Nowadays, it’s easy to fire off a quick text or email informing the candidate or recruiter of a decision, no matter where you are in the talent acquisition lifecycle. And yet, ghosting continues, particularly in and around the interview stage, frustrating recruiters and infuriating candidates.

It creates a bad experience for everyone involved and can even cause long-lasting damage to both your relationships and your employer brand. The real trouble is that ghosting is symbolic of larger issues in the process. So why does ghosting happen, and how can you prevent it? 

Finding the Cause 

No matter which side of the table you’re on, recruiting is emotional. For candidates, looking for a new job can be time-consuming and tied to feelings of self-worth, and getting an offer can literally change someone’s life overnight.

Similarly, looking for the right candidate is almost always time-consuming for hiring teams and requires making tough decisions. No one wants to disappoint the other, so sometimes, it feels easier to avoid the situation entirely. As if when we disappear, we don’t disappoint. 

Laura Mazzullo, founder and owner of East Side Staffing, explained the psychology behind this thinking to SHRM, saying, “The fear paralyzes them from even sending an email. The year is all about ‘How will the other person respond? What if they hang up on me? What if they yell at me? What if they’re disappointed in me? What if they give me a long, undesired sales pitch to try and change my mind?’” 

The what-ifs can affect anyone, especially when it comes time to interview. By acknowledging this, it becomes clear that today’s competitive job market exacerbates a long-standing issue and one you need to face head-on to solve. 

Facing Your Fears 

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “Hurt people, hurt people.” But the truth is that emotional avoidance makes nearly every situation worse and ghosting perpetuates a cycle of bad behavior. Discussing how ghosting spreads in a recent webinar, John Leech, Director of Talent Acquisition, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, explains, “I think now we’re feeling the pain that, ‘Wow, I can’t believe this candidate ghosted me, and we’re going to put them on a shortlist of not being able to apply here again.”

To Leech’s point, this mentality is concerning for recruiters because the relationships they foster and develop directly correspond to hiring outcomes. Likewise, the more you ghost and the further into the process, the more candidates will avoid working with you and your organization. 

As the one setting up the interviews, it’s important to remember that dispositioning and disconnecting from candidates (even ones you really like) is part of your job. It’s not a fun part of your job, but it comes with the territory. The more proactive you can be in your communications, the better. 

Fixing the Process 

If you are the ghost, you are choosing to avoid your candidate. If you are being ghosted, your candidates are choosing to avoid you. As Mazzullo reminds, “We can only control our own behavior. We can choose not to ghost. We can choose to close a process out.” 

To her point, ghosting comes down to a conscious choice. By focusing on what you can control, you have the ability to fix your output before it impacts others. You can gently disconnect from candidates, rather than leave them hanging.

It can be a quick note, thanking them for their participation and the time they spent with you. Think about prioritizing kindness and making the message personal. How you let someone down directly reflects your process for talent acquisition: the when, where, why and how you hire. 

In the webinar with Leech, William Tincup shared that there are software engineers who outsource their first “three to four” interviews to stand-ins until they know the company is serious about them. Tincup points out that these candidates don’t want to go through a battery of tests to prove themselves.

For others, the mere idea of going through three to four rounds of interviews could be reason enough to ghost. Understanding where the ghosting occurs is an essential data point if you’re interested in improving your process.

From there, it’s possible to exert control and create an interview experience that caters to the hiring team and candidates, encouraging open dialogue between both sides. It might not scare away all the ghosts, but at the very least, you’ll know you’re practicing good vibes only.  

The post Ghosting: What Goes Around Comes Around appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

For too long, culture seemed to exist in a vacuum, seemingly distinct from the workforce it is meant to support. That stems from the fact that there is more than one culture within an organization, there are two: your company culture and your hiring culture. Here’s what that means and how it impacts the role talent acquisition and human resources play in the process:

Company Culture

Nine times out of 10, when you sit down to read a book about becoming a better leader, it will tell you to build a better culture. That’s usually where the lesson ends because most of these resources are talking to CEOs and drawing on the work of management consultants, social scientists and industrial-organizational psychologists rather than HR and TA pros. Still, the basic premise of company culture hasn’t changed much since researchers coined the original definition.

Following Edgar Schein’s model, company (or in his context, organizational) culture involves behaviors and artifacts, values and basic assumptions. The interplay of these three factors forms the basis of company culture, influencing how employees interact and treat each other.

Some artifacts and behaviors are visible, such as those kegs in the kitchen or takeout Fridays, whereas values and basic assumptions are implicit, like open feedback and speaking up when you have a good idea.

Schein also suggests  company culture isn’t built in a day, which gives those with a longer tenure an advantage over newer employees and leads to the debate between hiring for “culture fit” versus “culture add.”

Hiring Culture

Hiring culture is representative of your company culture, but extends beyond your employees to include candidates, too. It is the first thing candidates experience when they engage with your organization and should reflect everything your organization embodies, including the treatment of others, candidates and employees alike.

All stakeholders play a role in shaping hiring culture, from the candidates you choose to how employees engage and interact with them. Hiring culture demonstrates how both sides treat and perceive one another.

That is why it’s essential to secure alignment between TA and HR teams as you develop the strategies that bring your cultural entities together.

Jackye Clayton, Vice President of Talent Acquisition and DEI at Textio, described how to put this in action during a recent webinar, “As recruiters and talent acquisition folks, we get to bring the change. We have to be thoughtful in understanding that the people we bring in could potentially change the whole culture. We have to take the time to build the persona of what type of person is going to find this environment great. So that means a regular visit of what is our company culture? What are we looking for? What’s missing? What voices are missing that add to that culture? And we have to bring those things full circle when we’re looking at candidates.”

Striking a Balance

Building on what Clayton shared, if you can trace where the company culture comes from, structurally and institutionally, you can communicate it to candidates from your initial point of contact. That establishes a baseline of understanding between company and candidate that will evolve throughout the process.

If you start out of sync, it’s more likely a candidate will feel the company duped them when they walk in on day one and find the culture isn’t what they expected. That said, hiring and company culture will always be separate to some extent, both evolving over time. It’s up to TA and HR to team up and reflect company culture in hiring culture in a way that feels authentic.

The bottom line is that by only focusing on company culture and not hiring, employers run the risk of hindering organizational growth and development. For instance, you can be diverse, inclusive and equitable on the inside, but if your candidates don’t experience that during the recruiting process, they’re less likely to feel like they will belong as an employee.

Ultimately hiring culture is what brings those people into your company culture. It’s a chance to promote the values that are important to your organization alongside your artifacts (even the ping pong table) and assumptions – everything a candidate would need to know to join the team – and succeed.

The post Below the Surface: Is That Your ‘Company Culture’ or Your ‘Hiring Culture?’ appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

For the sake of perspective, let’s take a look at a story that one candidate shared regarding how bias affected her interview experience. 

The Story

My interview was the common live virtual setup. We used Zoom, a recruiter took center screen and the hiring manager joined in the background. Of course, we all said hello, talked about the weather then commenced. 

The interview started off okay.  I was asked to walk through my resume and then describe my responsibilities in my most recent role.

But then the questions became more personal, uncomfortable and potentially illegal: 

• • • How do you spend your weekends?
    • How long have you had your TikTok account?
    • Are you married?
    • How many children do you have?
    • How are you going to spend your Christmas?
    • Do you smoke or use alcohol?

I felt the questions were invasive and as if I was being judged on aspects of my life that had nothing to do with my skill set. This made the situation very uneasy for me. There were even a few minutes when the interviewers made a joke about an internal situation that I should not have been privy to. 

Speaking from a candidate’s eye-view, I felt disrespected and as if my time was not valued, wasted even. I was offered the position and did not accept. Based on the interview and the people responsible for making me feel welcome at the organization, there were too many red-flags to abide by and I don’t think it would have been an inclusive environment where I would feel comfortable working. 

What Went Wrong in This Scenario?

Unfortunately, the scenario above is repeated frequently in various organizations and throughout multiple industries. Many times the hiring team members conducting the interview are not properly prepared and are simply ignorant to what can and cannot be asked during a job interview. 

If the interview isn’t planned in advance and interviewers are not trained on how to conduct themselves, the organization may be held liable for any damages.

If not informed on how to conduct an interview, most interviewers naturally default to their own biases. It’s been reported that lawyers, bankers, consultants and other professionals tend to look for someone like themselves in interviews. This can obviously lead to gender-biased hiring based on job titles, racial discrimination, ageism as well as many other biases.

And it’s not just candidates witnessing biases in interviews. Recent data reveals that 42% of recruiters believe interview bias is a problem in traditional interviews. The fact is, some questions just simply should not be asked by a hiring team. There is no in between; questions are either okay or they are not.

A safe, inclusive and legal hiring practice may feel like an out-of-reach ceiling when we read stories like the above. The truth is, however, properly trained hiring teams have the tools at hand to ensure best practices are being used. Interview questions should not be a guessing game.  

What You Can Do

The first thing a hiring team can do is strive to remove bias from the interview process. Organizations can use technology platforms like Clovers.ai to help hiring teams deliver a consistent and compliant interview process that helps remove bias and unconscious influencers that create it.

Once the candidate answers a question, the interviewer tends to take side roads to dive deeper into that particular topic. They go down certain paths in hopes of learning more about the character of the candidate. They ask questions like, “What are some of your hobbies?” and, “Do you enjoy living in the city?” to get to know the candidate. 

There are many interviewing tools the hiring team can use to help guide them in the process of asking the right questions of a candidate. Clovers provides interviewers live, guided questions in real-time to help them stay on track. You can also check out their Essential Checklist for Inclusive Interviewing that offers guidance on how to avoid asking biased, discriminating and illegal interview questions. 

A candidate will (hopefully) come prepared for the interview and the hiring team should do the same. Being casual is not a negative, but it is the responsibility of the hiring team to protect the integrity of the candidate experience. This interview guide from Clovers.ai provides a list of to-dos for hiring teams.

Survey the Candidates

Feedback on a hiring team’s performance from the candidate, hired or not, helps the organization understand better where they are passing or failing in the interview process, as well as be better organized and informed in the future. This is especially important in terms of biases, which are often unconscious. 

What a candidate experiences, especially if negative, will be shared. Spreading a bad experience via word-of-mouth is one of the most damaging “reviews” a company can receive. 

From a candidate’s perspective, it’s stressful enough job-hunting and going through all it takes to get to the interview. The hiring team should be professional and prepared to ask job-related questions and treat each candidate as if they’re just as important as any new employee.

To keep a flow of great talent, a company needs to maintain a clean reputation, understand the candidate’s perspective, follow-up respectively and be conscious of biases during the interview process and beyond, of course.

The post A Candidate’s Perspective: Biased (and Even Illegal) Interview Questions appeared first on RecruitingDaily.