Employers, Why the Hate?

"I'm embarrassed to tell you," my friend Evan said on the phone. "No, tell me, I promise I won't overreact," I said. "Okay," said Evan, "you know that company that I've been interviewing with for months? They made another outrageous request of me yesterday, and I confess - I said I'd do it."

"Well, what was the request?" I wondered. "They asked me to put together a Powerpoint presentation on their product line, comparing them to their top three competitors. As you know, I've already interviewed with sixteen people in that company, completed an online honesty test and a writing test, provided references, written up a sample marketing plan and just yesterday, I wrote a sample press release."

"Evan," I asked, "are you positive there's a real job opening? They could be getting some free consulting out of you and the other candidates, with no intention of hiring anyone."

"I don't know about that," said Evan,"but when I asked the HR rep 'Should I come over to your office and present the Powerpoint to your Marketing team?' she said "No, just send it over."

"Evan, there comes a point...." I began, and he cut me off. "That point was reached," he said. "I created the Powerpoint they asked for. I sent it over by the deadline. I got a terse email message back from the HR gal, telling me that it would take them a few weeks to make a decision as to who would go into the next round of interviews."

"Geez, it's like they're appointing a Supreme Court justice," I said. "I'm glad you bailed on that deal, Ev. You deserve better."

"That's what I realized, as I sat looking at this two-line, unfriendly, ungrammatical email message from a 22-year-old HR rep. I've invested dozens of hours in free consulting for these people, and they've delegated the project called 'handle Evan' to one of the least-experienced people in the joint. It isn't her fault. It's a badly-designed process, the wrong person is running it, and there's no adult supervision or human element in evidence anywhere."

"I was that girl," I said, "when Cyndi Lauper ruled the airwaves, but back then we treated job-seekers better than employers do now."

"What is the story with that?" Evan asked. "Why the neglect, curtness, and general disregard for job-seekers at so many large employers?"

"If you're a cynical North Jerseyite like me, you could say that the abysmal way large employers treat job-seekers -- and plenty of smaller ones too, sad to say -- is a natural sorting mechanism. Companies that don't deserve you won't get you onto their teams, because you'll drop out of the process before you could end up working for a zombified place like that."

"I'm from Oklahoma, and here's my opinion," said Evan. "I think it's because there are so many people on the job market, employers believe it doesn't matter how dismissive of job-applicants they are. People need jobs, so they'll jump through as many hoops as it takes."

"I know what you mean, but ironically employers aren't experiencing things that way," I said. "They're actually scrambling for talent. It's not that easy to find a lot of the skills they're looking for, and their own recruiting processes are a big part of the problem."

"Do you hear from people who have opted out of the system, who won't use the Black Hole to apply for jobs?" Evan asked. "I talk to people like that every day," I said. "They won't do the job-search-groveling thing anymore. It's too low-yield a proposition for one thing, and for another it's insulting. You get to an age and a point in your career where you say, "I'm not doing that anymore. I'll consult, I'll work contract assignments, or I'll work for myself some other way."

"I am about at that point," said Evan. "Do employers know that their own dysfunctional recruiting processes are the problem?"

"Some of them must know," I said, "but the other day an HR person said to me 'We WANT it to be hard to get a job at our company.' They are literally hiring for obedience, docility, and door-mattishness. To get a job in a company like that, you have to be the candidate who has the qualifications for the job and will also put up with the greatest amount of B.S."

"So what's to be done?" asked Evan, and I said "Some smart employers are getting the memo. They're realizing that they have to work harder at getting talented people excited and keeping them interested through the hiring process. Of course, those employers invest some time to streamline the process and takes weeks out of it, and lots of red tape, too." "Those companies are going to win, competitively," said Evan, and I said "They will - and they'll deserve it, too."