What I Learned About The Job Search When I Was On The Other Side
Lessons from my time hiring people
If you don’t hear back right away, it may not be about you at all.
If you don’t hear back right away after submitting your resume or even interviewing, don’t assume it’s because the company doesn’t like you. I’m not trying to excuse this, it is not the ideal way to treat candidates. But it does happen. Despite going in with the full intention of getting back to people right away and creating a process that was as painless as possible, there were great candidates who I left waiting for far longer than I should have. Even when I wanted to hire someone.
When you’re facing multiple work fires, your CEO wants something from you, you need to get the board an agenda for their meeting tomorrow, you absolutely have to be ready for the team meeting later in the day, etc., it’s far easier than it should be to be human and forget, or to have to push your response to the next day. Again, I’m not saying this is right, just that when the company doesn’t have a dedicated recruiting person, this can happen even among well-meaning people.
If you don’t get the job, it may not be about you at all.
I wasn’t involved in this, but at Facebook I saw that jobs often got posted even though there were already several internal candidates who’d learned about the job weeks before it got posted. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t apply to big companies; my team and the company hired many non-Facebookers when I was there. But if you don’t get the role, know that it doesn’t necessarily say anything about you.
If you don’t get the job, it might say more about the company than you.
Not only does it not say anything bad about you, sometimes it may even say something good about you. Hiring managers are human, and sometimes we post something only to realize that we’re actually interviewing people who have far too much experience and would likely be bored in the role. Interviewers also know more about the interpersonal dynamics at the company and what the role actually looks like (which can be very different from the description).
If someone is unhappy, they may really like you and then decide that you have similar values, and since they clash with their manager you’d probably clash with them too. For example, maybe you really value ownership and being left alone to work through projects, and the person knows everyone on the team complains about how their boss is a micromanager who wants to collaborate on everything. I’ve also interviewed people who I really liked who, based on the interview, I thought would hate the actual work of the job. One time this happened and we hired the candidate anyway, they were miserable, and their manager needed to put them on a performance improvement plan.
For non-technical roles, good interview questions work better than hiring tests.
There’s a lot of debate about hiring tests right now, as in theory they can make hiring more fair, while in practice they often end up as little more than unpaid work. I think hiring tests can be ok if they are time-bound and candidates are compensated for their work. But I don’t like them because, in my experience, they don’t really work. I’ve spoken to others who hired someone because they loved their hiring test, only to have that person be their most difficult employee to work with. I’ve also seen this fail the other way, where someone is passed on because their writing sample isn’t the best, and then that person is hired later and ends up being amazing at their job. These aren’t outliers either; I’m having a hard time thinking of a non-technical case where someone’s hiring test predicted their work.
One tried and true practice has, for me, worked far better than hiring tests: structured interviews. In these you create a set of questions designed to check for the criteria that are important to you. For these questions, candidates should be able to answer with a specific example of a situation and the action they took (or, for a hypothetical, the action they would take), and you should ask each candidate the same questions. All of the hires I’m most proud of went through this process. And I can’t think of anyone I hired who went through this process and then underperformed.
Your story doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to make sense.
As a job searcher, I worried about how I switched careers from attorney to product manager. I worried about the gaps in my resume, where I’d left a role without having a new one lined up. Fortunately I had a good career coach who told me to create a clear narrative and own my story. It worked when I was interviewing, and I saw how well it worked when I was hiring. For example, I’ve seen candidates who, going against conventional wisdom, left roles after less than a year. As an interviewer, as long as the person had a reasonable answer that wasn’t “I hated everyone there,” we were quickly on to the next question. What feels like a big deal to you may be something your interviewers don’t care about at all.
Do you have anything you learned from being on the other side of hiring, or any tips you have for job searchers? If so, please reach out to me at tltcoaches@gmail.com. And if you’re interested in coaching, you can find me at The Leadership Team.
