You had one jobđ€Š
Recently a friend and former employee got passed over for a role. Thatâs fine; it happens. Weâve all been there.
Whatâs not OK is the feedback the hiring company provided. Itâs not that it was rude or overly harsh - it was worse. The hiring managerâs feedback demonstrated, well beyond a reasonable doubt, that they didnât know the candidate at all.
My goal with this post is to illustrate why not knowing a candidate is a failure to do your most important job and will lead to a pretty crappy candidate experience that can harm your and your companyâs reputation.
Itâs not that hard
The title of Graham Duncanâs excellent âWhatâs going on here, with this human?â blog post says it all. As someone in the position to hire someone else, your one job is to determine what is going on with the person youâre evaluating and if and where they fit into your organization. Doing so requires that you learn who they are as quickly and accurately as possible.
Thatâs it. If youâre looking to make a friend, stroke your ego, or play some strange game of gotcha with esoteric brainteasers, then youâre doing it wrong.
Sadly for my friend, and embarrassingly for the company that interviewed her, itâs evident in their post-process feedback that the hiring manager came up woefully short of their one job. I wonât go into specifics, but after reading their feedback, I said, âUm, did they send this to the wrong person?â Everyone else she showed it to said the same thing.
If you find yourself in the privileged position to have a say in someone elseâs professional future, please have the decency to get to know them as best you can. If you find yourself trying to be the candidateâs friend, or prove your intelligence, ask yourself if youâve learned anything valuable about who that candidate is and what they can do for your organization - more often than not, you havenât.
And, for the sake of your reputation and your companyâs âhiring brand,â if you half-assed figuring out the human youâre supposed to figure out, please donât make it comically obvious in your feedback to that exact same human.
After all, half-assing things is never a good look.
Take it away, Matthew.
Yes indeed, some lazy recruiters mass email lots of people hoping to land something, as I see messages about roles I'm obviously not a fit for. Though having a candidate go through interviews without getting the basics is even more egregious.
Actually I imagine the job of understanding anyone (getting their essense) within a short time and limited context to be quite challenging! It's really easy to tune out and get distracted by all the unimportant metrics about a candidate.
The hiring manager needs to know the team(s) really well and scenario-extrapolate whether the candidate would fit nicely, under the most common daily routines but also more extreme circumstances to try mitigating risks.