Today my news feed included yet another article about the terrible plight of hiring managers these days. The poor dears are being left high and dry by job seekers who don't care about their wasted time and don't feel the need to offer their victims even the common courtesy of a phone call or email. Or even a text message. Such unprofessional behavior! Who could credit it?
Or something like that.
I am aghast In theory. But not in reality.
You see I conducted professional job searches in 2004-5, 2007-8, 2012-13, and 2017-18; making somewhere between 250 and 300 applications in total. Consequently I have a reasonable statistical basis on which to make some observation of what "professional, business behavior" associated with hiring situations has actually turned into over the last decade and a half. Albeit, based on my memories rather than good records. You've been warned.
First a few observations about the large scale context:
- The vast majority of those applications were made via email or on-line form. I can't recall sending a single hard-copy packet in the last two job searches.
- The prevalence of on-line forms over "send us these documents in a format we understand" grew steadily through the period and was total dominant by the end.
- It is obvious (occasionally even explicit) that many of these systems use some kind of automated filtering to save the hiring managers from needing to look at all the applications.1
Before we go on, I should mention that I've sat on hiring committees. I've sat in bed next to my loving spouse pouring over a slush pile of packets sorting out those that should never have been sent from those that at least come close to having the background we asked for. The next week I was working over a subset of them to select a set of promising prospects for deeper investigation.2 I've called references. I've sat through two rounds of telephone interviews and hosted the in-person appearances. I've debated the pros and cons of the multiple interviewees who were almost but not quite the candidate we wanted, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.
I know how painful, labor intensive, and demoralizing it can be to be on the hiring end of these things.
That said, I want to focus on a particular feature of the hiring system we've developed in these glittering first decades of the twenty-first century: in many, many cases the system is designed solely for the convenience of the hiring manager at the cost of the job seeker. First I have to register with a portal to start the process. Including, of course username3, password4, and recovery questions. No, you won't be able to re-use any of that; every employer has their own portal. Then not only should I upload my carefully formatted resume (or CV), cover letter, and other documents but I also need to copy the data therein to an endless series of web forms.5 Then I get to answer a set of true/false or multiple choice questions to confirm that I have the minimum requirements for the job.6,7 Then I'm lucky even to get an automated email confirming that the system received my application8 and even more lucky to receive further communications if I don't get called for an interview.9
Total time screwing around in the web interface: 30-60 minutes. Exclusive of (a) finding the prospect, (b) any research on the company you care to do, and (c) any customization of your packet materials you care to do.
The "painful, labor intensive, and demoralizing" bit I experienced when trying to hire was never a patch on what it was like to be a job seeker.
And there are three key points here. First, no one on the other end gives a fig how well this system works for the job seeker. Your blood, sweat, or tears are of no consequence to them. Second, while people are looking for a "fit" they care more about being able to identify a reasonable fit than about finding the perfect (or even a great) fit if it means more work to do it. And finally, the last fifteen plus years have been spent normalizing the idea that one side of this negotiation is allowed to drop the other side without a word. Some folks just imagined that only one side would ever exercise the option.
Ghosting your partner in this interactions is the standard of professional business behavior in the hiring game. Because a significant fraction of hiring managers have been working hard to make it so for decades.
Now, it's just possible that the people interviewed for these articles are the compassionate few who insisted on maintaining polite, if automated, contact with applicants up to the point that the position closed with those hopefuls still outside the door.10 It could be, but I doubt it.
I started this post with the intention of writing a sly observation on the reversal of fortunes. But somewhere along the way it turned into a bit of a rant. It seems I may have a little residual anger. Something on order of a coal-seem fire, perhaps. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.
In any case, schadenfreude is an ugly emotion and I try not to indulge, but sometimes it's very tempting.
1 And let's face it: those filters are utter trash. Natural language processing has come a notable way since the early 1990s but it is still better characterized as "artificial unintelligence" than AI. If you write it by hand you use word and phrase matching, and if you hand it over ot a ML system you get a more finely weighted word and phrase matching system. Either of which suck at seeing transferable skills and related experience. You can try to fix that with some kind of mapping systems but only if you can accurately anticipate what related experience and transferable skills will appear in your application pool. And of course, if you care to spend the not inconsiderable amount of money turning such predictions into work code would require.
2 I'm positive, both as a job seeker and a hiring committee member, that good candidates get screened at this step.
3 But not that one, it's already taken.
4 But not that one, it has characters we don't allow. Or doesn't have a character from this class. Or doesn't have characters from enough classes. Or whatever.
5 Occasionally the system tries to pre-populate the forms for you by parsing the documents you uploaded. I presume this works OK if you upload in Word format (but why would you upload something like that in an editable format?!?) and use a popular template.
6 Always after you've done all the other work.
7 Which means these things are hard fails with no chance for intelligent consideration of the other factors. A friend who chaired the IT security committee at a major public university and gave talks at major security conferences was ruled out of a position in IT security because he didn't have a master's degree. Of course, you could lie to the computer, but how will the hiring manager feel about that?
8 I'd guess this was roughly 50% of systems in my earliest search reported here and had dropped to less than 25% by my latest one.
9 A few systems do make it possible for you to log back in to track the progress of your applications. For those you actually have to hold on to that username/password pair you made.
10 I even had a handful of personal emails telling me I hadn't been selected back in the noughties. One person took the time to write what looked like a personalized encouraging message. Nothing like that in the teens, however.
