| I'm not a recruiter, but I've done a lot of recruiting and hiring inside of companies. Your points about the process being lumpy and drawn out is the thing that many candidates don't quite understand. Some large companies hire engineers non-specifically into large talent pools, then assign them to specific teams or positions later. If you're operating at this scale, there's no excuse for not moving quickly and following up with candidates. Most companies don't operate like this, though. They're looking for one candidate to fill one specific position, and hiring the wrong person is a costly mistake. It takes time to gather candidates for a narrowly-scoped job description, coordinate interviews that work with their schedule, get approvals, and push the hire through. Going into this, I thought communicating weekly with candidates would be a good thing, as more communication is better. To my surprise, frequent communications without progress is misinterpreted as a negative signal by a lot of candidates. I could send the most harmless e-mail explaining that we're still moving forward with the hiring process but haven't made any decisions yet, and candidates would assume this meant they were going to be rejected. Younger candidates were especially prone to over-reactions, with some of them explicitly withdrawing from the process to avoid the possibility of explicit rejection (Usually remedied with a phone call). In an ideal world we'd move as fast as possible from interview to hire. In the real world, coordinating interviews with more than 5 candidates while everyone is also trying to do their regular job duties just takes time. Still, it should be standard practice to let candidates know when the position has been filled or they have been removed from consideration. I've also noticed that expectations from some candidates, especially the recent college grads, are getting out of control. For example, I've had a few candidates get irate that our offer letters had expiration dates set 2 weeks in the future. There's a growing misconception that any expiration date on an offer is an "exploding offer" and therefore a predatory practice. I have to explain that we can't keep the position open for them indefinitely, and if they don't want the job then we can't keep our 2nd choice candidate on the hook forever. |
I've done my fair share of hiring. We have hiring windows too, and have to close a candidate in a reasonable time. But when we started down this path, I made sure that we explained the time frames and where they came from up front, and agreed with the candidate on a reasonable window. At the time of interviewing, which is the crucial part.
That way everyone knew where they stood, and more importantly, the candidates who were in the middle of a lengthier interview process with another company could arrange the time frames to suit us. Most of the time 2 weeks was perfectly fine. Some of the candidates needed 3 weeks. One ended up requiring a month.
But because the expiration windows were agreed upon together with candidates when they were still early in the process, they were not caught off guard.