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I interviewed at a small company. I came in, talked to several people, cruised through some coding problems, and left with smiles and handshakes. Sent the usu
by was_hellbanned 13y ago
I interviewed at a small company. I came in, talked to several people, cruised through some coding problems, and left with smiles and handshakes. Sent the usual thank-you email, too.
About three months later, after I'd long written them off, I got a call from them. They'd "been busy" and asked if I could come by the next day. This time, I met with several people working on the projects I'd be helping them with (mostly porting code to platforms I had a ton of experience on). Everything was looking good. Then the HR guy said something like, "you don't seem very excited." Since no talk of an offer of any kind had come up yet, I was severely tempted to remind him that, after the last time I came in, I didn't hear from them again for months.
The last thing said to me upon exiting the interview, again, all smiles and handshakes, was, "I'll give you a call tomorrow. But if you don't hear from me, give me a call."
Fuck that. From the moment I left their building, I never gave them another thought. As expected, I didn't hear a peep from them.
Employers like to complain about how hard it is to find talent, but then they behave like this. It's as much our evaluation of them as it is their evaluation of us.
I've been on the other side of it, too. Being made to interview candidates when we have absolutely no need for additional people, or for groups wildly unrelated to anything I do in the company. I wanted to tell the people, "look, you're probably never going to hear from us again because, frankly, we don't need anybody, and nobody in engineering has any idea why we're interviewing you."
- hamburglar 13y ago> The last thing said to me upon exiting the interview, again, all smiles and handshakes, was, "I'll give you a call tomorrow. But if you don't hear from me, give me a call." I might have been inclined to respond, "you don't seem very excited." :D
- blisterpeanuts 13y agoYou're funny. I might say, I express my excitement in other ways. (cue a joke about is that a banana in your pants or are you just happy to see me)
- Morgawr 13y ago>The last thing said to me upon exiting the interview, again, all smiles and handshakes, was, "I'll give you a call tomorrow. But if you don't hear from me, give me a call." >Fuck that. From the moment I left their building, I never gave them another thought. As expected, I didn't hear a peep from them. I don't understand, why wouldn't you give them a call? I mean, sure, if it's not the place for you then it's fine, but just putting it off because of that.. I do not understand. At least they had the human decency of letting you know that they might be busy and forget to give you a call, and encouraged you to remind them. Way better than most other companies that just ignore you altogether and pretend you never even existed.
- blub 13y agoSo far I have never forgotten to call or email a candidate when I personally told them I would do it. I put it in my todo list and then it gets done. This "being busy" is just a lame excuse.
- seunosewa 13y agoI guess it depends on how many candidates you interview in a day. I suspect that there is a point where taking the time to be the bearer of bad news just doesn't seem to be worth it anymore. But I guess at that point one should stop promising to call or email candidates.
- bmj 13y agoIf you are being asked to interview candidates (especially if you are being asked to coordinate/lead the interviews), then you should also have the time/bandwidth to do the follow-up work with the candidates, even if that means sending them a canned response. Another comment noted that we're talking about common human decency here--a candidate took time out of their schedule to spend a good chunk of a day (likely more, counting phone screens and travel), and someone can't take a few minutes to even respond to an email. I'm not sure I'd want to work with/under someone like that.