We’re in the middle of graduate recruiting here and there’s been a steady stream of candidates coming and going all week. Yet there are always a few candidates who just don’t show up. We interviewers sit around, wondering how long we ought to wait before writing the candidate off. This morning we had two “no shows”.
I don’t really care what your excuse is:
Surely it’s only common courtesy to ring and tell us?
Rather like the courtesy that some employers show their applicants by wasting the applicant’s entire day with a series of fake, pro forma interviews, then never get back to the applicant? “Gee, thank you for serving as our stalking horse for the guy that we really want to hire.”
Yeah, it goes both ways…
Yes, it does. And when it goes one way, you find out you don’t want to hire the no call no show jerk. The other way, you learn that that company has no interest in people besides a desire to use them to the best advantage of the company without even common courtesy.
So, everyone learns what they need to know.
Tris
[QUOTE=cerberus]
Yeah, it goes both ways…
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, i pretty much agree.
Cunctator, if you’re one of those interviewers/employers who actually treats your potential employees like human beings, who is honest with them during the hiring process, and who gets back to them (with good or bad news) when you say you’re going to get back to them, then i feel for you. It sucks taking up a whole lot of your valuable time, only to have it wasted when someone fails to live up to their promise.
But i know too many people who’ve been jerked around in exactly this way by potential employers who apparently feel that the only one with any obligations or responsibilities in the whole process is the person seeking a job.
And i’m not just talking about your archetypal faceless corporation here. As a graduate student, i have many friends who are looking for work or who are actually working in academia, and many of them tell the same story. Despite academia’s generally-liberal leanings and alleged concerns for fairness and openness in economic relations, university hiring committees are often just as bad as corporate ones when it comes to shafting their job candidates.
One example.
A friend of mine finished his Ph.D. a couple of years ago, and his first job was a one-year position at a university in Florida. Because it was a job with no potential for becoming full-time or tenure-track, he applied for full-time jobs and got some interviews.
In the history profession, there are usually two big cut-offs in the hiring process. First, the applications (often as many as 200 for a position) are taken in and a group of likely candidates (usually about 8-15) is selected. These candidates are asked to attend the historical profession’s big meeting, the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, where they each have face-to-face interviews with the hiring committee, usually in a hotel suite.
After this, the field is generally narrowed down to the 3 best candidates, who are invited back for an on-campus interview, which involves actually travelling to the university and spending at least one day and often two days there. During the visit the candidate will have to give a lecture or presentation, will be given a tour of the university and the department, and will be continually grilled about research plans, class syllabi, teaching philosophy, theoretical leanings, etc., etc. It’s a pretty gruelling process.
Anyway, my friend had a few interviews at the AHA, and was called back for on-campus interviews at two universities. One of them was a state university in the mid-Atlantic. He flew up from Florida, spent a day and a half doing his interview, presentation, etc., and was told that they would make a decision after the final candidate’s on-campus interview the following week. The time came and went and he hadn’t heard, so he got in touch with them and they told him they were still deciding. A few more weeks went by, and he still hadn’t heard. Finally, he ran into a member of the faculty at a conference, and she said to him, “I was sorry to hear you didn’t get the job.” Well, that was news to him, and when he told her that no-one had ever even had the courtesy to contact him she was shocked.
Bear in mind that he wasn’t just some guy who sent in a resume. He was one of the final three candidates out of over 100. He was considered good enough to ask to the AHA meeting, and then was was considered good enough to bring to the campus for an overnight stay. And they didn’t even have the courtesy to call him and say that they had offered the job to one of the other finalists.
If this was an isolated incident, i wouldn’t make too much of it, but i’ve heard similar stories from a whole bunch of people in my field, and in other academic and corporate fields.
This particular story had a happy ending, because about a week later my friend was offered a full-time, tenure-track job at an extremely prestigious research university in the South. It’s pretty much his dream job, and much better than the one he got shafted over.
Eh, it gives you time to do the crossword puzzle, instead of wasting that time on a canidate clearly not worthy of any sort of professional position.
I wonder if it varies by field. A few years ago I took temporary work as a receptionist for a social services agency after I’d been laid off for 6 months. I was appalled that two or three people who were scheduled for interviews during the few days I worked there never showed. At that point, I would have killed for an interview in my field, IT, but apparently it was fairly common for them.
I was hiring an attorney for my office a few weeks ago- there was one guy who looked great on paper. He wanted me to schedule an interview for a Saturday, so he could work it around his job. He was a strong enough candidate that I didn’t mind doing it. I scheduled him for 2:30, came to my office around 2, and waited. He caled at 3:30 and wanted to reschedule. Against my better judgement, I did, for the following Friday afternoon at 4:40.
He called be just before 5 to tell me he was running late, stuck in traffic in Atlanta. I've been stuck in Atlanta traffic before, so I was willing to wait for a little while longer. A little after 6, he called to say he was still in Atlanta, and could we please do it tomorrow? This is where y'all are going to question my sanity- I said, OK, one more interview. I scheduled him for the next day, Saturday, at 11. Showed up. About 11:30, I was killing time, checking my e-mail, and I had an e-mail from him telling me that he was afraid that he wouldn't make a good impression that day, so he wanted to reschedule. I e-mailed him back and said no way.
For the next week, I got several angry, rather nasty e-mails from him telling me that I was unreasonable, not being fair to him, explaining that he had health and personal problems that kept him from keeping the appointments, etc. I respended to the first 2 or 3, telling him that I couldn't hire someone who I couldn't even depend on to show up for an interview, but I wished hom luck in his job search. His e-mails got angrier and nastier after I stopped respnding to them. I forwarded all of them to our HR office. He finally quit e-mailing me, and I hired a really great guy.
Just goes to show you that anyone can look great on paper.Or the ones who show up for the interview in jeans and t-shirt, want you to sign their unemployment paper, then they want to leave without doing an interview. They were only there to say they tried. I wouldn’t sign their papers. If they don’t want a job, that’s fine. But find somebody else to lie for your and say you tried to get work.
Having been an interviewer…shrug
No-shows just make it easier to weed down the candidate list. Go ahead and interview someone else in the waiting room in the meantime. Heck, give them extra points for showing up early!
Any data point that assists in a final selection is a good thing, IMO.
Also, like the History Dept description by another poster, I feel interviewers often take themselves far too seriously and often show a huge lack of respect for the value of the interviewee’s time. As an interviewer, my golden rule starting out was “let’s not jerk people around, ask your important questions the first time, and get the answers you want the first time.” Call-backs, repeat marathon interviews, and ignoring travel and relocation issues just show lack of organization and respect.
Ugh. We’re trying to find a replacement for me at my second job (I finally get to quit, yay!) and I can’t BELIEVE how many flaky people there are out there! We had two interviews scheduled for last Tuesday and neither of them showed up. These interviews were scheuled after my boss screened both applicants over the phone for about 45 minutes so you’d think the applicant would actually be interested. I was so shocked, but my co-workers all insisted it was totally normal. I was still pissed and ready to call both candidates up on the phone (do these people now know we still have their resumes with all their contact info?) and ream them out.
I didn’t give a shit that they decided they didn’t want the job, but they could’ve at least called. Both my bosses totally rearranged their schedules for these interviews.
Honestly, what the hell is wrong with people? And for those of you who try to justify it by telling tales of inconsiderate employers, how does that make it okay to sink to their level? I don’t care how unprofessional someone else acts, that is hardly reason for you to act in a highly unprofessional manner yourself. Two wrongs don’t make a right and all that.
May I chime in with a different scenario?
We were trying to rent our condo. We had two different people call and express interest, then ask to see it. We gave them directions, and showed up 30 min early to turn on the AC, the lights, make it look nice.
The first one, Ivylad called 10 minutes after her appointment time. Again, he called her. Oh, sorry, she was running late, will be there in about 30 minutes.
45 minutes later, we kick off the fuses, lock the door and leave. She calls about 10 minutes after that to say she was on her way. Ivylad said, sorry, we waited nearly an hour for you, forget it.
The second one never showed and never answered her phone when I tried to call her. I guess it’s good they never showed, because if they’re late for an appointment, they’ll probably be late on the rent. But yeesh, don’t waste our fricking time!
(We do have it rented now, BTW.)
[QUOTE=cerberus]
Rather like the courtesy that some employers show their applicants by wasting the applicant’s entire day with a series of fake, pro forma interviews, then never get back to the applicant? “Gee, thank you for serving as our stalking horse for the guy that we really want to hire.”
Yeah, it goes both ways…
[/QUOTE]
or, my personal favorite, after you’ve traveled an hour to the interview, gone through the one hour panel interview, their last question is "the person currently holding the “assistant to this position” position is also interviewing for this position - if ( :rolleyes: ) we hire that person, would you be interested in the assistant position? :mad:
Hmph.
I don’t know how many applications I’ve sent out, over the past several months. It’s got to be numbered in the hundreds.
Even the interviews must run into dozens. (For the record, the only time I’ve missed one, it was because I’d fallen down a flight of stairs and done something to both my knees, so I couldn’t walk. Didn’t stop me ringing up to explain and apologize, though.)
I can count the number of times I’ve had definite feedback from an interview (as in, a reason why they rejected me). I can count those on the fingers of both hands …
[QUOTE=lezlers]
And for those of you who try to justify it by telling tales of inconsiderate employers, how does that make it okay to sink to their level? I don’t care how unprofessional someone else acts, that is hardly reason for you to act in a highly unprofessional manner yourself.
[/QUOTE]
Justifying it is different from explaining it. And the latter is what i was doing.
I agree that just because some employers are jerkoffs doesn’t mean that potential employees have to be jerkoffs too. But if people have been jerked around by employers before, it’s at least partly understandable that they might come to the conclusion that basic politeness and consideration are not really necessary.
[QUOTE=lezlers]
Two wrongs don’t make a right and all that.
[/quote]
You reap what you sow and all that.
Unfortunately, the ones that reap are not always the same ones that sow, and as i said in my previous post it could well be that the OP is one of those employers who is, in fact, considerate and reliable in dealing with his interviewees. If that’s the case, then it sucks that he suffers from the lack of consideration shown by others.
Still, if what i read, and what i hear from other people looking for jobs is any indication, it seems to have become increasingly common for employers not to show even the most basic courtesies during the hiring process. Everyone except the person who actually gets the job is often ignored, and promises to call the candidate and inform them of whether or not they have been successful are broken. When the whole culture shifts away from these courtesies, it’s hardly surprising that individuals do it too.
[QUOTE=GargoyleWB]
No-shows just make it easier to weed down the candidate list.
[/QUOTE]
That’s if you had a huge candidate list to start with.
There’s a huge labor shortage problem in my particular business sector now (integrated media planning and buying) and our lists of qualified applicants are usually only 3-5 people to start with.
Candidates need to understand that when they blow off interviews or otherwise fail to live up to their commitments, they waste time and money. They also appear unprofessional.
Hey, I was stood up by my college interviewer. Fortunately, he showed up the second time, but he did not bother to call.
No, I didn’t get into that college.
Here I thought you were going to talk about something completely different… like that time during the campaign when the country’s top rated morning show did a feature about my riding with all of the candidates. One of them didn’t show up.
He’s now the MP. :rolleyes:
[QUOTE=THespos]
Candidates need to understand that when they blow off interviews or otherwise fail to live up to their commitments, they waste time and money. They also appear unprofessional.
[/QUOTE]
No, the only thing they need to understand is that they don’t get hired. Don’t I wish that were true in my workplace. (Where I have nothing to do with HR at all.)
Tris
I’ve got something worse than that - how about people who you interview, hire, have them sign papers and go through pre-orientation, and then - they don’t show up for their first day of work, or the second day, and sort of vanish off the face of the earth? These are people being hired in as $40-$50k engineers, supposedly to work in a professional environment, they’ve spent all this time to get to this point and signed all the paperwork, and they just walk away on the first day.
This has happened 3 times lately, and it happened a few times in the past too. One common thread is that every single one of them was a new college grad. When our HR has tried to contact them to find out why, we’ve had very interesting results. One person we kept getting his roommate who kept nervously saying “um, he’s out, I don’t know when he’ll be back”, another had their mommy answer and finally say “stop harassing my little girl!” Excuse me? Your “little girl” applied and was hired for a somewhat prestigious first job at a high salary which she spent time negotiating over to bump us up $5k a year, and she can’t even scrape up the courage to tell us by e-mail that she’s not going to show up?
I wish I could contact whoever ended up hiring them and say “you hired a person who right out of school is sorely lacking in honour and professionalism. Good luck with all that.”
Oh, and putting your Livejournal link on your resume? Bad idea. These kids needs to take their blinders off and realize that the typical person looking over their resume is a crusty old adult who is only vaguely aware that this “web” exists via their experience hitting ESPN at lunch, and they are not going to appreciate your maoist lesbian wiccan poetry, bitch-fights over Idol or some other dreck, and your cute animated icons of Legolas.
Also, when including an e-mail address, here’s a tip - people like me who do know the smallest amount about the net will put it into Google, and sometimes find out a whole lot about you from it. Like one guy who looked like a good candidate until I found his student e-mail attached to a college sports blog where he made several racist and homophobic posts, including using the rather quaint racist word of “jigaboo”. Another one, a girl who looked promising, I found her LJ via her e-mail, and found her saying very disparaging things about my company in posts the day before her interview, saying how “it was a lame place but it would give her interview experience for the real job she wanted”. E-mail addys are free; get a unique one for work that you never, under any circumstances, use for anything but work.
<googles self email address>
Nope, nothing. My anonymity wins again!