Interviewers Behaving Badly

It becomes a catch-22. You’re looking for a job because you’re out of work, but you’re not being hired because you’re out of work and have been for a long time.

NPR recently looked at a growing trend of employers who discriminate against the long-term unemployed, despite the fact that the recession has spurred a number of people who have been out of work for longer than usual. Some companies are mentioning in hiring ads that the unemployed need not apply.

One HR professional said that his employer doesn’t consider candidates who have been out of work for more than six months.

To help combat this, several states — California, Connecticut, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Tennessee — are considering legislation that would prevent companies from discrimination against the unemployed. Fines would most likely be assessed.

But this is easier said than done. This type of discrimination could be hard to prove, save for the blatant kind found in hiring ads.

And as we know, there are many factors that go into a hiring decision.  As NPR points out, some employers want to see that applicants performed some sort of work during stretches of unemployment, even volunteering.

What’s the unemployed to do in all of this? HR professionals encourage the unemployed to remain active.

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What’s the proper way to reject job applicants? Canned email? Personal response?

How about a long list of 42 application do’s and dont’s?

That’s what one employer did. According to Gawker, the head of a technology news site decided to send a rather lengthy rejection letter to more than 900 applicants, bcc’d thankfully.

In addition to a thorough explanation of which candidates were and weren’t selected, and why, the letter than provides 42 bulleted application tips, such as “Do be a badass” and “Don’t send Squidoo links.”

One of the rejected job applicants forwarded the email to Gawker and commented, ”I don’t find it helpful. I just find it arrogant.”

Here’s an excerpt from the email:

• Do keep it short and sweet.
Tell me a little bit about yourself— where you’ve written before and a few sentences on why you are awesome. Short and sweet.

• Don’t describe yourself as zany, crazy, or wild.
Zany is not high on the lists of attributes we’re looking for. I don’t imagine it’s high on the list of many companies, this side of birthday clown agencies.

Read more

Imagine this. You’re on an interview. It’s going well. Then the interviewer turns to her computer to search for your Facebook profile. When she finds that it’s private, she asks you to provide your Facebook login information.

Sound invasive?

That’s what Justin Bassett, a New York-based statistician thought, reports The Boston Globe. While Bassett withdrew his application because he didn’t care to be employed with a company that inquired about such personal information, the article points out that not everyone has the luxury to do so. Many need employment and may have to provide their Facebook login information to obtain it.

Are you thinking the same thing, is this legal? According to The Boston Globe, there is legislation on the table in Illinois and Maryland that would deem it illegal for public agencies to ask for social network access. Apparently, this practice is much more common among law enforcement positions. As an alternative, some agencies ask for potential employees to login into social networks during the interview.

Either way, it’s sticky territory for companies and employees.

Here’s a letter sent to a PR firm that is a lesson in what not to do:

I am a student from XXX State University I plan on graduating this spring and was very interested in applying at your firm. My major is public but I have had experience in advertisement, campaign management, and social media. I will of course sent you a portfolio and resume upon my graduation I just find it appropriate to contact you early. I extremely respect your business and I feel I have the ability to add to your already sterling reputation.
Thank You
XXX XXX
Sent from my iPhone

The recipient of this email, Gil Rudawsky, said that it “shows laziness” to send a letter from an iPhone and that it’s the “ultimate insult.” Really? The genericness of the letter, the terrible spelling and grammar, and the lack of research weren’t insulting, but the fact that the student sends emails from his phone is an insult?

We’re gonna go out there and say that sending an email from your iPhone to apply for a job isn’t inherently bad. Hell, perhaps it will make you look even more interested (“I just saw this job posting and couldn’t wait to get to my computer to apply!”). This letter wouldn’t improve any by having been sent from a computer, we promise you that much.

One thing to keep in mind: Obviously, the Autocorrect features on iPhones and other smartphones do lend themselves to some hilarious typos. And it can be harder to proofread on such a small screen. Know your own limitations. If the emails you send to family are riddled with mistakes because your fingers can’t hit those tiny virtual keys, as ours often cannot, think twice about using the smartphone to apply for a job, obviously. But you could always draft an email (delete any addresses in the To: field to make sure you don’t accidentally send it) and save it for review later, or let a friend look over it.

What happened when a recruiter for Groupon went looking for good developers? Well, s/he stumbled upon the online profile of David Heinemeier Hansson. Hansson’s profile looked awesome, and he had tons of experience with Ruby on Rails, the developer language that (it feels like) the whole damn Web is written on these days, and the recruiter was super-interested, so he sent an email.

Hi David,
I came across your profile online and wanted to reach out about Development Opportunities here at Groupon. The company is growing, and we’re always looking for folks with solid skills that can make positive contribution to our continued success. Any chance you’d be open to a quick conversation about opportunities, or for any possible networking potential? If so, let me know when you’re free and we can set up a time to chat. Also, if you are interested, it would be great if you could forward a current resume over that I can take a look at. I look forward to hearing back from you! Please let me know if you have any questions.
Cheers,
[Name]

Thing recruiter failed to notice: David Heinemeier Hansson INVENTED Ruby on Rails.

This has spawned a mini-meme in tech circles, mostly mocking the clueless recruiter. This is by far the best comment.

We’d like to spin this out to the media world in a “contest” (air quotes, because the only prize is the admiration and envy of your peers!): what would the equivalent of this be in your industry? Let us know in the comments or Tweet us and we’ll print the best ones in an upcoming post.
We’ll start you off with one:
“Mr. Woodward, I came across your online profile and wanted to reach out about reporting opportunities at Patch…”

Here’s a post by a recruiter (or human capital strategist, if you prefer) who seems a little disillusioned by the hiring managers to whom he’s sent potential candidates, as he dedicates nearly a thousand words to how much of a waste of time the interview is.

Interviews, Kevin Wheeler writes, “satisfy a human need for power and control. An interviewer has power to recommend for a job or not. Sometimes an interviewer has the power to actually make the hiring decision, and by holding a person’s economic future and career success in your hands, you can feel very powerful….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?”

And that’s where Wheeler goes wrong, we think. An interview isn’t a test, and there’s no mandate that two candidates with the same answers “should” perform the same in an interview. If all you had to do was get the “right” answers, people would be hired solely on the basis of a multiple-choice quiz.

An interview is a way to establish rapport with the hiring manager, to show that you’re a decent, well-adjusted human being who won’t drive your new coworkers crazy by leaving toenail clippings at their desks or whatever. It’s not just about raw ability, and that’s why interviews aren’t a waste of time.

Wheeler does say, however, that there are some other methods hiring managers can use to evaluate candidates. (He recommends using them instead, but we wouldn’t be surprised if many hiring managers used them in conjunction.) They’re the usual things: asking the candidate to do something related to the job, taking them on for a tryout, giving them an internship (paid we hope), or giving a test.

“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,” he says.

Recruiters: chime in. Are interviews a waste of time? Jobseekers, you’ve surely been on some interviews that were a waste of time, but is the entire concept broken?

Jobseekers get a lot of flack for being totally ridiculous (flip-flops to an interview?) or doing things that, in retrospect, weren’t such a great idea, but as readers of MediaJobsDaily hopefully know, sometimes the person sitting on the other side of the desk is worse.

Here’s two blog posts from Kristin, a NYC-twenty-something who was emailed by a recruiter she’d never heard of about a position. Sounds good, right? Sadly, it started to spiral downhill almost immediately….

Part one: Recruiter is patronizing, comes up with silly requirements (like “ask her to write a two paragraph bio about herself in third person, explaining why she is right for this job. Right now, please. (It’s 4:30 pm)”) and forwards correspondence from the hiring manager directly to Kristin, when the hiring manager clearly thought she was just talking to the recruiter (which seems like it should be a big nono).

Part two: Recruiter sends this amazing email (go read the whole thing; neither we nor Kristin added this formatting, though):

Despite that, the writer says she went to the interview anyway and that the people at that company were nothing like this recruiter.

The happy ending: According to a later post on this blog, Kristin accepted a job offer. No telling whether it was this one.

About.com Job Search has compiled a list of 20 terrible interviews.

In one, for example, the interviewer was on his Blackberry, oblivious to what the candidate was saying. “At one point he asked me why I left my last job and I knew he wasn’t paying attention so I said the boss had a habit of taking his pants off every afternoon. The guy said “oh really?” and didn’t flinch. I knew then I could never work for him,” the interviewee says.

Another interviewee, a college student, drove three hours to be interviewed over lunch in a group setting. “I tried to make chit chat with the other interviewees, but they wouldn’t speak with me. Most of them seem to know each other so I felt very alienated and alone.” On the bright side, the company paid, in cash, for the student’s mileage, but she says it was still a blow. “This interview was with my #1 or #2 dream company to work for & my #1 job choice.”

Of course, not all the stories are about bad interviewers. One interviewee admits that she didn’t get enough sleep before the daylong interview, and actually fell asleep while a hiring manager was droning at her. Oops. Others seem indignant about not getting the jobs, but their submissions are riddled with spelling errors and typos. Hrmmmm.

Read more here.

We know that some companies are known for asking bizarre interview questions (we’re looking at you, Google).

But it ain’t just Google that likes to throw interviewing curveballs.

These questions, from Shine.yahoo.com, all come from real hiring managers asking potential interns to do ridiculous things like estimate the number of airplanes flying at any given moment or describe how to play ping pong.

Enterprise Rent-A-Car likes to ask, “Would you be okay hearing “no” from seven out of 10 customers?”

Merrill Lynch asks, “Tell me about your life from kindergarten onwards.” (Yikes.)

The questions were all pulled from Glassdoor.com, so we went on there and checked what Yahoo asks employees. Pretty standard stuff, though one potential marketing manager was asked “How do you deal with creative people?”

Also on Glassdoor, a Yelp intern was asked “How do you make sure people are writing reviews on Yelp?” (Go to their houses and look in their windows?) Forbes asked “What’s [sic] a billionaire you’re specifically interested in reporting on?”

And to get back to the original Shine article, Capital One’s “curveball” interview question may be the most head-scratching one yet: the bank asked: “How do you evaluate Subway’s five-foot long sub policy?”

Huh?

A frustrated job seeker left a lovely rant in our sister blog AgencySpy’s anonymous tips box. It is directed at the ad industry as a whole and rails against how hiring managers treat candidates like dirt. “Things shake around really fast in this business, and the creative you’re treating like garbage today might be a highly desirable candidate in a couple of years. Don’t you want to have a positive relationship developed?”

Thing is, this kind of treatment isn’t unique to the ad industry at all. Whether it’s a recruiter making fun of a candidates’ hometown or just lies hiring managers tell their candidates, it’s a buyer’s market. That makes life tough for everyone—the jobseekers now, and the companies later when the market improves and word’s gotten around how companies treat their candidates.