Category Archives: The Recruiting Rules

Email Heroes – Are you one?

Posted on by
1

For most of their careers, my parents could never check their work email at home.  It did mean that they probably stopped working when they got home, unlike most professional employees today.  My parents also rarely made it home at 5 pm and worked in the office many Saturdays and Sundays when the work needed to get done. The world changed, we can now get work done almost anywhere.

When did we start defining work as sitting in the bathroom at home and replying to emails in five minutes as work?

Let’s face it, most people aren’t really working when they are home if they don’t normally work at home.  They like to believe that what they’re doing is real work, but if can also wait to be done the next morning when you arrive at the office, you’re not doing real work, you’re just narcissistic.  Oh, I better immediately get back to John and tell him I can definitely do that interview at 8 am, next week Friday…

We act like checking work email at home is the same as donating a kidney or something.

Studies show that 59% of males and 42% of females respond to emails when out of the office.  Those numbers actually sound low to me. The survey also shows that younger workers are more likely to think about work when going to bed and when waking. Just wait! Pretty soon thinking about work will be the same as work!

Are we losing our f’ing minds!?

Seriously! I want to know.  Having the ability to check and respond to emails outside of the office increase your work-life flexibility, but we talk about it like it’s an anchor.  That iPhone is only an anchor if you make it an anchor!  I have a son who plays baseball and I watch as many of his games as I can.  In between innings I always check my email and respond to work if necessary. I do not consider that work. I consider that watching my son play baseball!

Making the decision to take a half a day to watch my son play baseball is easy, because I know I can balance both jobs I have, running a company and being a Dad.  Does my son care that I’m checking email while he’s warming up in between innings?  No. He doesn’t even notice.  It’s not like I’m behind the backstop giving a performance review over the phone while he’s up to bat! I’m just checking and following up on some emails.

If you decide you want to stay connected to your job and organization while you are out of the office, that is a personal decision. Don’t act like you’re a hero going above and beyond by keeping up on your emails. You’re not, everyone does that.

If keeping up with your emails is the real work you’re doing, you’re highly overpaid and easily replaceable. If telling your coworkers you checked emails while out of the office on some personal time to show how dedicated and better you are than them, you need to get a life, email hero.

T3 – @Teamableme – Recruit the Best Talent from your Employees Networks

Posted on by
Reply

This week on T3 I review the employee referral technology Teamable. I’ve been a big fan of employee referral technology for a few years now, so I thought I already knew what Teamable was before I demoed. What I found was Employee Referral Automation 2.0!

Jobvite kind of created the industry of employee referral automation and leveraging your employee’s social media networks. For the money and the ROI, employee referral automation is still the most underutilized technology in talent acquisition. Almost every TA leader will tell you employee referrals are their highest quality hires and one of their top sources, but the spend almost zero dollars on technology to better these stats! It’s completely insane!

So, Teamable takes employee referral automation and says, how do we make it better? What do current users of employee referral automation like, and what do they wish they had that they don’t with this tech, and what is no one doing with this tech? This is what I think will ultimately set Teamable apart from other players in the space of employee referral automation is their innovation and ability to show organizations new ways to leverage this technology.

Teamable also found a game changer when it comes to using their technology to potentially increase your organization’s diversity hiring. That’s huge!

What I like about Teamable:

– Employees in your organization have the ability to see both the referrals they’ve made and what’s going on with them, but also those they’ve requested and where those are at as well. It’s one of the major gripes employees have after making a referral, that they don’t know what going on with it.

– Gamification is integrated very well into the dashboard showing a leaderboard of most referrals, which employees are most active, which employees have the most connected network, etc.

– The ability to segment out within your organization which employees you want to send specific job postings to. Why is that important? Diversity hires more diversity. Let’s say you had an opening for a Sales Rep. Your team was top heavy with dudes and you wanted more females. Instead of sending out this posting to all the sales reps you only sent it to your other female sales reps. What would happen? More than likely the referrals that came back with other female referrals. It’s not a guarantee, but the percentages are pretty good. BTW – works with any segment of your employees!

– ATS integrations already built for Jobvite, iCims, Lever, Greenhouse, etc. and Teamable will give you a visual cue if the person being referred is already in your current ATS, which is super helpful in letting those who referred know as soon as possible.

– Great UI/UX with their dashboard and ability to pull metrics and see the full funnel.

If you don’t have employee referral automation this is a must demo. I don’t know how to make that any clearer, this technology is a game changer for hiring more employees for less money and higher quality. I’m shocked that it’s not used by 100% of organizations who rely on and desire more referrals.

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

The Most Important Question You’ll Ever Ask a Hiring Manager

Posted on by
1

How are those hiring manager “intake” meetings going?

You know, those meetings you have with a hiring manager every single time they have an opening.  You sit down with your hiring manager, face to face, and ask them a page full of questions.  Why is this position open? What would make a candidate most successful in this role?  What color of skin would you like this candidate to have? Boobs or no boobs? Whoops! Scratch those last ones, we would never ask those…

The reality is Talent Pros really only have one question they need to ask hiring managers. That question is this:

“Do you trust that I can find the talent you need?”

Ultimately, this is all that really matters for your success.  If they trust you, they’ll give you all the information you need to be successful.  If they don’t trust you can find the talent they need, they tend to hold stuff back.

Yes, I know that doesn’t make sense, but that’s real world talent acquisition stuff! Welcome to corporate America, a lot of stuff doesn’t make sense!

Most hiring managers have no faith you’ll find them great talent.  They have this belief because of so many bad Talent Pros before you failed them.  So many before you didn’t really go out and find the best talent, they just delivered whatever warm body came into the ATS.

I just come out and ask the question.  The first answer you’ll get from 99% of hiring managers is a weird, “Well, sure, I do.” If you really dig into this answer, you’ll get the true answer which 90% of the time is, “Hell no! Why would I?  Your department has really never gotten this right!”

Thank you! That’s what I really needed.  I needed to get that out in the open, so now we can really build trust, and make great things happen.  They’re mostly right. Talent Acquisition fails many of our hiring managers for a number of reasons. Right now, your hiring manager doesn’t need to hear those reasons, they need to hear why this time will be different.

Then, you have to live up to ‘different’! You have to be better.  You have to get it right. Getting it right earns trust.

Once they trust you, great things will happen. Earn that trust.

The Grand Vision of Your Company: Ingredient #1 of your Employment Brand

Posted on by
3

Did you see last week that Facebook changed its corporate vision? The old vision was “Making the world more open and connected”. The new vision is:

“Bring the World Closer Together”

It’s pretty good, right? Five words. That’s pretty tight! Studies have been done on thousands of company mission and vision statements and the average word count runs around 14. It’s really hard to break your mission or vision down in five words or so and have it really mean anything.

When I first got into HR developing your mission and vision statements were a big deal, then like most things we focus on too much, they became a corporate joke. Web sites cropped up where you could throw in some words about your company and these random, meaningless, vision statements would come out and actually sound like something better than you already had, but could have been used by any company on the planet!

Organizations spent millions of hours in meeting developing these statements. Billions of dollars in resources spent. These words were supposed to drive our decision making, help motivate the troops, inspire our customers, cure cancer! If we could just find the ‘right’ words for our vision we’ll change the world!

The reality is, your mission, your vision, has become nothing more than a marketing slogan.

Facebook is a social media site that most people use to share stupid cat videos and once in a while lose their minds about something political before deleting the post after they got their 72 friends in an uproar. “Bringing the world closer together?” Oh, you mean, letting skinning high school friends make fun of fat high school friends. That close? Calm down, Zuck. You stole one great idea, you didn’t cure cancer.

One exercise I’ve done with recruitment marketing and employment branding folks is to tell me your company mission or vision in seven words or less. The reality is, from a marketing perspective, this is probably the time you have as a recruiter to get this in front of a candidate, plus it fits well in a text!

Can you boil it all down in seven words?

It’s tough to do, try it with your team today. Tell me our vision in seven words or less. Share your best one below.

Mine would be – “We put asses in seats”! Five words. Beat that. “We put world-class, asses in seats!” 😉

How Big Is Your Hotel Room? Measuring your HR Influence! #SHRM17

Posted on by
5

Just got off the spring HR conference season, although it seems like the HR/TA conference season is now never ending. It used to be the conference season for HR and TA conferences were spring and fall, with the one outlier being SHRM National at the end of June. Now, you can go to a conference in any month of the year!

As one of the many people in our industry that writes, speaks, etc. Some folks would consider me a person who has some influence in the space. I certainly don’t have the most influence, but I do okay. My wife likes to call me a ‘micro-celebrity’, meaning I have about 23-ish HR pros around the world who know who I am, and might want a hug when they see me!

When you go on the HR/TA conference circuit, as an influencer, you get humbled very quickly, as you run into conferences where your influence is minimal, and come conferences where you’re the rock star. I just came back from a conference where I was humbled, so I wanted to share how you can tell your value at a conference as an influencer!

It’s the size of the hotel room they give you!

Let me break down the ratings of Influence “5” being the highest influence, “1” being the lowest influence in the HR space:

Level 5 HR/TA Influencer:  You’re in the suite life! Gerry Crispin is a level 5 influencer! I was at a conference with him recently and his “room” was actually 4 rooms with a breakfast nook, two fireplaces, and a hot tub! That’s influence! We won’t talk about my room as compared to his! Level 5 Influencers also are picked up at the airport by someone holding a sign with their name on it. Probably have a gift basket in their room that includes something cool like a pair of Beats by Dre or Oakley sunglasses or something. Most level 5 influencers do not attend conferences for free, many of these gigs are paid gigs. (I’m not saying Gerry was paid, just that those at level 5 can get paid if they desire)

Gerry is a level 5 influencer because TA buyers listen to what he has to say. If Gerry says buy “X” software/product, people will buy. If he says “Y” software/product is crap, people won’t buy. Don’t tell me you’re a level 5 influencer without being able to move the market!

Level 5 HR/TA Influencer upgrade moment – Kyle Lagunas had a giant suite on top of the Bellagio in Vegas this year. I got invited. It was HR nerds acting like rappers, and it was awesome!

Level 4 HR/TA Influencer: You get to stay at the same hotel as a Level 5 influencer but you don’t get the same room! You probably don’t get the private ride to your hotel from the airport, but they’ll send you a note on what shuttle to take, you might even get the gift basket, but you will never get the breakfast nook! Level 4 and 5 influencers also are personally invited to these conferences, they never have to ask to attend. You’ve reached a certain level when you’re no longer begging to come to an event and work for free!

Once you reach level 4 you start getting invited to private dinners with vendors. Really nice meals at restaurants you would never go to unless someone else was paying and ordering drinks you wouldn’t if you were paying the tab.

Level 3 HR/TA Influencer: Welcome to the Hampton Inn, are you a Hilton Honors member? If so, we can get you a free bottle of water and move you to the top floor! Level 3 Influencers have made it to the land of not having to pay their own way to a conference, congratulations, that’s actually a huge step! The expectations though for this honor will be you’ll be writing, tweeting, IG’ing, Facebook live’ing, Snapping your life away for two straight days. It’s a big step to reach level 3, but that step comes with a lot of work conference organizers expect from you. At level 3 you’re probably booking your own hotel, flight and sharing an Uber to the event. But, you can turn those expenses in and get reimbursed.

Most likely at level 3 you probably had to ‘apply’ to attend the conference. Someone took a look at your name and others who applied and determined you carried enough influence to make the ‘list’. No one was contacting you asking you to come, but to be in the game, you must play the game! Level 3 influence comes with VIP access to the big HR parties, which usually means you don’t have to stand in line!

Level 2 HR/TA Influencer: You’re paying your own travel, but enough level 3-5’s didn’t want to come to our event, so we’ll give you a free pass to get in! With this free pass, we’ll make you dance like a monkey and do anything else we ask. Where a t-shirt with your logo? Sure! Many level two’s will bunk up in a two queen room. I once asked Kris Dunn if he wanted to share a room and he wouldn’t talk to me for a month! He was definitely not at level 2!

Level 1 HR/TA Influencer: At level 1 you’re paying your own way for everything. Travel, conference admission, etc. You’re probably sharing an Airbnb with other level 1’s and 2’s to help offset the cost, but you’ve got a dream, the Gerry Crispin 4-room suite dream! Plus, you can probably make at least a meal or two from snacks and candy given out at expo booths, and some giant HR vendor will have a huge party you can attend with the rest of the heard!

Some vendors completely screw themselves when they don’t understand the levels! If you’re a level 5 and a vendor treats you like a level 3, you can best believe you’ll never go back to that event! But, if you treat a level three, like a level 4 or 5, you just created an influencer friend for life! It works both ways!

The key for vendors is to try and get the most value for the level. It’s Moneyball! I want an up and coming level 3, who will probably be a 4 or 5 soon, to be at my event! I can get level 4 or 5 influence, on a level three budget. The hard part for all vendors is understanding who actually has real influence and who’s just pretending. Since I wrote the HR/TA Influence levels, I’m putting myself down as having some influence! 😉

Should Talent Acquisition Be Driving Revenue in Your Organization? #VueDD17

Posted on by
Reply

I’m on a plane flying back from HireVue’s Digital Disruption in Park City, UT this week. Really well-done user conference which is more non-user conference than user conference. Agenda loaded with great TA content, a ton of really high-level TA leaders in attendance to drive great conversation and almost no product pitch!

One of the panels they had took a strange turn down the path of whether or not, as part of a great candidate experience, TA should be making consumer offers within the apply-hire process. Basically, everyone on the panel (all retail of some sort) were really excited about their ability to drive increased revenue by sending candidates consumer offers during the hire process.

“Hey, Mary, thanks for applying for the Manager of Accounting on Wednesday, we hope to get back to you soon on the next steps! In the meantime, please feel free to use this code for 35% off regular price merchandise at the Shoe Barn!” 

My first reaction was horror!

The last thing I need my TA leaders concentrating on is driving revenue. I need talent. Figure that out and then let’s talk about you and your sales capabilities!

But the more I thought I about it, the more I think I’m on the wrong side of this!

If you’re in the business of making money to stay in business, shouldn’t every single part of your organization be focused on driving revenue? I think so. Profit or Non-profit, I want an organizational culture that is about maximizing revenue so we can better serve our mission, whatever that might be.

Can TA drive revenue through candidates? Yep. The bigger your are, the more opportunity you have. Clearly, retail, dining, etc. probably have a better chance of being more successful at this task.

Word of Caution: If you want to leverage candidates to drive revenue you better first have your candidate experienced buttoned up end to end! You can’t be awful at candidate experience and think your discount offers are going to play well when the candidate is pissed off because they never even heard if you got their application!

Bad candidate experience will more than likely lead to a bad consumer experience. So, don’t think that offering a ‘Free Appetizer” to candidates who got turned down are going to make them feel better about not getting the job!

The panel offered up a great suggestion to where these offers probably fit best – after the first interview. This goes out to those candidates who you felt were worthy of the next step, give them a little thank you and an opportunity to experience your organization on the consumer side as the process moves forward.

All of these offers can be tracked and TA can actually show how much revenue they are driving to the top line of the organization. Don’t gloat too much about your $250K in revenue you gave away at a 35% discount. That margin is low, but revenue is revenue, and besides Ops, no one else in the organization can say they added to top line sales!

I actually asked one of the HireVue product people if they would be willing to tie a data point to candidates who buy the most on one of these offers! They laughed in my face! But think about the slippery slope this creates.

I want to hire ‘fans’ of my brand. My biggest fans probably spend the most in buying stuff from my brand. So, if I can offer applicants a code to buy, why wouldn’t I want to talk to the suckers candidates who bought the most!?!

Food for thought Revenue Driving TA Leaders!

3 Reasons You’re Never Fully Staffed!

Posted on by
Reply

For any HR/Talent Pro who lives with the concept of staffing levels – becoming ‘fully staffed’ is the nebulous goal that always seems to be just out of arms reach.  I’ve lived staffing levels in retail, restaurants, hospitals, etc.  I know your pain – to be chasing that magic number of ’37 Nurses’ and almost always seeming like you’re at 35 or 36, the day that #37 starts, one more drops off…

There are 3 main reasons you can’t get fully staffed:

1. Your numbers are built on a perfect world, which you don’t live in.

2. Your hiring managers refuse to over-hire.

3. Your organization actually likes to be understaffed.

Ok, let me explain.

The concept of being fully staffed is this perfect-case scenario – a theory really – in business that there is a ‘perfect’ amount of manpower you should have for the perfect amount of business that you have at any given moment.  That’s a lot of perfects to happen all at once!  Usually, your finance team comes up with the numbers based on budgeting metrics.  These numbers are drawn down to monthly, weekly, daily and hourly measures to try and give you a precise number of ‘bodies’ needed at any given time.  You already know all of this.  What you don’t know is why this type of forecasting is so broken when it comes to staffing.

These models are predictive of having a fully functioning staff to meet the perfect number needed.  Fully trained, fully productive, etc.  If the model says you need 25 Nurses to run a floor, in reality, you probably need much more than that.  Finance doesn’t like to hear this because they don’t want to pay 28 Nurses when the budget is for 25 Nurses.

You’re in HR, you know the reality of staffing 25 Nursing openings (or servers, or assembly workers, or software developers, etc.) takes more than 25 Nurses.  You have Nurses who are great and experienced and you have ones who are as green as grass -you have ones retiring in a few months, some taking leave, some leaving for other jobs, etc.  Because of this, you have a budget for overtime – why? – because you need coverage.  This why you need more than 25.  And the staffing levels argument goes around in circles with finance.

I’ve worked with some great finance partners that get the entire scenario explained above, and they would let me hire as many people as I felt I needed and it still didn’t work!?  Hiring managers struggle with one very real issue, “what if?” What if, Tim, we do get all 28 hired and now I only have needs for 25?  What will we do?!

Even when you explain the reality, they will subconsciously drag their feet not to hire just in case this might actually come true.  I’ve met with HR/Talent Pros from every industry and all of them share very similar stories.  They can’t get fully staffed because of what little stupid ‘perfect’ concept – “what if we actually get staffed!”  That’s it.

You can’t get staffed because you actually might get staffed!  If your fully staffed hiring managers are now held accountable to being leaders.  If you’re fully staffed, plus some extra, hiring managers have to manage performance and let weak performers go.  If you’re fully staffed being a hiring manager actually becomes harder.

When you’re understaffed everyone realizes why you keep a low performer, why you allow your people to work overtime they now count on as part of their compensation and can’t live without.  When you’re understaffed everyone has an excuse.

You’ll never become fully staffed because deep down in places you don’t talk about at staffing meetings you like to be understaffed, you need to be understaffed.

The Top 7 Sources of Hire for 2017!

Posted on by
5

Silkroad released their annual Sources of Hire 2017 report and I always love looking at big sets of data around the source of hire because I think the vast majority of organizations are misallocating their talent acquisition resources in a big way, and this data just gives me more evidence to point to!

Check out this chart:

So, it looks like Employee Referrals remain king! That doesn’t surprise anyone, what should be surprising are two items from this list:

1. Organizations are wasting more time on Indeed than any other place. 2nd place of a waste of time is LinkedIn. What? If the vast majority of your interviews are coming from Indeed, but a much smaller percentage of your hires are coming from Indeed, you have a misallocation of resources. LinkedIn has the same thing happening but from a much smaller overall number.

2. CareerBuilder is exponentially a better overall value than LinkedIn, but when I ask most companies to give me their #1 spend LinkedIn is almost always their largest single purchase when it comes to the source of hire, even though it’s #7 overall.

So, what does this data tell us?

First, if you are not investing in automating and increasing your employee referral program, you should probably not hold a TA leadership position at any company in the world. I find most organizations spend the least amount of money ‘marketing’ and ‘automating’ their referral program than any other single source they have. Yet, it’s their number one source and their number one quality of hire source.

Second, Indeed does drive a ton of traffic, and for many companies that’s organic (free) traffic, so you can’t beat that. It’ll be nice to see if Google Jobs changes all of this when it’s fully live. You should see a traffic shift from Indeed to Google as a source of hire. But, this doesn’t mean Indeed will go away. Just like the job boards, people will find value and talent at Indeed.

Third, if you’re single biggest spend is on LinkedIn, yet, it’s not your single biggest source of hire, you’re being taken. By whom? Most likely your recruiting team who claims LinkedIn is awesome when it’s really not that awesome, for you. If your hires per source and cost per hire per source work out that LinkedIn is number one for you, great! Spend more! This data shows it probably won’t.

Lastly, you should be striving to make your sources and interviews be fairly equal if possible. If you’re interviewing a ton from a source because you get great traffic, but you don’t make many hires, it’s a greater waste of time than those sources where you get a high interview to hire ratio.

One final cool stat:

3:1  

14 Million applicants, 655,000 interviews. This data tells us what the magic number is that we already all know, it takes three interviews to make one hire.

Feels right, doesn’t it?

Scared Straight – OFCCP Style!

Posted on by
6

Being a parent of three boys I’ve always been a fan of the theory behind “Scared Straight”! Your kids don’t listen to you, they’re getting in trouble, just send them down to the local prison and have them meet with some inmates! I mean what could go wrong?

In adult life, we don’t have many ‘scared straight’ opportunities. Maybe you painted the front door of your house the wrong color and the subdivision council sent you a strongly worded letter of compliance. Maybe your dog dug up your neighbor’s flowers and she left a handwritten note in your mail box looking for reimbursement, and to be taken off your holiday cookie list. Or, maybe it’s a cease and desist letter from a big HR Tech company’s lawyer telling you to stop saying ‘they suck’ on your blog.

For the most part, it’s hard to get scared straight as adults!

The OFCCP is probably the biggest scared straight organization for HR. Worse then employment attornies for sure! I get threatened to get sued by employees daily, that’s no longer a fear, but DO NOT tell me the OFCCP is on the phone!

It used to be the OFCCP only followed up on complaints and such. You have an extremely low chance of a ‘random’ OFCCP audit. That’s all been changing because of big data. Turns out, someone at OFCCP shows them how to run a basic statistical analysis of the data you send them on your applicants and who you hired.

Check out this chart from ERE and Nicole Greenberg, Esq. (go read the article Nicole does a fantastic job and is the first person in history to make an OFCCP  article that is interesting!) 

So, this data is from a company that had to pay $1.7 Million because they discriminated in not hiring Asian candidates. No one complained that they were discriminated against. OFCCP just looked at the data and said, “Hey, if 77% of applicants are Asian and you only hire 14% of those, you’re being discriminatory in your hiring practices!”

This should scare you straight, like immediately! Especially if you work in a company that has government contracts!

Of course, how the OFCCP is doing this is fraught with bad data interpretation. Just because 77% of my applicant pool is Asian doesn’t mean I’m being discriminatory in hiring. What if, for 77% of those Asian applicants who applied for Front End QA Engineer actually had a degree in accounting and no IT background!?

Doesn’t matter, you are now in an audit that is going to uncover some stuff! Most likely with numbers that far apart, you’re going to have a hard time arguing you’re not at least a little discriminatory in your hiring!

Nicole smartly points out that the government’s own contracting language forces many companies to be discriminatory in hiring in some aspects. Most government contracts require those working on the contract to be U.S. citizens. So, you could have the numbers above in the chart, being following the requirements on the contract and not hiring foreign nationals, and the OFCCP would still find you discriminatory in hiring! Welcome to the American Dream!

So, consider this a heads up. Go run your numbers. Find your hot spots in your organization and address them.

Why Am I Being Ghosted After I Interviewed?

Posted on by
3

Dear Timmy,

I recently applied for a position that I’m perfect for! A recruiter from the company contacted me and scheduled me for an interview with the manager. I went, the interview was a little over an hour and it went great! I immediately followed up with an email to the recruiter and the manager thanking them, but since then I’ve heard nothing and it’s been weeks. I’ve sent follow-up emails to both the recruiter and the manager and I’ve gotten no reply.

What should I do? Why do companies do this to candidates? I would rather they just tell me they aren’t interested than have them say nothing at all!

The Ghost Candidate

************************************************************

Dear Ghost,

There are a number of reasons that recruiters and hiring managers ghost candidates and none of them are good! Here’s a short-list of some of these reasons:

– They hated you and hope you go away when they ghost you because conflict in uncomfortable.

– They like you, but not as much as another candidate they’re trying to talk into the job, but want to leave you on the back burner, but they’re idiots and don’t know how to do this properly.

– They decided to promote someone internally and they don’t care about candidate experience enough to tell you they went another direction.

– They have a completely broken recruitment process and might still be going through it believing you’re just as happy as a pig in shi…

– They think they communicated to you electronically to bug off through their ATS, but they haven’t audited the process to know this isn’t working.

– The recruiter got fired and no one picked up the process.

I would love to tell you that ghosting candidates is a rare thing, but it’s not! It happens all the time! There is never a reason to ghost a candidate, ever! Sometimes I believe candidates get ghosted by recruiters because hiring managers don’t give feedback, but that still isn’t an excuse I would accept, at least tell the candidate that!

Look, I’ve ghosted people. At conference cocktail parties, I’ve been known to ghost my way right back up to my room and go to sleep! When it comes to candidates, I don’t ghost! I would rather tell them the truth so they don’t keep coming back around unless I want them to come back around.

I think most recruiters ghost candidates because they’re over their head in the amount of work they have, and they mean to get back to people, but just don’t have the time. When you’re in the firefighting mode you tend to only communicate with the candidates you want, not the ones you don’t. Is this good practice? Heck, no! But when you’re fighting fires, you do what you have to do to stay alive.

What would I do, if I was you? 

Here are a few ideas to try if you really want to know the truth:

1. Send a hand written letter to the CEO of the company briefly explaining your experience and what outcome you would like.

2. Go on Twitter and in 140 characters send a shot across the bow! “XYZ Co. I interviewed 2 weeks ago and still haven’t heard anything! Can you help me!?” (Will work on Facebook as well!)

3. Write a post about your experience on LinkedIn and tag the recruiter and the recruiter’s boss.

4. Take the hint and go find a company who truly values you and your talent! If the organization and this manager treats candidates like this, imagine how you’ll be treated as an employee?