Apply to a job takes great courage and enormous amount of time. Developers like black-box abstractions but we are not a fan of black-box hiring processes.
We all experienced these1:
- Apply, wait for weeks, never hear back
- After first call, wait for weeks, hear back canned response
- After take home project and positive final interview, wait for weeks, hear back canned response before Christmas
It's always interesting to me when recruiters from big, presumably well-run tech companies ghost candidates. I don't understand how this happens.
— Pete Holiday (@toomuchpete) February 28, 2019
In my last job hunt, I got this from GitHub, Fastly, and Pandora. They aren't the first, though, and probably won't be the last.
We left wondering why even applied in the first place. What did I do wrong? Open mailbox every morning and evening further amplifies imposter syndrome. Made me want to get drunk with iced latte in the morning. It’s not going to help with a status changed to No Longer in Consideration on Workday as your only way to let me know I got rejected. The time we put in for months of interview came back with the reward of silence.
This is so wrong, am I right? This is my sincere calling companies who are hiring. Reject candidates fast if there seems not to be a good fit. Reject candidates early if you already decided to rock with someone else. Reject candidates early if you really cannot find something for the candidate at your company. Reject candidates early when things have been changed. A rejection without reasons within a week would be fast in my book. A rejection with reasons are fairy tales that never happened to me. For fairy tale, I can wait for 2-3 weeks.
Because you don’t want any of your candidate to suffer like this:
Footage of me waiting for a reply
Really is to create a great candidate experience, no matter what the outcome was, never leave candidate a negative impression of your company. The interview process defines every candidate’s impression of how your company operate. And we have nothing to chat with friends at the dinner table except the failed interviews stories. No engineer has ever sued a company because of constructive post-interview feedback. So please do let us know your honest feedback. It could be impossible for you to give feedback if you get too many applicants2, I get that. So please be detailed in the job descriptions.
Candidates who you don't hire should come out of your interview process as fans of your team and company who hope their friends work w/ you.
— Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) May 22, 2015
If you’re a great company and will commit to reject me fast, reject me early. Please send me your recruting email with magic code: #RejectFastRejectEarly.
I commit to reply to your recruting email within 7 days. Is it too much to ask to reject me fast, reject me early?
Thanks for reading!