole.

Below is a list of questions (reprinted from my new book) you can select from, to assist you in understanding the candidate’s background and convey your interest in the world from which they are coming.

General opening questions can build rapport and sense where the individual is in his or her transition from military service to civilian employment. Begin with “I know leaving the military can be a big transition . . .”

• How is it going, separating from military service?
• How has the adjustment been?
• What has been the biggest surprise about the civilian workplace?
• What opportunities are you looking forward to taking advantage of as a civilian employee?
• What challenges do you foresee as a new civilian employee?

For each job over the past 10 years, ask:

• How would you describe this position in layman’s terms?
• What was your primary mission in this job?
• What did it take to accomplish this mission?
• What were the key activities you performed, and in what circumstances/conditions?
• What people or resources were you responsible for in this role?
• What were the greatest challenges in the role?
• What is an example of a time that everything went as planned?

1. What was your contribution?
2. What did you learn from the experience?
3. How did you incorporate what worked and what you learned?

• What is an example of a time that things did not go as planned?

1. What went wrong?
2. What did you do, and what was your contribution?
3. What did you learn from the experience?
4. What did you change or do differently as a result of this experience?

• What aspects of this role or job would you like to find in a civilian position?
• What aspects of this role or job would you prefer not to perform in a civilian position?

General questions to ask include:

• How would you approach a situation in which… (describe something “typical” of the job the candidate is applying for; avoid irrelevant questions that may come across as setups)?
• What kinds of things did you coordinate and accomplish in the community (e.g., community social events, charitable projects, leadership roles)?
• Looking across your recent military work experiences, what key knowledge, skills, abilities, and experiences would you say are most valuable?
• Setting aside the specific job you were required to do, what activities do these knowledge, skills, abilities, and experiences prepare you to do?

The experience was exceptional.

I was impressed with the high level of professionalism.

Very professional interviews that provided me an environment in which I could be myself.

It made me want to work there even more.

Let’s hope that’s what your candidates are saying about your organization. Let’s hope that’s what they’re saying about your recruiting processes. But they may be saying stuff like this:

The worst and most unprofessional experience I’ve had.

You’ve yet to follow up with me.

The interviewer had absolutely no idea of what the position called for.

The reality is that candidates are probably saying things that cover both ends of the spectrum about your organization. What’s important is whether the first set of statements is more prevalent, or the second set is – and what you are doing about it.

There’s a lot of focus in our industry on finding and engaging passive candidates, developing a strong employment brand, using social media, and building talent communities, but a poor candidate experience can derail and minimize the impact of each of those efforts. My company did something about the problem.

We’re going to be talking more about this at the Spring Expo (March 28-30 in San Diego), but first things first. I think we’ve all heard of the so called “career site black hole,” and I have talked to many a candidate who has a story about moving through a company’s interview process, moving all the way to a final stage, only to never hear from the company again one step short of the finish line. Less anecdotally, CareerXroads publishes a survey every year about how a “mystery candidate” is treated by the top 100 Companies to work for as listed by Fortune. The results are eye opening. It reports that 79% of candidates who apply to a position expect that there will be some sort of feedback, but only 19% of the top 100 companies to work for let the mystery candidate know they were not going to get the job. The apply-process itself has become a barrier between job seekers and organizations, with only 48% of the organizations in the study having a process that takes less than five minutes to complete.

Anyhow, we came out of a two-day recruiting meeting last spring with a long list of to-dos, and at the top of the list was to improve the candidate experience. The key for us was developing a “Candidate Commitment,” and then develop processes to support the commitment. Our commitment is quite simple actually, and focuses on four main areas that are part of the candidate experience: Education, Application, Screening, and Interviewing.

Education: we have used social media channels, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Tumblr (blogging tool) to provide candidates with a closer look into our organization. We make a point not to use these channels as another way to just promote our job postings, but rather to provide content that a candidate may not find on our corporate career site, such as recruiting team activities, corporate events, relevant business news, candidate tips, and so forth. We’ve used video to provide a more in-depth look at some of the functional areas we do a lot of hiring for, as well as to provide a look at the lighter side of our culture.

Application: we worked with our ATS partner to reconfigure our “apply now” process. Now, we only require three fields to complete our process — first name, last name, email address — the minimum it takes to create a profile. Amazingly, almost every candidate includes a resume as well, but you get the point: we went back to the bare basics, and the result is a process that takes less than two minutes to complete for a first-time candidate, less for returning candidates.

In addition to improving the candidate experience, it also improved the ROI for our job board investments. I know it is not a very hip thing to admit these days, but the boards are actually still quite useful for us and an important part of our overall recruitment strategy, resulting in about 19% of our hires. Have you compared the data you get from your job board partners regarding traffic sent to your site with what actually lands in your ATS lately? I was shocked by the drop-off rates, and when I talked to two major boards recently about things, they informed me that our numbers were actually pretty good. Both stated that anywhere from a 50%-80% drop-off rate was typical! No wonder the job boards are talked about so negatively. Our industry may only be realizing 20%-50% of their potential because of the hurdles we create to completing our process.

Screening: we committed to following up with all of our candidates in a timely manner. For us that is 1-20 days. This may be a phone conversation or a “thanks but no thanks” email template, but we do not want anyone to experience the black hole. You may be able to commit to something quicker than 20 days, or longer than 20 days, but the point is to set an expectation and then meet it. It is fairly easy to develop strong communication templates. Every commercial ATS out there has functionality that allows you to send mass messages to your candidates that feel at least semi-personalized.

Interviewing: we work closely with our hiring managers to ensure there is a solid interview plan in place, and that the interview will be conducted in a balanced manner, allowing the candidate to interview us in addition to the information we seek from them.

Three weeks ago I had the privilege to accept one of the first annual “Candidate Experience Awards” on behalf of the Sage NA Recruiting Team. In talking with many of the other winning participants, clearly everyone recognized that we all have a long way to go. I am hopeful that the industry as a whole embraces the challenge to improve, and I am particularly excited to compete for the award again next year.

So anyone wielding such a powerful tool should be certain of its validity and of their skill in using it. The EEOC considers the interview to be a selection test, and requires that it be validated before use. Yet, I would guesstimate that few interviews are validated at all, and the ones that are may not be delivered consistently or by a competent, trained interviewer.

Research has consistently shown that the typical unstructured interview is pretty unreliable. It does not consistently ensure that the most qualified person gets a job or that the person will perform any better than another candidate chosen with less care. In all the studies that I have looked at, the validity of choosing candidates by only using an unstructured interview process is about the same as simply picking someone at random.

Interviews are rarely done consistently from interviewer to interviewer or from candidate to candidate. Yet, we typically consider all the interview inputs for a candidate as if they were done in the same way. Therefore we are comparing apples to oranges, and the hairs we split and the time we spend agonizing over a small detail or a particular answer to an interview question is wasted.

No wonder that candidates often roll their eyes at the absurdity of the interview process.

Assessing candidates is highly subjective, and is based on whatever assumptions (prejudices) the recruiter or hiring manager has, their mood, and the chemistry between them and the candidate. Even factors such as physical appearance, tone of voice, or time of day can impact the interview.

I often ask recruiters to think about what would happen if they selected two candidates for a job who each had the same qualifications and who had known the questions that were going to be asked and had prepared the same answers. If another recruiter interviewed them, would they both receive the same score on the interview, as they should?

DDI and other respected selection organizations offer excellent tools to improve the reliability and validity of interviews, and everyone who does interviewing should be trained in these methods and use them consistently. These well-constructed, validated, and structured interviews given by a trained interviewer can increase reliability by a significant amount, yet they are still only a little more reliable than simply picking a “winner” at random from your final pool.

Carefully constructed interviews, where the questions are directly related to measureable skills, competencies, or past experiences, take a lot of time to prepare and, to be most effective, have to be delivered in a similar way (ideally exactly the same way) to each candidate for the job. This alone would eliminate most of the interviews I have had personally. From my experience as a recruiter and candidate, these rambling, unstructured interviews were far more common. The interviewer ranged over a wide variety of topics, dipping into my resume here and there to ask a question or ask me to validate something they already expected and wanted to hear. In most cases, I could manipulate the interview in subtle ways to make sure my strengths were showcased. In other words, a sophisticated candidate can game the system in many ways to tilt the deck in their favor.

Another Way

On the other hand, there are many tools available to recruiters that could improve their ability to reliably select and recommend candidates that have the depth of skill and aptitude the positions calls for. These tools can save endless amounts of time and free up a recruiter to spend more time sourcing, selling, and ensuring that the candidates are informed and engaged.

These tools include a multitude of screening and testing tools: validated realistic job previews, simulations, aptitude. and skills tests, as well as simple things like asking candidates to actually do something relevant to the job: edit an article, write an advertisement, critique a circuit diagram, locate an error, etc.

Internships are another great way to assess a candidate’s fit into an organization as well as their motivation, interest, and ability – both professionally and to work within a team. While they can be difficult to set up and take time, once they are underway an organization has an almost steady stream of good candidates under assessment.

And still another excellent way to get feedback on past performance and character is to conduct a reference check. Using a tool such as Checkster, you can get anonymous and wide-ranging feedback from many people who have worked with the candidate.

I know many of you use other tools in your evaluation, but I also know you always conduct interviews — often many of them. If the interviews are used to establish a human connection, market the organization or position to the candidate, and are not the primary source of gathering the information to make a decision, I have no issue with them. When they are used as a selection tool — and particularly when we are proud of them as a selection tool — I get concerned. There are many better way to select candidates than the interview, and we should be using them more and more.

Let’s forget for a moment the hundreds of applicants who apply for a particular position, with a small percentage of them qualified. The candidate experience is not going to be positive for the unqualified applicants, and that’s okay. If they had taken seriously the minimum qualifications listed on the job posting, they would have realized they didn’t have a chance.

And let’s even forget those applicants who are qualified, but don’t have a strong enough background to be considered for an interview.

What we are talking about, however, is the candidate experience for those individuals who get invited to the company for an onsite interview. That’s where we have a problem. And it’s a big one.

As HR and recruiting professionals, we’re the face of the company for potential employees. We want to, and typically do, make a strong impression on leading job candidates. We politely and respectfully do screening interviews. We carefully match the hiring manager’s criteria with candidate skills. We provide recommendations on strongest applicants. We work closely with finalists to coordinate days and times for them to meet and interview everyone necessary within the company. We juggle internal calendars. We make follow-up calls. We prepare and distribute interview schedules. For some candidates we make travel arrangements and hotel accommodations. And we provide a welcoming smile and positive attitude when the candidate walks in the door.

And then we forget about them.

What? Forget about them? Well, not intentionally. But many times we do. And that leaves a much stronger and lasting negative impression on the candidate than all the other positive efforts we have made up until this point.

Think about your experience with job finalists who have been invited to onsite interviews. How many of them have you left hanging after the interview was over? How many have sent follow-up e-mails or letters thanking you for the opportunity to interview, and reiterating their qualifications? How many have called to follow up on the job status, never to hear another word from you.

Don’t get me wrong. There are many, many good recruiters, both internal and external. There are a few HR departments that put an emphasis on the candidate experience. Some do follow up with final candidates, even when the news is not positive. They share whatever information they can, from telling a candidate they were not selected for the position to telling candidates the position has been put on hold, or an internal candidate was selected. Sometimes they relay that the hiring manager has been delayed in making a final decision and that they simply wanted to keep the job finalists in the loop. That’s great communication.

But a great percentage of others leave the candidates in the dark. Never another word.

Is that fair to the candidate after all the effort he or she put into the interview process? Is that right to ignore a job finalist whom you have respectfully treated up to this point? Is this the way you want to treat someone who you feel may be a great future employee of your company, but perhaps just wasn’t the ideal fit for this position? If you were that candidate, wouldn’t you want to know at least a little bit of additional information? Particularly after the many hours you’ve invested in attaining that position?

Candidates understand that only one person can get the job. And they can readily accept when they are told that someone else was selected for the position. But not to say a word? That’s just not right. It takes a small amount of time on your behalf to do that final communication, but it can leave a lasting impact on the candidate. And a critical final impression of you personally, as well as the company brand.

Why wouldn’t you do that final communication?

The experience reminded me how much responsibility hiring entities have to maintain the confidentially of the executives they interview. There are at least five areas where exerting caution is imperative.

The first is illustrated in the above story. Talking about candidates in public may cause undue vulnerability. While this may seem obvious to ERE readers, it may be so obvious that we forget our clients often need cautionary reminders. External to the company, someone from the press, the candidate’s current staff, their boss, a customer, or a variety of other interested parties could be within ear shot. Regardless of the motivations, many categories of eavesdroppers could benefit by exposing the candidate’s employment discussions. More than likely, that exposure would damage the candidate’s relationship within their current employer and adversely impact their career within that company.

There’s risk within hiring entities as well. One time, an employee within a hiring organization was friends with one of the external candidates. The current employee learned of a competing external candidate through the hiring executive’s imprudence and leaked that candidacy to the press. The exposure caused the individual to withdraw from the search; the friend lost a competitor, and the hiring executive lost his lead prospect.

The second and third areas of risk have to do with visibility of candidates’ resumes. Companies often make the mistake of putting executive candidate resumes in applicant tracking systems. Once a resume is in an ATS, it is visible to a host of people: human resources, hiring managers, varieties of recruiters. Rarely do these constituents understand or remember the sensitivities typical of passive executive candidates. I have known staff recruiters to call the office of an executive whose resume they found in their system, and announce to the receptionist that they have the executive’s resume and would like to discuss a job opportunity with him or her. These risks can be mitigated by tracking executive recruiting activity within a separate, restricted-access system; there are several specific to the profession that serve our needs better than traditional ATSs.

Third, limit the distribution of executive candidates’ resumes. Too often, when debriefing after a series of interviews, I learn that candidates saw the resumes of competitors on the interviewer’s desk. When feasible, distribute biographies instead of resumes during the search process — they do not scream “candidate” as loudly. Additionally, when sharing executive resumes, remove names and contact information. Not only does it add a layer of anonymity, but it also hinders others from calling the candidates without your knowledge.

The final two areas of caution have to do with visibility of candidates during the interview process. If your company requires visitors to sign a guest ledger, work with the receptionist or security to ensure that each of your candidates signs a blank ledger which is then removed from the stack of other sign-in sheets. This is especially important if you have multiple candidates interviewing for the same job on the same day. Further, limit your candidates’ time in the reception area. Otherwise, subsequent visitors may see your candidate’s sign-in. Additionally, I’ve known employees to scan visitor sign-ins to glean company intel; segregating executive candidate visitor registrations limits exposure to others both internally and externally.

Lastly, limit your candidates’ vulnerability during interviews. Refrain from hosting their meals in the company cafeteria or the company’s favorite nearby restaurant. Also, instead of having candidates move from one interview to another, keep them stationary (in a room that has opaque walls and doors) while your interviewers go to the candidates. This limits the candidates’ visibility to other employees in your company hallways. Also, if you are interviewing more than one candidate for the same search on the same day, make sure the interviews are in different areas, and the candidates use different dining and comfort facilities. Further, if they are overnighting, house them in separate hotels and recommend different restaurants to them. Each of these cautions will decrease the likelihood that your candidates encounter each other during your interview processes.

The bottom line is that you never know who knows who, you never know who is listening or watching, and you never know who is friend or foe with accordant agendas within the political and competitive realms of corporations. Exercising these basic cautions will help protect your reputation as well as those of your candidates’ and their interest in continued engagement with your company.

These interview questions are used by permission from Job Interview Skills 101, the Course You Forgot to Take For New Grads and College Students.

Comment on any, or add your own interview questions to share in the comments section.

1. Tell me about a time when you were a member of a great team. What role did you play in making the team great?
2. Tell me about a time when you were given a task to accomplish without any direction.
3. Tell me about a time when you had to work with someone you did not get along with.
4. Tell me about a time when you felt that a decision was unfair. How did you handle it?
5. Tell me about a time when someone asked you for assistance outside the parameters of your job. What did you do?
6. Tell me about a time you had to multitask.
7. Tell me about a time when you were creative in solving a problem.
8. Tell me about a time when you were the leader of a team and the team disagreed with your decision. How did you handle it?
9. Tell me about a time when you were a team leader and had to mediate with members who disagreed with each other.
10. Tell me about a project that did not go well.
11. Tell me about a time that you worked hard to accomplish something but didn’t.
12. Tell me about a time when you suggested a better way to do something.
13. Tell me about a time when you had to handle conflict within your group.
14. You are a team member and you disagree with an important decision that you believe will have a negative impact on the project. How will you proceed?
15. Tell me about a time when someone told you that you had made an error. Describe how you would react and what you would say in your defense.
16. You are a new employee at our firm and I have asked you to speak to a group of 10 employees. What would you talk about and what would you say?
17. You are part of a team working on a project with a one-week deadline. The team leader does not seem to be on top of things and you are worried about reaching the deadline. What do you do?
18. How do you handle a crisis? Describe one that you handled well.
19. Describe one that you didn’t handle well and what you would have done differently.
20. It’s five o’clock on Friday and your supervisor gives you an assignment that needs to be finished by 8:00 am Monday morning. You have plans to be away for the weekend. What do you do?
21. Describe a situation that was a great learning experience.
22. Describe a challenge you faced in school and how you handled it.
23. Describe an experience that you felt was rewarding.
24. Describe a situation where you were mentored.
25. Describe a situation where you were given feedback on your performance that wasn’t what you had hoped for.
26. Describe a situation where you resolved a problem.
27. What would your last boss/manager say about you?
28. How would your co-workers describe you?
29. What do you think is the best part of working in teams?
30. What do you think is the worst part of working in a team?
31. How do you define “work ethic”? How would you describe yours?
32. How do you make decisions?
33. What type of people do you like to work with?
34. What motivates you?
35. Give me 10 adjectives to describe yourself.
36. How do you like to be managed?
37. Tell me about your best manager. Why do you consider them the “best”?
38. Tell me about your worst manager. Why do you consider them the “worst”?
39. What book are you reading now?
40. What books have you read about leadership?
41. Describe your ideal job.
42. What was the most creative thing you have ever done?
43. What are you most proud of?
44. How do you handle stress at work?
45. What would you liked to have done more of in your last internship?
46. What would you like to have done less of in your last internship?
47. Why did you choose your last job/internship?
48. Why did you choose your school?
49. If you could have done anything different during your college career, what would it have been?
50. What are your short- and long-term career goals?
51. In what areas would you like to develop further?
52. What skills did it take to succeed in your internships?
53. What do you know about our company?
54. What makes you the best candidate?
55. Why should we hire you?
56. What made you apply for this job?
57. Where else are you interviewing?
58. How would you describe client satisfaction?
59. What do you think is most important in great customer service?
60. What will you do if you don’t get this job?

He traveled around the world, visiting different offices and meeting with their recruiting staff at each location. As the head of talent acquisition, during each visit, he’d meet with recruiters in the lobby and ask, “What would we have to do during the interview day that would guarantee candidates would never return our phone calls?”

After posing such a question, he was often met with bewilderment, blank stares, and furrowed brows. Not surprisingly, ‘Is this guy serious?’ was written on most of the faces he confronted.

As it turns out, he was serious, and his question made perfect sense. You see, often in life it is easier to state what you don’t want, rather than what you do. It’s definition by elimination, and more often than not, it just comes easier. His approach was shrewd and guided the company’s recruiters to a complete deconstruction of what could go wrong from start of the interview process to its end. The list flowed:

• Book candidates in sub-standard hotels
• Leave them stranded at the airport sans ground transportation
• Provide transportation, but pick them up late
• Have interviewers wander into the interview after their scheduled time
• Have interviewers who are not prepared for the interview
• Leave the candidate alone in a corner or a conference room between interviews
• Ask them terrible questions during the interview
• Take them out for a rushed lunch at a fast-food restaurant

You get the picture.

The presenter explained that this approach facilitated a very detailed discussion and, more importantly, an actionable strategy for interview process dos and don’ts. The discussion participants developed a highly choreographed plan for a positive candidate experience (a topic I’m giving a workshop on at the annual ERE conference in Florida this fall). Before they knew it, it became standard practice to book candidates in quality rooms at the best hotels, and they were driven to the office by way of the most scenic city routes only. The end result was a fantastic candidate experience in which candidates felt valued.

When reassessing your own organization’s interview strategies, don’t be afraid to ask the same question. It’s worth moving past the blank stares to help define best practices for your company. You might also find that this approach will permeate and improve the whole recruiting process, as it did for the spirit and wine company.

The intention is good, for we all know that the more feedback one can gain on a candidate, the better. And this truth was discovered a long time ago. In 1906, for instance, Englishman Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, stumbled upon an intriguing contest while attending a livestock fair. An ox was hanging on display, and the visitors at the fair were invited to guess the animal’s weight after it was slaughtered and dressed. Nearly 800 participated, but not one person hit the exact mark: 1,198 pounds. Galton’s insight was to examine the mean of these guesses from independent people in the crowd. Astonishingly, the mean of those 800 guesses was 1,197 pounds —  accurate by a fraction of one percent.

Today, this phenomenon of having more accuracy collectively than any single individual is called collective intelligence, and the field is booming, as research has shown over and over again that estimations coming from many people, in the right circumstances, lead to results closer to the truth. This is because the extremes are essentially cancelled out. That is why it is often referred to as a statistical phenomenon.

Because of collective intelligence, organizations that try to stay on the cutting edge of information and technology think they should interview more individuals, because more is better.

This isn’t always true.

An article called “How social influence can undermine the wisdom of the crowd effect” discusses how we as social beings are subject to influences that will often make people revise their estimations and affect the accuracy of the outcome. In their research, the authors show how the “social influence effect” — such as learning that an interviewer, or your boss, favors a candidate — diminishes the diversity of the group without improving its accuracy. The experiments conducted by the authors tested objective, verifiable data and controlled for social conformity biases.

The group subject to social influence became actually less reliable in guiding the decision-makers. As the group is influenced to head in one direction, and the range of options are reduced, the supreme perverse effect is the “confidence effect,” or overconfidence, as everyone reaches an agreement although the decision may be wrong.

This can translate into a hiring manager who relies on 10 very keen interviewers being supremely confident in their decision and exhibiting a high level of certainty while the accuracy, in reality, isn’t improved a bit.

Ultimately, this very fascinating research shows that even though we tend to believe that debating a decision will lead to a better choice, this assumption fails to take into consideration the fact that no one is immune to social influence.

In an interview debrief that organizations tend to perform by phone or in person, the most vocal person usually impacts the outcome and the decisions of all the others. All those involved will eventually merge toward a common assessment and the confidence of the group will be raised. The group will then make a decision feeling very certain they have made a good choice, but a single answer is not the stamp of accuracy.

To prevent this, ask for feedback on the rating of the candidates before any discussion starts. This can be done online before the meeting or even at the meeting before it starts. If you are leading the hiring committee and are leaning toward a particular judgment, write it down rather than consciously or unconsciously leading the group in the direction you wish to take.

The next time you debate the hiring or promotion of an individual, think about Francis Galton and the ox and ask yourself if the decision has been truly driven by diverse feedback or the views of one strong minded, vocal individual.

Yes, technology is wonderful — when used effectively. That’s the caveat. Too many people have just jumped on this bandwagon without evaluating how, when, and why they should be using various technologies in business. It has become so pervasive that some of the tried and true methods of doing business have fallen by the wayside. Let’s look at a partial list of some of the technologies used in recruiting:

Applicant Tracking Systems: Companies need these systems to help manage their candidate pool. There are so many out there to choose from. Where do you start? Do you need it to integrate with payroll and HR? Why? Why not? Do you know the right questions to ask so you don’t end up with a product that doesn’t suit your needs or is so complex that your employee compliance is low? There is one very well-known company out there today whose product I’ve yet to hear one positive thing about from any recruiter using it. Remember, just because you recognize the company’s name does not mean it’s a product you should buy or that it will suit your requirements. More bells and whistles are not necessarily a good thing.

Corporate Careers Page: How many of you have considered the pros and cons of requiring applicants to register on your careers page? Are you thinking, “We want them to register so we can have their information.” or “We’d like candidates to feel comfortable coming to our careers page”? The first is about you. The second is about the candidate. I’m going to assert you want them to register so you’ll have them in your database for the times you need to search out candidates who have already applied. Probably the most significant concern for applicants is confidentiality. I know if I was confidentially looking around to see what types of jobs were available I wouldn’t want to register for some company’s website. There’s just no guarantee of confidentiality without knowing who may be looking at my personal information. Call me paranoid, but it’s not something that gives me the warm and fuzzies.

I popped onto a few sites today and one F50 company allows you to search everything they have open globally without registering for their site. Bravo for them. I looked at several postings and there wasn’t one that didn’t have at least one typo. Do you think the CEO would be happy about this? This is a reflection not only on the head of their recruiting organization but on the company as a whole. Are they this sloppy when it comes to building and selling software? This also tells me a lot about their recruitment department.

Twitter: Are you spamming out tweets about open reqs or really thinking about the best way to use 140 characters? How can you capture someone’s attention and have them take notice? How many followers do you have? Are your followers really reading your tweets and potentially forwarding them to their friends? Have you really thought out your Twitter strategy and how you should be using it for it to be most effective?

LinkedIn: Are you using LinkedIn in the same way as Twitter? Are you sending the same messages to LinkedIn and Twitter? Do you connect with people in order to have quality connections, or just for quantity? If you’re one of those people who connects to any Tom, Dick and Harry, I’d assert you don’t have a strategy. More is not neccessarily better. I know some of you will think I’m an idiot for saying it, but LinkedIn is NOT about seeing who has the most connections.

How is your profile? Is it professional? Is it complete? Is there a professional picture? If you have a picture of you with your kids, at a bar, at a sports event, etc., put it on Facebook. Does is look like a resume or is it conversational in nature while showing your strengths, accomplishments, responsibilities, etc? Does it have real content for someone to see what you’ve done and what you’re currently doing? If you were a candidate and read your profile, are you someone you’d want to work with or connect to?

How are you using LinkedIn to source candidates? Are you sending emails to people or picking up the phone? Why? Why not? People are busy. Have you really thought about what to put in an email or voicemail so that there’s a higher probability of a response?

Video Interviewing Applications: There are a growing number of these and it feels like I’ve evaluated all of them. What I can tell you is that there’s only one I like, and this is becasuse it can be customized to suit each client’s needs. Most of the apps out there now have limited abilities or a set of questions they give you to ask in an interview. I know that wouldn’t work for any of my clients. Can a third party be on the call and be invisible? Sometimes it benefits my hiring interviewers to have me on the call and invisible and sometimes they want me to be part of the interview.

Make sure you are clear about your requirements before you spend money on this “now” technology.

Facebook: Are you posting to your company page? Your personal page? Is it the same strategy as Twitter and LinkedIn? Do you have “friends” of the page who are going to see what you’ve posted?

Telephone: You may be thinking that the phone isn’t high tech. You’re right in one respect but sorely lacking in another. I could, and probably should, write a post about the art of the telephone. How are your phone skills? Do you say “um, uh, you know” a lot to fill space? Shame on you if you do. Some people may think I’m a dinosaur, but I firmly believe there is no other technology more important than the phone (your oral skills). The phone is where you get to know people, build relationships, and gain trust. No other technology can do this for you. Not even lots of LinkedIn recommendations.

I’d like you to look at the examples I’ve given and put a percentage of use to each. Are you using some more than others? Why? Is the percentage you spend using one or two far outweighing the others? Is that large percent of time you use a particular technology returning that amount in candidates? In other words, if you’re spending half your time in your ATS, is that generating half your candidates and are they qualified? If not, you need to reevaluate your processes and procedures to align with your company’s strategies.

The big takeaway here is that no technology will fix a process that doesn’t work, is ineffective, and/or lacking quality recruiters to implement it. Technology must be looked at as an adjunct to enhance a quality, well-thought-out process. It is really nothing more than a tool to help you do your job.

I really want to hear your thoughts on this. My request is that you answer any or all of these questions in the comments sections (or you can send me an email directly) and ask any other questions you’d like to see addressed. This way I’ll be able to write a follow up to this post. Thanks in advance for your participation.

Famously lampooned for it, Barbara Walters once asked Katherine Hepburn what kind of tree she wanted to be. (To be fair, Hepburn prompted it by declaring she wanted to be a tree.) Recruiters, however, have asked far more peculiar questions.

One job seeker reported being asked, “If you won the lottery tomorrow, how would you spend your free time?” (How would you answer? Personally, I’d first ask, “How much?” A mere million isn’t what it used to be.)

At the end of last year, Glassdoor offered a list of 25 of the weirdest interview questions of 2010 (and answers suggested by readers). Glassdoor is the website where job seekers, employees, and former employees rate companies and their management.

On the list was this one from Amazon: “If you had 5,623 participants in a tournament, how many games would need to be played to determine the winner?”

Another one, from Boston Consulting, asked the candidate to “Explain [to] me what has happened in this country during the last 10 years.”

Now, Glassdoor offers another view of the interview process, culling its thousands of company reviews for those rated by job seekers — successful or not — as the most difficult.

Both Amazon and Boston Consulting made the list of the top 25. Candidates who went through an interview with either company thought it tough, but few considered it negatively. And for those who landed a job, working there is at least an OK experience. (Glassdoor has reviewers rate a company numerically, from 1/very dissatisfied, to 5/very satisfied.)

McKinsey & Company, the global management consulting firm, was considered to have the toughest interview process of all of Glassdoor’s thousands of company ratings. Interviewers there typically throw candidates such curve balls as: “Tell me why the number of car accidents reported to insurance companies is declining.”

Yet, 64 percent of the candidates consider the experience positive. One candidate described it this way: “They are very thorough and put a variety of interesting and challenging scenarios forward for immediate response. If you’re not confident or comfortable with your skill sets and problem solving abilities, this is not the place for you.”

The most negative interviews, according to the reviewers, are at Cree, an LED development and manufacturing firm. It ranked third on the list for difficulty, but with 42 percent of the candidates calling it a negative experience, it topped the list for that category. Only 19 percent, the lowest of all 25 companies ranked, considered the interview experience positively.

Besides asking technical questions and others like “How many barbers do you need in a city of 1 million,” several reviewers — including some who got job offers — thought the interviewers rude, arrogant, or both.

Even in shops at the top of their game in recruiting, onboarding itself can make or, as was the case with Morgan Hoogvelt’s friend Herb, break the budding relationship.

“Most corporate onboarding programs are designed from the HR administrator’s perspective,” wrote Dr. John Sullivan in a 2008 article on the subject. That’s one reason why HR vendors have focused on automating the form filling part. That’s transactional onboarding.

The few that offer more — Kenexa is one that stands out here — incorporate social components and cultural acclimation into the onboarding program via externally accessible intranets. The best employers provide the new hire facility maps, profiles of their new colleagues, and welcome messages among other information.

But in the end, as Kevin Wheeler wrote, “a manager who takes time to discuss issues with a new employee, who shows concern over that person’s assimilation, and who knows what the employee can do and wants to do, will make wiser decisions and build loyalty over time.”

Now PeopleAnswers, the assessment firm, is introducing a behavioral onboarding component to its assessment software suite. It’s one of those tools that make sense the minute you see it. In a crisp, direct handful of paragraphs it gives a manager guidance into how best to work with the new employee and make their first few months productive.

As Gab Goncalves, PeopleAnswer’s president and CEO, told me recently, behavioral onboarding talks to the manager about what to expect and what to look for in working with the new hire. Equally important, it offers advice on working with the new employee.

The analysis and the guidance is derived from the PeopleAnswers assessment the employee completed during the pre-hire recruiting process. PeopleAnswers assessments measure dozens of traits and behaviors, scoring them against the results of the company’s top performers in the same job.

Most employers who administer pre-employment assessments typically use them as a screening tool. It’s another data element for recruiters and hiring managers to consider. PeopleAnswers assessments are no exception. The company’s signature thumb up/thumbs down tells recruiters at a glance who the best fits are.

However, the traits and behaviors that result in those recommendations provide insights into each individual that can be used by managers to better understand the specific traits and behaviors of the new hire.

Goncalves gave me a look at how PeopleAnswers leverages these pre-hire assessments. The one-page advisory for Roscoe, a new hire, includes this bit of advice: “Consider that Roscoe tends to have difficulty solving problems involving numbers and may not complete all tasks within the set timeframes.”

The advisory also suggests ways to help: “You may help Roscoe by showing how to perform specific mathematical problems and by requiring him to provide updates as deadlines approach.”

Obviously, Roscoe wasn’t hired for his math skills. But knowing he has a weakness in this area avoids unpleasant surprises and helps his manager help Roscoe.

“What’s exciting,” Goncalves explained, is that the toolset “is taking the candidate from the pre-employment assessment … through to coaching and training.”

Think of PeopleAnswers behavioral onboarding as a guide, not a performance plan. The advisory is computer generated, like those online personality profiles offered by career sites and dating services. Like them, it provides insight into basic traits and behaviors that a manager can use to help a new employee get off to a fast start and feel more comfortable in their new surroundings.

Besides the behavioral onboarding, which I happened to find to find the most intriguing of the new products, PeopleAnswers also is adding a business intelligence component and an interview guide to its talent assessment software suite.

Madeline Laurano, talent systems analyst and advisory practice manager, The Newman Group, said of the lineup,  “PeopleAnswers addresses a critical need in the recruiting process by connecting selection, onboarding, and career planning. Technologies that establish such connections play an essential role in effective employee recruiting.”

The interview guide, like the onboarding piece, leverages the assessment to suggest specific areas of inquiry for the interviewer. Interviewers can choose from among a series of questions or structure their own, based on the narrative description of the issue. Usefully, the guide also counsels the interview on what to listen for and look for during the interview.

A business intelligence component provides an enterprise-wide look at the recruitment process, focusing, obviously, on how the assessments are being used and the results they are providing. There’s a great deal of useful information here, including such things as candidate and hire sources, correlated to their assessment scores, and other metrics. The data can be compared to industry stats and internal data, to the extent its available.

Earlier, PeopleAnswers introduced an authenticity alert, which functions a lot like those credit card fraud alerts. It monitors candidate responses to the assessments and raises an alarm when something doesn’t “smell” right.

Usually what tends to happen is that an employee leaves the organization or someone decides that some new work must get done and it is time to expand the staff. Next, a haphazard job description is located from a previous opening or a new list of requirements is jotted down and hastily slapped up on the job board of choice.

Taking the time to examine which competencies and characteristics will enable achievement of corporate goals, rather than just refilling a vacant chair with a clone of the prior occupant is rarely done. Inevitably, resumes of predominantly unqualified applicants begin to pour in by the hundreds, leaving the recruiter frustrated and overwhelmed. Meanwhile, the hiring manager is eagerly awaiting some action and attention.

If lucky, some highly skilled impressive folks turn up in the pile and are immediately passed through an initial screening. They may move on through additional steps, meeting with various influencers and decision-makers. Ultimately, after anywhere from several weeks to several months of this going on, a selection is finally made and an offer is extended and accepted.

While there may be nothing particularly noteworthy in that oversimplified depiction, the main point of this article is the opinions being formed from the candidates’ perspectives. For a number of years, I’ve worked one-on-one with job seekers of all levels — mostly experienced, educated, mid/senior level professionals from various industries — to assist them in preparing for their next opportunity. In doing so, I’ve collected countless anecdotes and what some may refer to as horror stories.

For mysterious reasons, these experiences don’t seem to faze the people on the other end of the transaction. For brevity, these are condensed down to the basic situation without the full contextual reference points. These samples leave no doubt that employers are missing opportunities to build relationships with their target audience, potential customers, and most importantly brand ambassadors.

• Jordan spotted a job posting on one of his email alerts that looked to be below his level, but since he knew someone at the company, he checked for more information. It turned out the that the hiring manager really liked his background and even filled in some details to make the position sound a bit more advanced than how it was written. After investing several hours over a few weeks, including taking an entire day off work to travel for interviews, he was rejected with a vague and confusing “not a cultural fit” excuse.
• During a phone interview with an internal corporate recruiter (that was arranged by a boutique search firm who pre-vetted her), the first question (45-year-old) Megan was asked was “what year did you graduate from college?” The remainder of the call contained equally irrelevant, offensive, and condescending questioning and commentary by the corporate recruiter.
• In a face-to-face interview, Jody’s resume format and content was ripped apart by the interviewer, who proceeded to complain and chastise her over her level of experience and suitability for the position. Rather than sit there and take the abuse, Jody held her composure long enough to excuse herself in time to keep her tears between her and her steering wheel.
• When it was her turn to ask questions at the end of a panel interview that seemed focused on company culture, Casey asked the interviewers to define and describe the unique elements of their culture. A few of them stated “fun” as the key component. Casey found this ironic since the entire team never smiled or showed any emotion or expression during her interview session that felt more like an interrogation or court hearing.
• Ken was referred by an internal executive at a company, where he was ushered through a series of interviews, meeting up to 10 different people. Though the final round was positioned as a last gauge of chemistry/culture fit, Ken was subjected to yet another batch of rudimentary and one-sided behavioral interview questions posed by a group who seemed disinterested in him as a coworker, just curious to hear his answers to some oddly placed inquiries.
• Tiffany was hopeful about a promising-sounding position after being led to believe and actually told that she was the only remaining top contender. She thought it was a great sign when the hiring company asked for her references. The very next day, luckily before her references were checked, Tiffany was crushed to learn that the company decided to move forward and offer the position to an internal candidate.
• Alan’s prospective employer took things a bit further and actually checked his references (which were all glowing) before sending him through one more round of panel interviews. Unfortunately, even though everyone up to that point thought Alan was an awesome catch, the last crowd didn’t agree. He was left stunned, going from the top candidate with an imminent offer, to being told “never mind.” The worst part was feeling upset that he had troubled his references and now had some explaining to do for the false alarm.
• Justin tried to prepare for several interviews at the same employer by researching the people he was scheduled to meet with, only to find fewer than 25% of them had a LinkedIn profile. When he met them in person, it was evident that their longevity at their employer was important to them and he immediately felt judged for having moved around a few times despite gaining new experiences with each job.

There are plenty more examples of poor behavior and broken employment brand tales to add, but the overall issue is that employers are expecting top talent to land at their doorstep and then they subject them to countless hoops to jump, steps to climb, and personalities to read only to coldly reject them for no apparent reason. Everything from their inadequate and misleading job postings to their guilty until proven innocent barrage of questions and abrupt unexplained dismissals, points to a severe lack of concern for the candidate experience.

While many people might think “so what, it’s a buyers market.” That is only partially relevant and obviously not a prudent business strategy or sustainable methodology.

The fundamental theme in this economy and for the foreseeable future is that none of us can afford to neglect or mistreat anyone who might be a source of revenue, references, referrals, business leads, or anything else connected to our personal and organizational success. Judging by the treatment that most job-seekers endure, it appears that only some are wise enough to believe and conduct ourselves based on the concept of “what comes around goes around.”