The Tea on Recruiting is Starred’s bi-weekly video series for recruiters where we address a variety of recruiting and hiring topics. Please feel free to grab a cup of tea/coffee/any of your favorite drinks and enjoy our episode :) If you find it meaningful, don’t hesitate to share it with your loved ones – colleagues, friends, etc. For now, enjoy the video as well as the copy attached!
Welcome back to The Tea on Recruiting, we’re going to be sharing insightful and thought-provoking content that can help you shape your recruiting career. The tea, the title is a subtle reference to the fact that I cannot stop drinking tea.
Also, at the end of every episode, we’re going to be spilling some tea, in this episode, perhaps even sooner.
Disclaimer: depending on your outlook in life, this episode could result in being painful or perhaps entertaining. Definitely, we hope it’s going to be insightful and inspiring for you, as we’re going to be sharing some terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible recruiting mistakes.
The title of the first piece of content in this episode is 13 job interview horror stories from people who definitely did not get the job.
Interviews can be straight-up terrifying. Some of us are more prone to anxiety, some of us are at the beginning of our careers and some of us really, really need a job right now.
We’ve read this Insider article, which is a collection of over 200 anecdotes that Reddit users shared for the world to hear about the worst possible job interview experience that they had. Well, apparently, some of these anecdotes revolve around hiring managers and recruiters asking dumb or inappropriate questions.
Wanna suffer? I bet that we can bond over this painful experience. During a med school interview, a Reddit user was asked how large would the boobs of his ideal woman be.
Someone else also shared the tale of a hiring manager, forcing them to lie about stealing a toaster. And another user shared the situation in which he was asked if he had a type-A personality.
He didn’t know what a type of personality was and neither did we. So we Googled it. And here is a definition for you.
The hypothesis describes type-A individuals as “outgoing, ambitious, rigidly organized, highly status-conscious, impatient, anxious, proactive, and concerned for time management. People with type-A personalities, often high achieving workaholics. They push themselves with deadlines and hate both delays and ambivalence. People with type-A personalities experience more job-related stress and less job satisfaction.”
Well, while the user was mumbling something in response and full-on confusion, the hiring manager straight-up looked at him dead in the eye and said, “You don’t have a type-A personality.” And then they walked out of the room.
Now, Insider didn’t really get a chance of verifying all of these anecdotes because they were shared by Reddit users. But you’ll have to believe me when I tell you that, in 2019, I, too, had a terrible, terrible interview experience.
In fact, the hiring manager asked me if I had a boyfriend and if I had any intention of having children soon.
I think we’ve covered the part about s***** interview questions, but there are more issues that we can learn from. Just to mention another episode, a Reddit user straight-on had a 20-second freeze-up during an interview and almost had a panic attack.
I see you staring into your screen and yelling, Why would I care?
But wait up.
We’re going to share your second piece of content. And following that, our insights.
The New York Times put out a piece called Seven successful people dish on their worst job interviews and what they learned. Reading what these successful people learned from terrible job interview experiences can actually teach us a lot about candidate expectations. I am probably going to say this wrong, but Mr. Naqshbandi, Chief Marketing Officer at Frank Recruitment Group, which is a niche recruitment agency in tech, remembers feeling incredibly embarrassed for showing up during a job interview with a stamp on his wrist, a stamp from a nightclub. Catherine Rose in 2016, had an interview with the principal of a law firm and at the very end, he said, Well, if you’re looking for a job for mother’s hours, this is not it. When she was younger, Annemarie Dooling was refused a job because of all of her tattoos. And I quote, You should think about what you’ve done to your body and how unprofessional it is.
As Eleanor Roosevelt once said, learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.
Some of these pointers are more obvious than others.
Point number one is, respect your candidates. They’re humans too.
Pointer number two is, put them at ease. They’re probably incredibly nervous and it’s going to be even more difficult if they feel like they cannot bring their whole selves to the interview because that means that they cannot bring their whole selves to work.
Point number three is, don’t waste their time and be transparent. What’s your culture? Do you expect them to show up with a suit or is it more of a T-shirt, Converse, and jeans Culture? What are your office hours? Is it more nine to five or is it more like nine to nine? Having your candidate know these things can actually help you find the best possible fit for your job description and can spare them some embarrassment.
The more barbaric your treatment of candidates, the more demonic the reviews on your Glassford page. And here is a nasty review we’re going to share with you today. Shout-out to a company we won’t name. We’re now referring to a candidate who received the job offer and declined it after a two-week-long selection process. They were being selected for a role with a salary of seventy thousand. They were then told that it would actually be fifty to sixty thousand because they’d made a mistake. Then, they told the candidate that they wanted them for 50K.
Get your stuff together. I believe in you.
