Ghosting Candidates, Marathon Interviews and Zero Feedback: The Modern Recruitment Experience

There was a time, not so long ago, when you could expect a polite acknowledgement of a job application, an explanation of the process and steps involved, and feedback if you weren’t successful. These days, ghosting candidates seems to be the norm. Hiring managers will claim that they are inundated with responses, so it’s just not possible to acknowledge every application, or inform people when they have been unsuccessful. They’ll also claim that overly aggressive legal requirements and an increasingly litigious environment means it’s no longer possible to provide candidates with feedback. Personally I don’t buy either of these arguments.

The volume of job applications has always been high, and if talking to hiring managers is anything to go by, the challenge they face is having too few qualified candidates rater than too many. While it used to be the case that applicants would apply for jobs via email, a large part of the process has now been automated. So the use of hiring tools with their set processes and templated responses, makes it harder to hide behind the excuse of volume.

I can sort of understand why, if you’ve received over a hundred applications for a specific role, it may not be practical to respond to everyone individually. However if somebody has taken the time to come in for an interview, I think you owe it to them to let them know why they failed to make the cut on this occasion. It’s not only polite-and generally the right thing to do as a human being-but failing to respond with the appropriate level of care and attention can have negative results.

The feedback I’ve heard about interview practices isn’t much better. Overly long, marathon interviews where the candidates are left feeling broken and exhausted by the end. No offers for tea or coffee, no breaks, just a revolving door of stakeholders peppering them with a seemingly random barrage of question. The lack of any coherent narrative makes these team interviews especially torturous. Randomly jumping from topic to topic with no logical segues, or being forced to answer almost identical questions posed by people who weren’t in the room to hear the answer you gave 20 minutes earlier. This unrelenting style of interviewing feels at best like a…