10 reasons people hate interviewing at your company

How we hire people needs to change

Now to start — I am a Career Coach & HR expert. People pay me money to help improve their hiring processes, create an interview process that makes people WANT to work for their company and basically tell them what to do.

But this list is yours for free — and are the top reasons people hate your hiring process. Ok — here goes.

1. 26 interviews. Screening call, first in person interview, interview with the team, coffee chat with the CEO, making sure you and the office dog get along, having a zoom call with the entire sales department. Anything more than 3 interviews or more than 3 hours is offensive. Period.
2. Projects that are actually work. Now, I think that every marketing person, writer and graphic designer knows EXACTLY what I am talking about. You finish your 2nd interview and they pass you an “at home” assignment that asks you to create a marketing plan for their product — that JUST HAPPENS to be their new product. No. No. No. No. No. Gross. What should you do instead. Have them do a 30 minute timed project. You can see how they work under pressure and you can see what they can come up with.
3. You never follow up. 22 interviews and project and then…nothing. Not a phone call. Not a follow up thank you. Not even a response to the email where you ask what is happening. People remember this. Good hiring practice is good PR. So if you are spending millions of dollars on telling the world how AMAZING you are but you do not follow up with candidates. I highly recommend assigning an admin person 2 hours a week to send out thank you emails. See what I did there — $60 bucks a week.

4. Brain Teasers. Um yeah — I am a 40 year old expert. Why are you handing me a rubix cube or a logic puzzle to see how my brain works. Please refer to page 2 of my resume where I explain how I developed programs for tens of thousands of people. So now you know where you can put that brain teaser….

5. Asking for 1800 qualifications and paying $16 an hour. This requires no explanation. Don’t do this. Pay people what they are worth.

6. This conversation — “please tell us what kind of salary you are looking for” NO YOU TELL ME THE SALARY! Would I offer to buy a house if I didn’t know the price? Would I buy groceries if there were no price tags? Nope. Lack of pay transparency is a systemic practice that is used to under pay women, POC and those with disabilities. To learn more and how you can change this read HERE.

7. Asking candidates to give their current boss as a reference. Want to know how to make an excited potential employee want to rip your eyes out? Ask them to serve up their current manager as a reference. This is such an awful practice and completely unnecessary. Pick someone else. It is that easy.

8. Changing the game. I call this the bait and switch. You go through the process for a manager role and they present you an offer as a Coordinator. Um, what? Or — you agree on a salary range (after going through the stupid process listed in item 6) and they come back UNDER that range. Then come the crap excuses — oh we think you can work up to that title. We are scaling back the position. WALK AWAY CANDIDATE. WALK AWAY. This is a company that has NO HOT IDEA what they are doing. If they screw you in the interview process they will screw you as an employee. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

9. Adding a video submission to your application. If you want to not have them do a cover letter or resume — sure have at it. Ask for a video. But having walked through this process on the hiring side — I have NOT ONCE seen a video add value to the hiring process. In fact, I know that 90% of those videos are never watched. So let’s just stop with this farce shall we?

10. And finally….even worse than the 26 interviews….I present — the whole day interview. You get there at 8am. They grill you for two hours — then play mind games with you. “Do you want to have lunch with the team or alone?” Here is some paper — you can write something or not. Please sit and watch our production team work for an hour. How did this start? I have no idea but I am going to need you to stop doing this — um right now.

Allison Venditti is a Career Coach, HR Expert and pay transparency and equity advocate. She is the founder of www.careerlove.ca and www.thisismomsatwork.com Canada’s largest and most awesome community of working mothers.

Oh and when she is recruiting — she always lists the salary range because that is what progressive, equitable leaders do. Follow me @thisismomsatwork on instagram for more obvious hiring advice and fun gifs :)