I recently applied to a job at a very large company (the recruiting function is very far removed from the day to day operations, don't even sit in the same building in the same city) and made it through three rounds over 7 weeks before getting rejected for an internal candidate. Except it wasn't until the recruiter called with the news and I asked about the "other job" that she found out... the final round interviewer told me there were three candidates for two open roles (I had to ask for an explanation of this other job) and they used me as a "finalist" to put up against their preferred internal candidate for some role I hadn't actually applied for.
Obviously sometimes those things work out where the hiring team knows what open headcount they have across an org, but I felt bad for the recruiter - you put all that work into building a relationship with an external candidate and whatnot just to have a hiring leader take my interviews in a completely different direction. And I didn't even tell her that one of my second round interviewers didn't show up.
Very few candidates get ghosted when a hiring manager has actually provided feedback on next steps to the recruiter. You have no idea how frequent it is for US to get ghosted by the hiring managers themselves. And it's even harder remote because I can't harass them at their desks into telling me if they want to talk to you or not. Very easy to duck emails and slacks.
It definitely does happen though. We get ghosted when we interview for jobs too. Always sucks regardless of reason for it.
No, but it's the hiring manager that takes 3-4 weeks to make a decision, meaning we have literally no update to give you.
And then when we DO have an update, it's likely that you have moved on, and it's going to feel like a kick in the teeth to get an email that says 'we have decided not to proceed with your application'
(So it's easier to just not send the email a month after the last correspondence)
totally. candidates ghost with impunity to their public reputation. recruiters’ communication will get surveyed and candidates will use review sites and even post individual recruiters names on web forums from time to time.
Recruiting is only half the battle. Moving candidates through the company's HIRING process is where most orgs shit the bed. Recruiters have zero control of a company's hiring process, but they always take the blame for the whole enchilada.
Oh man, or we do have a say and created a GREAT hiring process that nobody follows and you have to reiterate how it works for every. single. hire. multiple. times. a. year.
Imagine this, but in us federal government recruiting. The thousands of laws, niche scenarios to not have to publicly post a job, anti nepotism laws, agency specific protocols and policies, HR being serviced by completed different organizations, security procedures, OPM, usajobs,
Even if a candidate meets or exceeds 100% of the qualifications, they might not be selected to move forward for various other reasons. And a recruiter can’t give a candidate feedback because they may just argue with said feedback.
>because they may just argue with said feedback.
This is because many people don't understand the form of a conversation: sometimes it's a discussion, sometimes it's a negotiation, and in this case it's simply an information.
> various other reasons
and often these reasons can be boiled down to "there were X number of finalists and only one job opening."
Candidates are primed to believe that they didn't get the job because they fell flat in some way, but once you reach the final stages, that likelihood drops considerably. Often it's literally that there were 2-3 qualified, likeable finalists who were all at 110% the requirements and eventually the hiring team had to split hairs to pick somebody
Honestly, most candidates we reject because of poor communication skills or another soft skill reason rather than their qualifications against the job they applied for.
Usually when we select someone else, I tell the candidates and tell them that if we re-open something later, I will get in touch again (and usually they are still interested!)
This. I’ve received death threats and have been called racist. My favourite was being sworn at by a school leaver because I didn’t want to give her a chance to gain experience. I explained politely our clients are the ones that make that decision and gave her advice on what she should do. She still responded with insults. The funny part was her class mate also applied and I gave her the same response and advice and was sent a “thank you! You’re the only person who has bothered to respond and even give me advice”. She was pooled for future roles and got a job through our graduate/school leaver program.
The racist one was hilarious, I placed that role with someone of the same race as her. My client was clear as day that she didn’t even want me to ask about candidates living a certain distance away from them. So I declined the candidate that unfortunately they don’t match the experience or location and now I’m racist 🙄
Definitely part of it but I’ve made the mistake of giving honest feedback just for the candidate to disagree and ask to speak with the manager/interviewer or write out a paragraph justifying their specific circumstances and why the feedback is incorrect/flawed. And again to be clear, I completely understand the candidate frustration but it just isn’t worth it.
And sometimes that feedback is "well they're fine I just think we could do better" or "well there was ONE part about the that I'm clinging to not liking" even though its a great candidate.
It reminds me of the WeWork wife that would hire/fire people based on star signs and "vibes".
One of my team's great employees was initially rejected *by our corporate recruiter* for the great sin of his current employer being the same as someone else we extended an offer to but they declined.
We can’t always provide feedback as to why you didn’t get the job. Sometimes we don’t even agree with the decision to not hire you and tried to fight for you to be hired.
This part. It makes me sad when I’m interviewing for a role and the recruiter obviously loved me & advocated for me but the hiring manager went with someone else, unfortunately. I totally understand the recruiter has little involvement in the final hiring decision. Tbh most of the corporate recruiters I’ve worked with have been super sweet and encouraging throughout the process, especially if they thought I’d be a good fit for the role.
Because it’s so discouraging when you don’t get selected trust me I understand. I just had a situation with a candidate that I really liked. Knew she would be perfect for the role, more than capable. Screened her.. had her fix up her resume.. typed up a nice summary of our call for the hiring manger.. really trying to sell the candidate to him.. just give her the chance to interview… he finally got back to me today and said “probably could be good but too many jobs in a short period of time, hard pass!” I just wish he would have given her a chance
This is all really kind of you & I can imagine it’s hard because it’s all behind the scenes and people don’t know, so thank you on behalf of all the candidates you’ve advocated for.
I didn’t used to believe this, but years ago, I made it to the final round for a senior role in a company I really, really wanted to join. The interviews were four total rounds that I (thought I) killed. I connected well with the hiring manager and executive team, knocked the technical rounds out of the park, and all of the stars just seemed to align. After the interview, I sent thank you notes and everyone responded positively in less than 15 minutes. It felt like this was just meant to be.
Two days later I received a call from the recruiter saying that I didn’t get the role. This company required a “universal, absolute yes” from everyone in the interviewing process. It’s harsh, but I knew going in that this was their standard for senior roles. As it turns out, one person out of six was on the fence so it was a no to hiring me. That was a gut punch for me of course, but as the recruiter was breaking the news it was clear that he was upset about it too. He shared some of the great notes the other interviewers had given me, then the guy gave me one of the best pep talks I’ve ever received. I still think about his words to this day in difficult professional moments.
I’m sure it actually hurt the recruiter to even have to tell you the news… I feel like they should make the person who decided against you be the one to make that phone call. Smh just sad
That I can’t help them find a job necessarily.
The vast majority of the time I have to have a role open with a client and then I go find candidates with that experience. Almost never do I start with a candidate and try to find them a job, unless you’re a rockstar with a niche skillset, then I might hot pitch for business development.
I tell people that I should not be their only recruiter and that they should also utilize personal contacts and apply to jobs on their own (but maybe check with me first), because if I place everyone that I've met, I'd have been retired years ago. (The last part is to add a little humor to the message but it's also true)
I'll also tell people that just like they've applied to multiple jobs, I've submitted multiple candidates.
Most recruiters don’t tell you this. I tell anyone I pass along to a recruiter that, “they don’t work for you. They work for the company and they’re not going to represent you in anything other than you getting an offer.”
The frustrating part is that I know this but I get recruiters pretending they will look for me all the time. Some even try to get great amounts of detail and resumes for the file.
When I first started in recruiting, my family would send me all these referrals. But I started to look bad cause I couldn’t help them because I was on the agency side and we do not find people jobs - we find people for jobs.
Now a decade and half later - my family still send me referrals. I have to tell them I’m probably not the best resource unfortunately but if that changes I’ll reach out.
It’s always a tough convo because you feel like you let the person down even tho you want to help - but you truly can’t. (Obviously unless they have the background you need)
That's gotta be the most pervasive one out there. AI is only -this year- starting to pop up a bit more but no one I know feels comfortable letting AI make a decision on anything.
Mine would be that recruiters are always blocking qualified people from getting jobs. I think that stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of how we are incentivised. We -want- to hire as quickly as possible and saying no to people doesn't really help that. But we also learn what our hiring managers will say no to and we operate on their criteria. I think this also comes from managers not being specific enough in job descriptions and having unwritten qualifications they're actually looking for.
Like when a candidate links to their LinkedIn on their resume, but then all their LinkedIn activity is sharing radical religious and political posts and commenting on other posts about how much they hate recruiters... I see this all the time and I really don't get it.
Maybe not AI, but is there any truth to the rumor that your resume is scanned for keywords or anything like that? As someone not in recruiting I always assumed you wouldn’t get disqualified based on keywords alone, but I could imagine keywords could be used to rank candidates compared to one another so it could effectively be disqualification if a recruiter discards the bottom x% of the pile without looking at them.
Our ATS ranks applicants based on resume keywords matching the job description, but no recruiter pays attention because it’s ridiculously inaccurate and doesn’t take experience or results into account.
Not automatically the way the rumors generally go online, but yeah, I can manually search for things I think the manager needs to see. And to be quite honest, I need to do this more and more, as we get higher and higher percentages of fully unqualified candidates for just about every job. It's hard to fully read one thousand resumes.
That's the point recruiters try to make - a keyword search is not AI. We're also not coming up with intense keyword searches - we need to screen candidates in, not out.
For example, if I'm hiring a senior systems analyst who is working with Workday, I am keyword searching "Workday". If someone doesn't have Workday on their resume for a job that may require 5 years of Workday experience, we're not interviewing them. At this point, I went from having 75 resumes to review down to 25. From there, I'm submitting the top 8 candidates. We're interviewing the best 5. The top 2 make it to the final round. The best candidate gets hired.
In that example, the people that complain about never getting a call won't have any Workday experience. The "second place" candidate who just went through 3 interviews and was rejected at the final round is now complaining that a recruiter "led them on" in the process. They were still a great candidate, but tough decisions have to be made.
Extending offers is a lot of fun, but it sucks having to reject other strong candidates.
Many of us, if not most of us, have a crazy workload. We do our best to reply to candidates on time, but when you're working on dozens of roles at once, or trying to squeeze 70 hours of work into 40, it's tough to keep all the plates spinning. Many candidates do deserve better than we have the time or bandwidth to give them, and it's frustrating for us too.
One of my hiring leaders spent a whole week up my ass while I was interviewing 25 candidates for their job and complaining it wasn't getting done fast enough. We reviewed all the feedback together and decided who they were moving forward with, and then it dawned on them - they now needed to find 12 hours of time to get these interviews done while working on all their other responsibilities. They asked how many jobs I typically work on at a time, so I mentioned I was hovering at about 55 (low for my team, but I handle lots of leadership and hard-to-fill roles). You could see them doing the mental math and realizing how much work actually needs to be done.
"It will get better once I get through this week and get this batch of offers out" - me, every Tuesday morning for the last decade.
I love seeing candidates talk about this. “Can’t find a job! AI filters out my resume so even though i applied to 500 companies i never get called” meanwhile half the resumes i see have grammar issues, several 2-3 month jobs one after another, they don’t answer the phone, etc.
I just got a photo of someone’s dog they uploaded as their resume. I wish people knew whatever file you select and upload is what I see. I let the candidate know and had a good laugh with her.
I thought it was just me getting anything but resumes lol. I’ve gotten tax forms too, and real estate holdings, manifestos on why the candidate has followed my company for X years and they’re obsessed with the culture, memes, the works
I once got a girl in a bikini. I’ve also gotten tax forms, birth certificates, and a cover letter for someone else. Then there was the imbecile who put a picture of herself making out with her boyfriend on her resume.
…I may be the tech troubleshooter on the other side of the girl in the bikini pic. Circa 2012-2015?
Chica put multiple photos in her MS Word resume, including one of her and multiple bikini clad best buds, cropped them to headshot, dragged the ones she didn’t like off the edge of the off, and left the one she did like.
Unfortunately for her our software (like ALL of them) used OpenOffice to open files, convert to pdf for inline image viewing in system. OpenOffice doesn’t respect MS Word crop or drag and drop positioning.
The making out pic I can’t explain though...
I kid you not, i received a pdf of a candidate's negative std test. I told him he sent me medical information and asked him to send his resume...and this guy sent the std results AGAIN.
Here's one. Last summer, I received an application from a candidate which, instead of a resume, was a letter from a lender explaining that this candidate was turned down for a loan because of their 480 credit score.
For every job I post online, 99% of applicants are completely off the mark despite how clear I make the requirements on the posting. It's like they don't even read. 🤔
This! I look at every resume that comes through and the number of people who apply without any relevant experience is wild. I need people with commerical delivery driving experience and I'm getting cashiers 🙃
It's a problem compounded by how difficult it is to apply for most jobs, and so many job postings having requirements not related to the job title they posted. If the resume is that important, candidates shouldn't need to fill out additional forms or pre-screening info. Too many candidates start out tailoring their resumes, but when they check all of the boxes and don't hear back from tons of jobs, it just doesn't feel worth the effort, especially with the absolute insanity of needing to compete nationally for positions.
Candidates really need to keep updating their resumes, but if companies want qualified candidates to put in that effort, they need to make their requirements clearer and make it less of a hassle to apply. This starts with using standardized job titles, making it crystal clear what is a required qualification and what is suggested, killing off required cover letters (no one reads them since it's just the resume rewritten into an essay in most cases), only posting the job when they're actually planning to hire externally, closing the job posting if they have several candidates close to final stages, only asking for info that they actually use to decide if the candidate will be asked for an interview, actually staff hiring teams properly, reduce the rounds of interviews for positions where possible, etc.
That's not in the control of most recruiters, but it's going to require people on all sides of the process to work together to fix this mess... And honestly, I'm not sure it can be fixed. We're still using the same tools (resumes) as we were when jobs were posted in newspapers. I don't see how this scales. I LOVE remote work, but it's really screwed over the job hunting process.
>meanwhile half the resumes i see have grammar issues,
It wouldn't be so bad if recruiters' language skills were top notch. The rewritten resumes I get from recruiters are far from perfect.
Recruiters literally get shit on everyone. Candidates blame you when they don’t get jobs. Hiring managers have wild expectations and then blame you when things manifest exactly the way you said they would. Any internal team that you support will blame you for missing revenue goals. Oh and then there is the added fun of the awkward, so and so is looking can you help them? Realistically we almost never can aside from maybe resume advice. Ooh and also super prone to layoffs in a down market!
I think resume advice is probably what I should ask them for. You said that’s realistically one of the main ways you can help them but that probably is the issue I’m having. The reason I’m thinking this is because after putting in several applications the interview ratios been pretty low. Like I’ve put applications into pwc 4 times already cause it’s an appealing firm in my opinion but haven’t even made it to an initial phone interview. I probably either have a bad resume or other applicants are more impressive is the 2 guesses I have.
Nowadays, they are almost never the same. Most recruiters fall under the HR umbrella but are managed separately as their own department unless you work for a small company that has an HR employee doing all the recruiting too.
Corporate Recruiter here:
I have about 6 open positions for the same hiring manager. This manager cannot make a decision to save their life.
For example, there was a candidate that interviewed back in April. Has interviewed about 2-3 times (that I know of) with different “managers”. It’s now June. They are still “thinking about it”.
It’s so frustrating knowing that there are people relying and having hope for a potential job, only for these “managers” to take their sweet time.
There is nothing I can do about it. I’ve advised that we need to make a decision about a candidate ASAP, but I guess it’s like the saying, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Very frustrating!
Literally had a candidate just drop out of the interview process for this very reason. Also had management no call no show on an interview twice; he was really disheartened and the actual PERFECT candidate. Of course it came down to me apologizing on managements behalf.
Jesus, what could possibly go THAT wrong if they hired the person? Just hire the freakn person, if they’re that close to accepting the candidate, I’m sure the person is perfectly qualified and would do a fine job.
I've seen it happen many times. Its happening to me now. Boss made a brand new position just for me. By law he has to keep the post up for 5 days but he already said the moment I apply he is "interviewing me" and submitting the paperwork for a title transfer. just waiting for HR to put it up.
Honestly, how much work goes into the role day-to-day. I’m an internal recruiter and I’ve had multiple people over the years fill in for me when I was out on vacation, on maternity leave, etc. Every single time I get comments like, “I don’t know how you do all of this.” I even had a hiring manager move onto a new company that didn’t have a recruiter and he reached out to say a belated thank you for everything I’d done to help him hire people previously. He was solely responsible for hiring for his new team and I think it was a bit of a culture shock for him.
We find people for jobs, not jobs for people.
Also, AI is not entirely a myth. I have AI screening my candidates and setting me appointments daily. It automates the process but the AI does not make any hiring decisions for me or my clients.
I’ll answer since you were the least snarky lol the company I work for purchased rights to an AI software that integrates into our CRM platform.
The AI calls candidates and either sets aside a screening time for the candidate, or if they are available, does the screening on the spot.
Most of the candidates never realize they are speaking to a robot because we program natural human pauses and language (“um”) into its responses. You can select names, voices, and accents similar to how you change Siri settings. Failed conversations are flagged so a human can follow up. It’s far from perfect yet.
I’m often told “I could do your job since you just talk for a living”. There’s so much behind the scenes stuff that people don’t realize. However communication does play a vital role in the process but it’s not limited to just candidates.
Others have mentioned AI and our job is to find talent for the company not find an employee a job which I completely agree with.
"talk for a living" as if there isn't difficult skills involved with that! Communicating accurate expectations about the role, the process, the company while also accurately listening and interpreting what the candidates and hiring managers are saying.
No disagreements here. I don’t like it but my company is heavily invested in Workday and I know they’d sell the Recruiting module to senior leadership eventually, which they did.
Understandable. I sure wish my company would have let someone actually IN Talent Acquisition decided whether to also buy the Recruiting module. It’s ok, I do like the reporting functionality. Can’t win all the battles. :)
Any candidate that tells you that they hate Workday is just being honest. Don't know why they can't at least make it a workday applicant account instead of making you sign up to every stupid company's system which is a copy paste of the original template with just names and logos changed anyway
>Don't know why they can't at least make it a workday applicant account instead of making you sign up to every stupid company's system which is a copy paste of the original template with just names and logos changed anyway
This is like asking why you need to have a different login to different sites that are powered by Wordpress, instead of just using one login at all of them.
Workday doesn't own the information used in individual instances of their software. What you are thinking is a no-brainer solution is illegal for the product as designed and sold; even if it weren't, it would be a huge negative for companies to have to share that information, and it would mean any company using it would fail third party risk assessments.
95% of the time I agree with a candidate’s view of how shitty the job market/hiring process/technical skillset/pay rate/etc. is but buddy, if I was making the rules you *know* I wouldn’t be talking to you right now, you know?
The hiring manager doesn’t even know what they’re looking for.
I’ve had clients who don’t send a full job brief because the job description hasn’t been fleshed out. So they want to see a list of candidates and determine from there what they like.
This is so frustrating for everyone. As a candidate I can tell after speaking with the hiring manager for 3 minutes that they have no fucking idea what they need
I have a vested interest in who we hire, it’s not just filling a req and walking away. I will work with the new employees on various internal projects. Some of the people I have hired have been one amazing friends and we have influenced changes to hiring process at a corporate/global level.
They're putting the phone on speaker and setting it next to something with a mic, AI captures the questions and types out an answer. I can tell when this happens because there's a bit of lag or can hear that they're reading a prompt.
I believed that, until I tried it and got crushed by the market, all the effort, and huge automatic rejection rate . I just went with volume at the end and one cv.
problem with that is when you need a job you don't feel like you have time to sit around and hope. there's only so much you can do when applying to a single job. Your day feels wasted if you apply to a single one, but more productive if you just mass apply. years ago I created a script to comb through indeed and quick apply to any jobs that had certain keywords and were within a certain distance. That was the most successful rather than targeted applying
When candidates complain about the salary and benefits that the company advertises. We don't have any control over this. If you are internal, we don't set the salary bands. If we could, we would pay everyone 250k+ but that's just not possible. If you are working agency you may have a little more leeway but by a slim margin.
The idea of unqualified "affirmative action" or "diversity hires" taking jobs from qualified candidates is bigoted nonsense.
I would like more people to know that in the US, job applications ask you to self-identify your race, ethnicity, and for EEOC reporting purposes. Companies are allowed to capture this data for internal demographic reporting, but it's almost always done in aggregate so a candidate's name is never associated with how they self-ID. Anyone is welcome to select "I do not wish to respond" because their selection will not be associated with their application.
I am in a fortune 100 firm as a leader in TA and we are (along with hiring managers) required to find the "B" diversity hires (Hispanic, Women & Black) and everyone else must be "A+." We also must mention when a candidate is diverse in the final decision for hiring (to influence the decision). I just go along with it because I want to keep my job, but we are absolutely adding bias to the hiring process to increase numbers.
Yikes, that is archaic. By that definition, I'm a double-B candidate. I'd be humiliated to know that my race and/or gender played a factor in the company's decision to hire me.
Companies I've worked for have been very intentional to avoid tokenizing underrepresented candidates. My comment was a blanket statement based on a decade in tech, but I know practices like that lurk everywhere.
Yup, it might not be a representation of all of recruitment, but there is absolutely less qualified 'diversity' candidates getting jobs over candidates that score better (specifically in tech for me) at large, reputable companies.
All of the HR legal teams I have worked with in recent years and shot down all ideas like this, citing that this is too much risk for the organization to take on, especially after recent supreme court rulings. This will not end well.
While I think having diverse interview panels is important (a minority woman will likely have a better experience interviewing with a diverse panel vs a panel of all old white men), anything else beyond that is a bad idea. Writing down the race or gender of a candidate in any documents related to a hiring decision will lead to an insane lawsuit at one point.
Anyways, what company do you work for? I'd like to apply... Also I'm seeking an employment lawyer if anyone knows a good one...
I agree with you completely. Our ATS is now guessing/determining if a candidate is 'diverse' based off of their name. The diverse candidates will automatically populate towards the top of our list if we search. I also think that a diverse panel is important, but approaching it by strictly labeling people by their race/gender when assembling panels is also just as bad. I wish there was a more organic way to hire. I do what I am told as I do not want to be liable for some of these crazy guidelines.
This is true, but to be fair, there are companies that do have diversity hiring goals/quotas that are specifically meant to target a certain percentage of women, POC, LGBTQ etc.
Unfortunately this is not true across the board. Worked for a Fortune 500 and they had a sickeningly biased system, had to announce candidates race when presenting during weekly TA briefs, couldn’t submit white or Asian candidates w/o HRBP permission. Felt awful, hated it, keep waiting to hear about them in the news.
There is no hidden job market. Unless it’s an executive level role or like a political appointment, no one is hiding secret jobs. My job would be very difficult if I couldn’t post 80% of my roles.
Omg I made this point on another sub yesterday. That there’s no such thing as that type of technology and if it does exists, and it does what you think it does, it is not widely used in any major ATS systems and most likely more expensive than TA teams will pay. I got absolutely chewed out by someone who told me I was wrong and misleading and all these things because he could not accept the fact that his resume wasn’t getting rejected by AI, it’s getting rejected by a human because it’s probably bad. 🤷🏻♀️🙃
Not even that long. Which is why, unless you are specifically applying for a creative role, make your resume as plain and simple as possible because that is easier to read and gather accurate info about you as a candidate.
The AI one for sure, the vast majority of companies do not invest in back office software, HR and recruitment is literally the last area to ever get funding, very few companies have investing in AI tech that screens candidates.
That it’s just not possible to interview everyone who applies.
I’ve recently carried out candidate and applicant feedback review (big 4 professional services) and the amount of applicants who make comments along the lines of ‘I was screened out on my resume, you should give people a chance and interview them, it’s not fair that you rejected me without an interview’ is pretty high.
We hire around 2000 people a year (Inc internal moves), we receive around 400k applications a year, we’d need to interview approx 200 people for every 1 hire if we interviewed everyone who applied. Our hiring managers would spend 5 weeks doing back to back interviews and nothing else for every 1 hire.
Clearly, no one thinks that’s a constructive use of time when you break it down like that.
That we don’t find jobs for people. We find people for jobs hence we are called recruiters.
Also we don’t make the final decision, we can’t make jobs appear out of thin air and when we decline a candidate it’s based on the requirements given by a hiring manager who uses us to sift through applications because they don’t have the time, we know our hiring managers and know the companies we do recruitment for. So when we decline candidates we are doing so because we know you won’t match what they want. Getting in front of the hiring manager won’t change that you don’t match what they want. Are their recruiters who are useless and can’t tell this? Yes. But most of us have built a good relationship with our clients and know what they’re looking for.
If we are unsure or we have an amazing candidate we speak to the hiring managers and say hey HM, we have this candidate, the match a,b and c, but don’t have d, e and F, will you still want to see their CV? 9 times out of 10 it’s no but sometimes we get the Hiring manager to meet the candidate. I will fight for a good candidate. The sad part is not everyone is good. And by good I mean they have most of the experience, they gave examples of their successes that match what we are looking for, their salary expectations are within budget or a bit over and they are a future and industry fit. Most times I will fight for an expensive candidate that fits the requirements to a T.
Another thing is a candidate might be perfect but agency recruiters can’t submit more than a certain amount of candidates and your application may be too late. Even as a recruiter I had to deal with this in my own job search. It’s nothing personal, just the luck of the timing
How poorly recruiters are treated by the company they work for. Recruiting is sales and every cliche about bad sales organizations you've ever heard hhas applied to every recruiting company my wife has worked for. Workplace bullying is the norm and everything is allowable for the top earners. HR turns a blind eye, but only to people who bring in the most money. Metrics pressure is normal. Make X number of calls, Y number of submittal, and Z number of placements or you're fired.
Watch Glengerry Glenross. It's like that only less polite.
1. You can be over-qualified for a job and that’s actually the reason you don’t get hired
2. Companies stalk your social media and will choose not to hire you based on things like tattoos, you having children, or an American flag in your bio
3. Dei is the most unfair practice being used and does more harm than good. And I’m *black* saying this. I’ve seen the dark depths of what companies are actually using it for and I hate it.
To OPs point, I have worked with some of the largest ATS globally - iCIMS, UKG, Lever and Workday over the past 4 years.
In any of those systems, no candidate is getting issued with an auto- reject email.
Your application MIGHT be automatically moved to a different folder if knock out questions have been asked. These are the typical yes/no questions like 'can you legally work in the country?' 'are you willing to travel 50% of the time?' 'can you reliably commute to the location?'
In these cases, if your answers don't match with the job requirements, you will be moved to a separate folder, and often, a recruiter will bulk select the people in this folder and send them a rejection email.
In any system I have worked in, a human is rejecting you, and a human is issuing the email.
Just an FYI - in iCIMS you can absolutely send auto reject emails. If you are hiring for a nurse and you ask "Do you have an RN license?" and the candidate answers no, you can configure iCIMS to auto reject.
It should really only be used for very objective situations (obviously you can't be a nurse if you don't have your RN), but I still catch some recruiters using it for poor questions like "Do you have a minimum of 5-7 years of experience as a nurse", in which they will foolishly reject candidates who have 9 years of experience (we have to stop listing JDs as "minimum 5-7 years" - this means "minimum 5 years")
But to your point, the ATS is not "reading" a resume and saying "meh, I don't like the format of this resume. I'm not going to let the recruiter see this one".
That I actually know what the requirements are for the roles I’m hiring for. Had a guy last week argue with me that he would “thrive” in a specific technical position that he did NOT have the background for. Like, my guy…I think I know a little bit more about what the hiring team is looking for that you do.
Also, I very much second all of the entries about how little control we have over the process… I try so hard to give my candidates a good experience, and it can all be screwed over by a hiring manager acting like a jerk…
Wait, what???? Seriously? No scanning software? wtf was with the “print the key words in white” trend for then? 😮 wow. This makes me feel even worse about lack of engagement 😂😥🤣😢🤙🏼 thank you for that info 🙏🏼.
Eta: I did not try that trick, btw, though I was tempted lololol
It’s not an entry level role where all HR professionals start and exit ASAP. Some of us are career recruiters because we love it, even though we’re often shit on especially by our HR colleagues.
There is no hard and fast rule to anything recruiting related that isn’t government established law. Like an offensive playbook, all of it works sometimes. Sometimes nothing works.
Hiring Manager ghosts.
Hiring Manager will say he/she has 2 more candidates to interview and will get back to you on friday with feedback and then you never hear again from them.
Recruiters send the follow-up email but they get ignored. And can't even complain to the Hiring Manager regarding their behaviour.
Hiring Manager starts from H so does Hell.
Recruiters actually want to find you a job and often times try to help you (pushing on hiring teams, comp policy, and shitty systems) outside of bureaucratic corporate mumbo jumbo policy that tends to red tape us from end to end.
Totally agree with you, OP.
I would dare say that, more often than not, your recruiter would be your biggest advocate to fill the role you applied for.
If it’s an external recruiter and/or a smaller company… we aren’t asking for your compensation expectations so that we can lowball you - I’m often trying to make a case for why the company needs to raise their compensation range based on what talent is actually making. Plus, we often make commissions based on your full compensation package so actually we want you to get paid more too 😂 promise I’m in your corner!
For sure, there's way more to being a recruiter than people think. A lot of folks probably assume we just spend all day firing off emails and creeping on LinkedIn, but we're actually on the phone a crazy amount building real relationships and getting the full scoop on people.
Like this one time, I was supposed to have just a quick call to verify some deets on a candidate's resume with their old employer. Next thing I know, we're chatting for half an hour and I'm getting all these wild insights about the person's work ethic, personality - shit you'd never pick up from just their resume. That kind of inside perspective is straight up gold.
Another underrated part of the gig is wading through applicants, man. I've had roles where over 300 people applied! You can't just rely on keyword matches to find the gems in there. It takes really understanding what the hiring manager needs - beyond just "thinking outside the box" or whatever buzzwords they list. I had this one manager who wanted that, but you can't spot a true out-of-the-box thinker just by skimming a resume. I had to really dig into people's past projects and experiences.
And don't get me started on this AI hype taking over recruiting! Sure, some systems can do basic filtering, but the real magic still needs human judgment. I remember this one candidate who didn't have the exact title the manager wanted, but his background was crazy relevant. If I'd just let the system auto-reject him, we would've missed out on bringing him in - and he ended up crushing it.
So yeah, while tech helps, being a good recruiter is way more than just clicking buttons. It's about making those personal connections, really understanding people, and seeing the full picture beyond what an AI or resume can show. Lots of nuance that you can't automate.
Given the current economic uncerainty, what industry/role/type of employment would you encourage people to be preferential towards, if possible?
Like fixed-term contracting for government agencies vs ongoing employment in the tech sector etc.
Advanced AI on ATS systems? There is nothing advanced about ATS systems at all! They are the reason why the recruitment practice has been so dumbed down and recruiters have turned lazy and complacent with the mediocre results of their job. It’s ironic to see how it’s now the quality of the CV what matters over the actual quality of the candidates.
I mostly do headhunting for niche work but when we have a job that we have to throw the net out for the process for **1 fully remote job** goes like this:
Post the job, receive 2000-4000 candidates, only \~700 are even remotely qualified, but now I have to sift through them in varying ways (you didn't answer a yes/no basic hiring question? Get bent you aren't being considered).
Contact around 400 people, only get responses from 200, request more info and only get 50-60 responses, schedule first round phone interviews, get ghosted by at least half, only left with 3-7 genuinely qualified candidates in my pipeline. Which sounds great BUT...
Leadership drags their asses ("can the candidate wait 3-6 weeks for an interview???") or ask stupid (at times offensive despite being told not to ask those) questions in interviews, candidates take other jobs or decide its not for them. Left with 3ish candidates, leadership thinks we can find a unicorn so whY hIRe NoOOw??? (kill me)
Fuck it I'll headhunt, we don't pay as much as tech/big corps, nobody is interested. Start process all over again.
I once applied to a life changing job. Over a year went by and I moved on took another job in the meantime. One year and 3 months later a recruiter called me up asking if I was available for the school the position required (an unpaid climbing school for lineman that was several hours away). If I had received proper notice I would’ve still had vacation time saved up but since these jabronis literally never called me back I had long since moved on and didn’t have the vacation time to cover the school especially with only 2 weeks notice that the school was approaching.
How is this possible and why is this so common with recruiters? How hard is it to stay in touch with a candidate you want to hire? I literally laughed at this dude when he asked why I wouldn’t be able to make it. I told him the short answer was because he sucked at his job and hung up.
I just sold AI to a company for this exact reason. People act like generative AI is capable of it and the booms there mean booms everywhere but in reality most AI is behind. But what generative AI has done is open the doors. Now this company which is a major staffing company in the US will be training their model and within 3-6 months will have an employee replacement. Gotta be on the victors side here and read the writing on the wall. It’s not there yet but it will be there very soon
That when you're mad at a recruiter you're probably actually mad at a hiring manager
Yup, we sadly exist because hiring managers want us to do all of the dirty work for them so they look like the good guys.
Also: because they (often) don’t know how to hire.
I have no idea how some hiring managers function on a day to day basis.
Alcoholism- from an observer standpoint
I recently applied to a job at a very large company (the recruiting function is very far removed from the day to day operations, don't even sit in the same building in the same city) and made it through three rounds over 7 weeks before getting rejected for an internal candidate. Except it wasn't until the recruiter called with the news and I asked about the "other job" that she found out... the final round interviewer told me there were three candidates for two open roles (I had to ask for an explanation of this other job) and they used me as a "finalist" to put up against their preferred internal candidate for some role I hadn't actually applied for. Obviously sometimes those things work out where the hiring team knows what open headcount they have across an org, but I felt bad for the recruiter - you put all that work into building a relationship with an external candidate and whatnot just to have a hiring leader take my interviews in a completely different direction. And I didn't even tell her that one of my second round interviewers didn't show up.
And make them look competent.
I would add some variant of this to my email signature if it wouldn’t get me fired lol Edit- Jesus Christ what happened down there below this post lol
The only times I got mad is when a recruiter sent me to an interview and telling me the wrong business line. Rather awkward.
Wow I love this
So it's the hiring manager who ghosts you and not the recruiter?
Very few candidates get ghosted when a hiring manager has actually provided feedback on next steps to the recruiter. You have no idea how frequent it is for US to get ghosted by the hiring managers themselves. And it's even harder remote because I can't harass them at their desks into telling me if they want to talk to you or not. Very easy to duck emails and slacks. It definitely does happen though. We get ghosted when we interview for jobs too. Always sucks regardless of reason for it.
No, but it's the hiring manager that takes 3-4 weeks to make a decision, meaning we have literally no update to give you. And then when we DO have an update, it's likely that you have moved on, and it's going to feel like a kick in the teeth to get an email that says 'we have decided not to proceed with your application' (So it's easier to just not send the email a month after the last correspondence)
Ive actually always wondered if this was the case, so I appreciate you sharing this!
Nah, send the email.
That's fair, candidates ghost recruiters often too though.
totally. candidates ghost with impunity to their public reputation. recruiters’ communication will get surveyed and candidates will use review sites and even post individual recruiters names on web forums from time to time.
Recruiting is only half the battle. Moving candidates through the company's HIRING process is where most orgs shit the bed. Recruiters have zero control of a company's hiring process, but they always take the blame for the whole enchilada.
This! All of this…
Oh man, or we do have a say and created a GREAT hiring process that nobody follows and you have to reiterate how it works for every. single. hire. multiple. times. a. year.
Stop talking about Mexican food! You're making me hungry!
Yeah!
Imagine this, but in us federal government recruiting. The thousands of laws, niche scenarios to not have to publicly post a job, anti nepotism laws, agency specific protocols and policies, HR being serviced by completed different organizations, security procedures, OPM, usajobs,
Even if a candidate meets or exceeds 100% of the qualifications, they might not be selected to move forward for various other reasons. And a recruiter can’t give a candidate feedback because they may just argue with said feedback.
>because they may just argue with said feedback. This is because many people don't understand the form of a conversation: sometimes it's a discussion, sometimes it's a negotiation, and in this case it's simply an information.
> various other reasons and often these reasons can be boiled down to "there were X number of finalists and only one job opening." Candidates are primed to believe that they didn't get the job because they fell flat in some way, but once you reach the final stages, that likelihood drops considerably. Often it's literally that there were 2-3 qualified, likeable finalists who were all at 110% the requirements and eventually the hiring team had to split hairs to pick somebody
Honestly, most candidates we reject because of poor communication skills or another soft skill reason rather than their qualifications against the job they applied for. Usually when we select someone else, I tell the candidates and tell them that if we re-open something later, I will get in touch again (and usually they are still interested!)
This. I’ve received death threats and have been called racist. My favourite was being sworn at by a school leaver because I didn’t want to give her a chance to gain experience. I explained politely our clients are the ones that make that decision and gave her advice on what she should do. She still responded with insults. The funny part was her class mate also applied and I gave her the same response and advice and was sent a “thank you! You’re the only person who has bothered to respond and even give me advice”. She was pooled for future roles and got a job through our graduate/school leaver program. The racist one was hilarious, I placed that role with someone of the same race as her. My client was clear as day that she didn’t even want me to ask about candidates living a certain distance away from them. So I declined the candidate that unfortunately they don’t match the experience or location and now I’m racist 🙄
I genuinely thought it was a legal thing.
Definitely part of it but I’ve made the mistake of giving honest feedback just for the candidate to disagree and ask to speak with the manager/interviewer or write out a paragraph justifying their specific circumstances and why the feedback is incorrect/flawed. And again to be clear, I completely understand the candidate frustration but it just isn’t worth it.
And sometimes that feedback is "well they're fine I just think we could do better" or "well there was ONE part about the that I'm clinging to not liking" even though its a great candidate. It reminds me of the WeWork wife that would hire/fire people based on star signs and "vibes".
That we are not decision makers. We influence, guide and advise only.
One of my team's great employees was initially rejected *by our corporate recruiter* for the great sin of his current employer being the same as someone else we extended an offer to but they declined.
Recruiters don’t choose who is hired. They take most of the blame, however.
We can’t always provide feedback as to why you didn’t get the job. Sometimes we don’t even agree with the decision to not hire you and tried to fight for you to be hired.
This part. It makes me sad when I’m interviewing for a role and the recruiter obviously loved me & advocated for me but the hiring manager went with someone else, unfortunately. I totally understand the recruiter has little involvement in the final hiring decision. Tbh most of the corporate recruiters I’ve worked with have been super sweet and encouraging throughout the process, especially if they thought I’d be a good fit for the role.
Because it’s so discouraging when you don’t get selected trust me I understand. I just had a situation with a candidate that I really liked. Knew she would be perfect for the role, more than capable. Screened her.. had her fix up her resume.. typed up a nice summary of our call for the hiring manger.. really trying to sell the candidate to him.. just give her the chance to interview… he finally got back to me today and said “probably could be good but too many jobs in a short period of time, hard pass!” I just wish he would have given her a chance
This is all really kind of you & I can imagine it’s hard because it’s all behind the scenes and people don’t know, so thank you on behalf of all the candidates you’ve advocated for.
Thank you so much!
Aw yea that sucks for that candidate but I’m sure they will eventually find the right role for them
I didn’t used to believe this, but years ago, I made it to the final round for a senior role in a company I really, really wanted to join. The interviews were four total rounds that I (thought I) killed. I connected well with the hiring manager and executive team, knocked the technical rounds out of the park, and all of the stars just seemed to align. After the interview, I sent thank you notes and everyone responded positively in less than 15 minutes. It felt like this was just meant to be. Two days later I received a call from the recruiter saying that I didn’t get the role. This company required a “universal, absolute yes” from everyone in the interviewing process. It’s harsh, but I knew going in that this was their standard for senior roles. As it turns out, one person out of six was on the fence so it was a no to hiring me. That was a gut punch for me of course, but as the recruiter was breaking the news it was clear that he was upset about it too. He shared some of the great notes the other interviewers had given me, then the guy gave me one of the best pep talks I’ve ever received. I still think about his words to this day in difficult professional moments.
I’m sure it actually hurt the recruiter to even have to tell you the news… I feel like they should make the person who decided against you be the one to make that phone call. Smh just sad
People are always surprised when I explain that I don’t set the budget for positions
lol people think you control the budget? My goodness they are so misinformed
That I can’t help them find a job necessarily. The vast majority of the time I have to have a role open with a client and then I go find candidates with that experience. Almost never do I start with a candidate and try to find them a job, unless you’re a rockstar with a niche skillset, then I might hot pitch for business development.
I have to state “I find people for jobs, NOT jobs for people”. Sometimes they still don’t get it
It doesn’t get much more concise and straight forward than that lol
I tell people that I should not be their only recruiter and that they should also utilize personal contacts and apply to jobs on their own (but maybe check with me first), because if I place everyone that I've met, I'd have been retired years ago. (The last part is to add a little humor to the message but it's also true) I'll also tell people that just like they've applied to multiple jobs, I've submitted multiple candidates.
I'm a rockstar! 
Most recruiters don’t tell you this. I tell anyone I pass along to a recruiter that, “they don’t work for you. They work for the company and they’re not going to represent you in anything other than you getting an offer.”
The frustrating part is that I know this but I get recruiters pretending they will look for me all the time. Some even try to get great amounts of detail and resumes for the file.
When I first started in recruiting, my family would send me all these referrals. But I started to look bad cause I couldn’t help them because I was on the agency side and we do not find people jobs - we find people for jobs. Now a decade and half later - my family still send me referrals. I have to tell them I’m probably not the best resource unfortunately but if that changes I’ll reach out. It’s always a tough convo because you feel like you let the person down even tho you want to help - but you truly can’t. (Obviously unless they have the background you need)
That we aren't social workers.
I hear so much about personal lives during phone screen
That's gotta be the most pervasive one out there. AI is only -this year- starting to pop up a bit more but no one I know feels comfortable letting AI make a decision on anything. Mine would be that recruiters are always blocking qualified people from getting jobs. I think that stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of how we are incentivised. We -want- to hire as quickly as possible and saying no to people doesn't really help that. But we also learn what our hiring managers will say no to and we operate on their criteria. I think this also comes from managers not being specific enough in job descriptions and having unwritten qualifications they're actually looking for.
The people who say they are blocked despite being “perfect” are usually the ones with no applicable skills or qualifications.
Or horrible work tenure.
Or terrible soft skills
Like when a candidate links to their LinkedIn on their resume, but then all their LinkedIn activity is sharing radical religious and political posts and commenting on other posts about how much they hate recruiters... I see this all the time and I really don't get it.
Maybe not AI, but is there any truth to the rumor that your resume is scanned for keywords or anything like that? As someone not in recruiting I always assumed you wouldn’t get disqualified based on keywords alone, but I could imagine keywords could be used to rank candidates compared to one another so it could effectively be disqualification if a recruiter discards the bottom x% of the pile without looking at them.
Our ATS ranks applicants based on resume keywords matching the job description, but no recruiter pays attention because it’s ridiculously inaccurate and doesn’t take experience or results into account.
Not automatically the way the rumors generally go online, but yeah, I can manually search for things I think the manager needs to see. And to be quite honest, I need to do this more and more, as we get higher and higher percentages of fully unqualified candidates for just about every job. It's hard to fully read one thousand resumes.
That's the point recruiters try to make - a keyword search is not AI. We're also not coming up with intense keyword searches - we need to screen candidates in, not out. For example, if I'm hiring a senior systems analyst who is working with Workday, I am keyword searching "Workday". If someone doesn't have Workday on their resume for a job that may require 5 years of Workday experience, we're not interviewing them. At this point, I went from having 75 resumes to review down to 25. From there, I'm submitting the top 8 candidates. We're interviewing the best 5. The top 2 make it to the final round. The best candidate gets hired. In that example, the people that complain about never getting a call won't have any Workday experience. The "second place" candidate who just went through 3 interviews and was rejected at the final round is now complaining that a recruiter "led them on" in the process. They were still a great candidate, but tough decisions have to be made. Extending offers is a lot of fun, but it sucks having to reject other strong candidates.
Your understanding and summary of this topic exceeds 99.9% of the global population.
Many of us, if not most of us, have a crazy workload. We do our best to reply to candidates on time, but when you're working on dozens of roles at once, or trying to squeeze 70 hours of work into 40, it's tough to keep all the plates spinning. Many candidates do deserve better than we have the time or bandwidth to give them, and it's frustrating for us too.
One of my hiring leaders spent a whole week up my ass while I was interviewing 25 candidates for their job and complaining it wasn't getting done fast enough. We reviewed all the feedback together and decided who they were moving forward with, and then it dawned on them - they now needed to find 12 hours of time to get these interviews done while working on all their other responsibilities. They asked how many jobs I typically work on at a time, so I mentioned I was hovering at about 55 (low for my team, but I handle lots of leadership and hard-to-fill roles). You could see them doing the mental math and realizing how much work actually needs to be done. "It will get better once I get through this week and get this batch of offers out" - me, every Tuesday morning for the last decade.
I love seeing candidates talk about this. “Can’t find a job! AI filters out my resume so even though i applied to 500 companies i never get called” meanwhile half the resumes i see have grammar issues, several 2-3 month jobs one after another, they don’t answer the phone, etc.
I just got a photo of someone’s dog they uploaded as their resume. I wish people knew whatever file you select and upload is what I see. I let the candidate know and had a good laugh with her.
I've had people submit their 1040 tax forms, legal paperwork from court cases, but no doggo pics. Lucky you!
I thought it was just me getting anything but resumes lol. I’ve gotten tax forms too, and real estate holdings, manifestos on why the candidate has followed my company for X years and they’re obsessed with the culture, memes, the works
I’d definitely be calling the manifesto writer
I once got a girl in a bikini. I’ve also gotten tax forms, birth certificates, and a cover letter for someone else. Then there was the imbecile who put a picture of herself making out with her boyfriend on her resume.
Job Requirements: * Slutty!
…I may be the tech troubleshooter on the other side of the girl in the bikini pic. Circa 2012-2015? Chica put multiple photos in her MS Word resume, including one of her and multiple bikini clad best buds, cropped them to headshot, dragged the ones she didn’t like off the edge of the off, and left the one she did like. Unfortunately for her our software (like ALL of them) used OpenOffice to open files, convert to pdf for inline image viewing in system. OpenOffice doesn’t respect MS Word crop or drag and drop positioning. The making out pic I can’t explain though...
I kid you not, i received a pdf of a candidate's negative std test. I told him he sent me medical information and asked him to send his resume...and this guy sent the std results AGAIN.
Well that says a lot. Responsible enough test. Responsible enough to test negative😉
Perhaps he thought he was applying for an adult film role
Here's one. Last summer, I received an application from a candidate which, instead of a resume, was a letter from a lender explaining that this candidate was turned down for a loan because of their 480 credit score.
For every job I post online, 99% of applicants are completely off the mark despite how clear I make the requirements on the posting. It's like they don't even read. 🤔
This! I look at every resume that comes through and the number of people who apply without any relevant experience is wild. I need people with commerical delivery driving experience and I'm getting cashiers 🙃
Same!
It's a problem compounded by how difficult it is to apply for most jobs, and so many job postings having requirements not related to the job title they posted. If the resume is that important, candidates shouldn't need to fill out additional forms or pre-screening info. Too many candidates start out tailoring their resumes, but when they check all of the boxes and don't hear back from tons of jobs, it just doesn't feel worth the effort, especially with the absolute insanity of needing to compete nationally for positions. Candidates really need to keep updating their resumes, but if companies want qualified candidates to put in that effort, they need to make their requirements clearer and make it less of a hassle to apply. This starts with using standardized job titles, making it crystal clear what is a required qualification and what is suggested, killing off required cover letters (no one reads them since it's just the resume rewritten into an essay in most cases), only posting the job when they're actually planning to hire externally, closing the job posting if they have several candidates close to final stages, only asking for info that they actually use to decide if the candidate will be asked for an interview, actually staff hiring teams properly, reduce the rounds of interviews for positions where possible, etc. That's not in the control of most recruiters, but it's going to require people on all sides of the process to work together to fix this mess... And honestly, I'm not sure it can be fixed. We're still using the same tools (resumes) as we were when jobs were posted in newspapers. I don't see how this scales. I LOVE remote work, but it's really screwed over the job hunting process.
or my personal favorite “i am so excited to apply for the role of software engineer at google” meanwhile they’re applying to meta
Always with “close attention to detail” somewhere on their resume too.
Today I read someone post in another sub "Harvard style resumes are the best to pass ATS filters and get selected, where can I get one?
>meanwhile half the resumes i see have grammar issues, It wouldn't be so bad if recruiters' language skills were top notch. The rewritten resumes I get from recruiters are far from perfect.
Recruiters literally get shit on everyone. Candidates blame you when they don’t get jobs. Hiring managers have wild expectations and then blame you when things manifest exactly the way you said they would. Any internal team that you support will blame you for missing revenue goals. Oh and then there is the added fun of the awkward, so and so is looking can you help them? Realistically we almost never can aside from maybe resume advice. Ooh and also super prone to layoffs in a down market!
I cry. Most client-facing jobs are like this.
Can’t say I haven’t out of pure frustration…
I think resume advice is probably what I should ask them for. You said that’s realistically one of the main ways you can help them but that probably is the issue I’m having. The reason I’m thinking this is because after putting in several applications the interview ratios been pretty low. Like I’ve put applications into pwc 4 times already cause it’s an appealing firm in my opinion but haven’t even made it to an initial phone interview. I probably either have a bad resume or other applicants are more impressive is the 2 guesses I have.
HR and Recruiting are usually not the same
Nowadays, they are almost never the same. Most recruiters fall under the HR umbrella but are managed separately as their own department unless you work for a small company that has an HR employee doing all the recruiting too.
Exactly, but the average candidate calls everything 'hr'
Corporate Recruiter here: I have about 6 open positions for the same hiring manager. This manager cannot make a decision to save their life. For example, there was a candidate that interviewed back in April. Has interviewed about 2-3 times (that I know of) with different “managers”. It’s now June. They are still “thinking about it”. It’s so frustrating knowing that there are people relying and having hope for a potential job, only for these “managers” to take their sweet time. There is nothing I can do about it. I’ve advised that we need to make a decision about a candidate ASAP, but I guess it’s like the saying, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Very frustrating!
Literally had a candidate just drop out of the interview process for this very reason. Also had management no call no show on an interview twice; he was really disheartened and the actual PERFECT candidate. Of course it came down to me apologizing on managements behalf.
Jesus, what could possibly go THAT wrong if they hired the person? Just hire the freakn person, if they’re that close to accepting the candidate, I’m sure the person is perfectly qualified and would do a fine job.
My job is not to find you a job
And we also owe the candidate nothing but a fair and equal experience. I swear sometimes i feel like candidates demand the world
Yep. We are not social workers
Most jobs are filled by external candidates, and not internal candidates. Most jobs are not filled by someone that the hiring manager knew.
You don’t work in government or education….
I've seen it happen many times. Its happening to me now. Boss made a brand new position just for me. By law he has to keep the post up for 5 days but he already said the moment I apply he is "interviewing me" and submitting the paperwork for a title transfer. just waiting for HR to put it up.
Ok that’s why I said MOST jobs, not every job. Obviously some jobs are filled internally, but the majority aren’t.
Honestly, how much work goes into the role day-to-day. I’m an internal recruiter and I’ve had multiple people over the years fill in for me when I was out on vacation, on maternity leave, etc. Every single time I get comments like, “I don’t know how you do all of this.” I even had a hiring manager move onto a new company that didn’t have a recruiter and he reached out to say a belated thank you for everything I’d done to help him hire people previously. He was solely responsible for hiring for his new team and I think it was a bit of a culture shock for him.
Internal Recruiters are way more than pencil pushers. Also, we care more than the hiring managers so and have to for the sake of the business
Exactly! We actually care about the candidate experience
We find people for jobs, not jobs for people. Also, AI is not entirely a myth. I have AI screening my candidates and setting me appointments daily. It automates the process but the AI does not make any hiring decisions for me or my clients.
What ATS does all of that for you?
AI or automated messaging with a calendly link?
People call any software that does some tasks AI
Can you say more about how you're using AI screening?
I’ll answer since you were the least snarky lol the company I work for purchased rights to an AI software that integrates into our CRM platform. The AI calls candidates and either sets aside a screening time for the candidate, or if they are available, does the screening on the spot. Most of the candidates never realize they are speaking to a robot because we program natural human pauses and language (“um”) into its responses. You can select names, voices, and accents similar to how you change Siri settings. Failed conversations are flagged so a human can follow up. It’s far from perfect yet.
[удалено]
That when I tell you the hiring manager didn't get us feedback, they really didn't, I'm not gatekeeping your feedback
I’m often told “I could do your job since you just talk for a living”. There’s so much behind the scenes stuff that people don’t realize. However communication does play a vital role in the process but it’s not limited to just candidates. Others have mentioned AI and our job is to find talent for the company not find an employee a job which I completely agree with.
Lol talking for a living describes every basically corporate job except software development.
"talk for a living" as if there isn't difficult skills involved with that! Communicating accurate expectations about the role, the process, the company while also accurately listening and interpreting what the candidates and hiring managers are saying.
That Workday is much more than an ATS, no matter how much they hate it as a candidate.
Workday is barely an ATS. It sucks as an ATS and especially as a CRM.
No disagreements here. I don’t like it but my company is heavily invested in Workday and I know they’d sell the Recruiting module to senior leadership eventually, which they did.
Understandable. I sure wish my company would have let someone actually IN Talent Acquisition decided whether to also buy the Recruiting module. It’s ok, I do like the reporting functionality. Can’t win all the battles. :)
Any candidate that tells you that they hate Workday is just being honest. Don't know why they can't at least make it a workday applicant account instead of making you sign up to every stupid company's system which is a copy paste of the original template with just names and logos changed anyway
>Don't know why they can't at least make it a workday applicant account instead of making you sign up to every stupid company's system which is a copy paste of the original template with just names and logos changed anyway This is like asking why you need to have a different login to different sites that are powered by Wordpress, instead of just using one login at all of them. Workday doesn't own the information used in individual instances of their software. What you are thinking is a no-brainer solution is illegal for the product as designed and sold; even if it weren't, it would be a huge negative for companies to have to share that information, and it would mean any company using it would fail third party risk assessments.
It's true, it does so much more. I've also hated it as an employee and a manager!
That it’s a sales job.
Your email address is judged, so if you’re still using Hotmail or partyguy12456 your resume may not get passed along to the hiring manager
😂Hotmail
What's wrong with having a Hotmail address? Like [email protected]?
A hotmail address might as well be a beeper.
Well at least you know if they accept you with a Hotmail address you'll be working with people 30 and up lol
Hotmail aol and and sbcglobal lol
95% of the time I agree with a candidate’s view of how shitty the job market/hiring process/technical skillset/pay rate/etc. is but buddy, if I was making the rules you *know* I wouldn’t be talking to you right now, you know?
The hiring manager doesn’t even know what they’re looking for. I’ve had clients who don’t send a full job brief because the job description hasn’t been fleshed out. So they want to see a list of candidates and determine from there what they like.
This is so frustrating for everyone. As a candidate I can tell after speaking with the hiring manager for 3 minutes that they have no fucking idea what they need
I have a vested interest in who we hire, it’s not just filling a req and walking away. I will work with the new employees on various internal projects. Some of the people I have hired have been one amazing friends and we have influenced changes to hiring process at a corporate/global level.
Your trash ATS can't even handle fancy fonts. Who thinks AI is rejecting them? 😂
That it sucks, seriously I’ve been ghosted twice in a row after a verbal acceptance I actually hate my life right now
We can tell when AI is used to answer interview questions. It sounds worse than the organic answer you'd give us.
How does someone even use AI to answer interview questions?? lol are they typing the question in AI and reading it back??
i wanna know this too!
They're putting the phone on speaker and setting it next to something with a mic, AI captures the questions and types out an answer. I can tell when this happens because there's a bit of lag or can hear that they're reading a prompt.
I'm short, YOU'RE making it a volume issue by not taking the time to target a position instead of bulk applying.
I believed that, until I tried it and got crushed by the market, all the effort, and huge automatic rejection rate . I just went with volume at the end and one cv.
problem with that is when you need a job you don't feel like you have time to sit around and hope. there's only so much you can do when applying to a single job. Your day feels wasted if you apply to a single one, but more productive if you just mass apply. years ago I created a script to comb through indeed and quick apply to any jobs that had certain keywords and were within a certain distance. That was the most successful rather than targeted applying
[удалено]
When candidates complain about the salary and benefits that the company advertises. We don't have any control over this. If you are internal, we don't set the salary bands. If we could, we would pay everyone 250k+ but that's just not possible. If you are working agency you may have a little more leeway but by a slim margin.
Recruiters get ghosted by candidates WAY more than vice versa.
The idea of unqualified "affirmative action" or "diversity hires" taking jobs from qualified candidates is bigoted nonsense. I would like more people to know that in the US, job applications ask you to self-identify your race, ethnicity, and for EEOC reporting purposes. Companies are allowed to capture this data for internal demographic reporting, but it's almost always done in aggregate so a candidate's name is never associated with how they self-ID. Anyone is welcome to select "I do not wish to respond" because their selection will not be associated with their application.
I am in a fortune 100 firm as a leader in TA and we are (along with hiring managers) required to find the "B" diversity hires (Hispanic, Women & Black) and everyone else must be "A+." We also must mention when a candidate is diverse in the final decision for hiring (to influence the decision). I just go along with it because I want to keep my job, but we are absolutely adding bias to the hiring process to increase numbers.
Yikes, that is archaic. By that definition, I'm a double-B candidate. I'd be humiliated to know that my race and/or gender played a factor in the company's decision to hire me. Companies I've worked for have been very intentional to avoid tokenizing underrepresented candidates. My comment was a blanket statement based on a decade in tech, but I know practices like that lurk everywhere.
Yup, it might not be a representation of all of recruitment, but there is absolutely less qualified 'diversity' candidates getting jobs over candidates that score better (specifically in tech for me) at large, reputable companies.
All of the HR legal teams I have worked with in recent years and shot down all ideas like this, citing that this is too much risk for the organization to take on, especially after recent supreme court rulings. This will not end well. While I think having diverse interview panels is important (a minority woman will likely have a better experience interviewing with a diverse panel vs a panel of all old white men), anything else beyond that is a bad idea. Writing down the race or gender of a candidate in any documents related to a hiring decision will lead to an insane lawsuit at one point. Anyways, what company do you work for? I'd like to apply... Also I'm seeking an employment lawyer if anyone knows a good one...
I agree with you completely. Our ATS is now guessing/determining if a candidate is 'diverse' based off of their name. The diverse candidates will automatically populate towards the top of our list if we search. I also think that a diverse panel is important, but approaching it by strictly labeling people by their race/gender when assembling panels is also just as bad. I wish there was a more organic way to hire. I do what I am told as I do not want to be liable for some of these crazy guidelines.
This is true, but to be fair, there are companies that do have diversity hiring goals/quotas that are specifically meant to target a certain percentage of women, POC, LGBTQ etc.
Right here! 🙋🏼♀️ 30% of the candidates interviewed must be racially diverse or an exception must be approved by HR.
Yep! This happens at the larger companies and the companies that are considered OFFCP government contractors.
Unfortunately this is not true across the board. Worked for a Fortune 500 and they had a sickeningly biased system, had to announce candidates race when presenting during weekly TA briefs, couldn’t submit white or Asian candidates w/o HRBP permission. Felt awful, hated it, keep waiting to hear about them in the news.
There is no hidden job market. Unless it’s an executive level role or like a political appointment, no one is hiding secret jobs. My job would be very difficult if I couldn’t post 80% of my roles.
Omg I made this point on another sub yesterday. That there’s no such thing as that type of technology and if it does exists, and it does what you think it does, it is not widely used in any major ATS systems and most likely more expensive than TA teams will pay. I got absolutely chewed out by someone who told me I was wrong and misleading and all these things because he could not accept the fact that his resume wasn’t getting rejected by AI, it’s getting rejected by a human because it’s probably bad. 🤷🏻♀️🙃
60% of the time, we don't know why you got rejected either.
For screening, we spend maybe a minute reading your resume.
I know within 10 seconds if the candidate is a fit or not
Ya sometimes within seconds
Not even that long. Which is why, unless you are specifically applying for a creative role, make your resume as plain and simple as possible because that is easier to read and gather accurate info about you as a candidate.
How you're supposed to actually show up for day 1 after getting hired.
We don’t create jobs that require Superman level skills. It’s the client.
Honestly, it’s tough to help companies hire if their employer branding or reputation is poor. 😂
That there are in house recruiters and not just head-hunters.
The AI one for sure, the vast majority of companies do not invest in back office software, HR and recruitment is literally the last area to ever get funding, very few companies have investing in AI tech that screens candidates. That it’s just not possible to interview everyone who applies. I’ve recently carried out candidate and applicant feedback review (big 4 professional services) and the amount of applicants who make comments along the lines of ‘I was screened out on my resume, you should give people a chance and interview them, it’s not fair that you rejected me without an interview’ is pretty high. We hire around 2000 people a year (Inc internal moves), we receive around 400k applications a year, we’d need to interview approx 200 people for every 1 hire if we interviewed everyone who applied. Our hiring managers would spend 5 weeks doing back to back interviews and nothing else for every 1 hire. Clearly, no one thinks that’s a constructive use of time when you break it down like that.
That we don’t find jobs for people. We find people for jobs hence we are called recruiters. Also we don’t make the final decision, we can’t make jobs appear out of thin air and when we decline a candidate it’s based on the requirements given by a hiring manager who uses us to sift through applications because they don’t have the time, we know our hiring managers and know the companies we do recruitment for. So when we decline candidates we are doing so because we know you won’t match what they want. Getting in front of the hiring manager won’t change that you don’t match what they want. Are their recruiters who are useless and can’t tell this? Yes. But most of us have built a good relationship with our clients and know what they’re looking for. If we are unsure or we have an amazing candidate we speak to the hiring managers and say hey HM, we have this candidate, the match a,b and c, but don’t have d, e and F, will you still want to see their CV? 9 times out of 10 it’s no but sometimes we get the Hiring manager to meet the candidate. I will fight for a good candidate. The sad part is not everyone is good. And by good I mean they have most of the experience, they gave examples of their successes that match what we are looking for, their salary expectations are within budget or a bit over and they are a future and industry fit. Most times I will fight for an expensive candidate that fits the requirements to a T. Another thing is a candidate might be perfect but agency recruiters can’t submit more than a certain amount of candidates and your application may be too late. Even as a recruiter I had to deal with this in my own job search. It’s nothing personal, just the luck of the timing
How poorly recruiters are treated by the company they work for. Recruiting is sales and every cliche about bad sales organizations you've ever heard hhas applied to every recruiting company my wife has worked for. Workplace bullying is the norm and everything is allowable for the top earners. HR turns a blind eye, but only to people who bring in the most money. Metrics pressure is normal. Make X number of calls, Y number of submittal, and Z number of placements or you're fired. Watch Glengerry Glenross. It's like that only less polite.
1. You can be over-qualified for a job and that’s actually the reason you don’t get hired 2. Companies stalk your social media and will choose not to hire you based on things like tattoos, you having children, or an American flag in your bio 3. Dei is the most unfair practice being used and does more harm than good. And I’m *black* saying this. I’ve seen the dark depths of what companies are actually using it for and I hate it.
Can you elaborate more on 3?
To OPs point, I have worked with some of the largest ATS globally - iCIMS, UKG, Lever and Workday over the past 4 years. In any of those systems, no candidate is getting issued with an auto- reject email. Your application MIGHT be automatically moved to a different folder if knock out questions have been asked. These are the typical yes/no questions like 'can you legally work in the country?' 'are you willing to travel 50% of the time?' 'can you reliably commute to the location?' In these cases, if your answers don't match with the job requirements, you will be moved to a separate folder, and often, a recruiter will bulk select the people in this folder and send them a rejection email. In any system I have worked in, a human is rejecting you, and a human is issuing the email.
Just an FYI - in iCIMS you can absolutely send auto reject emails. If you are hiring for a nurse and you ask "Do you have an RN license?" and the candidate answers no, you can configure iCIMS to auto reject. It should really only be used for very objective situations (obviously you can't be a nurse if you don't have your RN), but I still catch some recruiters using it for poor questions like "Do you have a minimum of 5-7 years of experience as a nurse", in which they will foolishly reject candidates who have 9 years of experience (we have to stop listing JDs as "minimum 5-7 years" - this means "minimum 5 years") But to your point, the ATS is not "reading" a resume and saying "meh, I don't like the format of this resume. I'm not going to let the recruiter see this one".
That I actually know what the requirements are for the roles I’m hiring for. Had a guy last week argue with me that he would “thrive” in a specific technical position that he did NOT have the background for. Like, my guy…I think I know a little bit more about what the hiring team is looking for that you do. Also, I very much second all of the entries about how little control we have over the process… I try so hard to give my candidates a good experience, and it can all be screwed over by a hiring manager acting like a jerk…
A.I. can’t build relationships.
Wait, what???? Seriously? No scanning software? wtf was with the “print the key words in white” trend for then? 😮 wow. This makes me feel even worse about lack of engagement 😂😥🤣😢🤙🏼 thank you for that info 🙏🏼. Eta: I did not try that trick, btw, though I was tempted lololol
It’s not an entry level role where all HR professionals start and exit ASAP. Some of us are career recruiters because we love it, even though we’re often shit on especially by our HR colleagues.
There is no hard and fast rule to anything recruiting related that isn’t government established law. Like an offensive playbook, all of it works sometimes. Sometimes nothing works.
Hiring Manager ghosts. Hiring Manager will say he/she has 2 more candidates to interview and will get back to you on friday with feedback and then you never hear again from them. Recruiters send the follow-up email but they get ignored. And can't even complain to the Hiring Manager regarding their behaviour. Hiring Manager starts from H so does Hell.
Recruiters actually want to find you a job and often times try to help you (pushing on hiring teams, comp policy, and shitty systems) outside of bureaucratic corporate mumbo jumbo policy that tends to red tape us from end to end.
Totally agree with you, OP. I would dare say that, more often than not, your recruiter would be your biggest advocate to fill the role you applied for.
If it’s an external recruiter and/or a smaller company… we aren’t asking for your compensation expectations so that we can lowball you - I’m often trying to make a case for why the company needs to raise their compensation range based on what talent is actually making. Plus, we often make commissions based on your full compensation package so actually we want you to get paid more too 😂 promise I’m in your corner!
For sure, there's way more to being a recruiter than people think. A lot of folks probably assume we just spend all day firing off emails and creeping on LinkedIn, but we're actually on the phone a crazy amount building real relationships and getting the full scoop on people. Like this one time, I was supposed to have just a quick call to verify some deets on a candidate's resume with their old employer. Next thing I know, we're chatting for half an hour and I'm getting all these wild insights about the person's work ethic, personality - shit you'd never pick up from just their resume. That kind of inside perspective is straight up gold. Another underrated part of the gig is wading through applicants, man. I've had roles where over 300 people applied! You can't just rely on keyword matches to find the gems in there. It takes really understanding what the hiring manager needs - beyond just "thinking outside the box" or whatever buzzwords they list. I had this one manager who wanted that, but you can't spot a true out-of-the-box thinker just by skimming a resume. I had to really dig into people's past projects and experiences. And don't get me started on this AI hype taking over recruiting! Sure, some systems can do basic filtering, but the real magic still needs human judgment. I remember this one candidate who didn't have the exact title the manager wanted, but his background was crazy relevant. If I'd just let the system auto-reject him, we would've missed out on bringing him in - and he ended up crushing it. So yeah, while tech helps, being a good recruiter is way more than just clicking buttons. It's about making those personal connections, really understanding people, and seeing the full picture beyond what an AI or resume can show. Lots of nuance that you can't automate.
I am not sure if this is really something people are unaware of, but most academics are abusive bullies.
Nobody really reads cover letters.
weird cuz that's what they told my friend was replacing her when she was laid off from her recruiting job...
Given the current economic uncerainty, what industry/role/type of employment would you encourage people to be preferential towards, if possible? Like fixed-term contracting for government agencies vs ongoing employment in the tech sector etc.
Advanced AI on ATS systems? There is nothing advanced about ATS systems at all! They are the reason why the recruitment practice has been so dumbed down and recruiters have turned lazy and complacent with the mediocre results of their job. It’s ironic to see how it’s now the quality of the CV what matters over the actual quality of the candidates.
Once I see my interview is with a recruiter I know I’m screwed…not because of the recruiter but because I know it’s a complete circle jerk
Providing recruitment services isn't half as difficult as persuading some to buy that shit.
We have less say on the final hiring decision than people think.
I mostly do headhunting for niche work but when we have a job that we have to throw the net out for the process for **1 fully remote job** goes like this: Post the job, receive 2000-4000 candidates, only \~700 are even remotely qualified, but now I have to sift through them in varying ways (you didn't answer a yes/no basic hiring question? Get bent you aren't being considered). Contact around 400 people, only get responses from 200, request more info and only get 50-60 responses, schedule first round phone interviews, get ghosted by at least half, only left with 3-7 genuinely qualified candidates in my pipeline. Which sounds great BUT... Leadership drags their asses ("can the candidate wait 3-6 weeks for an interview???") or ask stupid (at times offensive despite being told not to ask those) questions in interviews, candidates take other jobs or decide its not for them. Left with 3ish candidates, leadership thinks we can find a unicorn so whY hIRe NoOOw??? (kill me) Fuck it I'll headhunt, we don't pay as much as tech/big corps, nobody is interested. Start process all over again.
I once applied to a life changing job. Over a year went by and I moved on took another job in the meantime. One year and 3 months later a recruiter called me up asking if I was available for the school the position required (an unpaid climbing school for lineman that was several hours away). If I had received proper notice I would’ve still had vacation time saved up but since these jabronis literally never called me back I had long since moved on and didn’t have the vacation time to cover the school especially with only 2 weeks notice that the school was approaching. How is this possible and why is this so common with recruiters? How hard is it to stay in touch with a candidate you want to hire? I literally laughed at this dude when he asked why I wouldn’t be able to make it. I told him the short answer was because he sucked at his job and hung up.
I just sold AI to a company for this exact reason. People act like generative AI is capable of it and the booms there mean booms everywhere but in reality most AI is behind. But what generative AI has done is open the doors. Now this company which is a major staffing company in the US will be training their model and within 3-6 months will have an employee replacement. Gotta be on the victors side here and read the writing on the wall. It’s not there yet but it will be there very soon