Edition #9: Why didn't you hire me?
Nodirkhon Y.
CEO & Founder of PROFIBOOK ?? Book and provide on-site services | Expert in Startups, Leadership, Engineering & Technology
You are reading the ninth monthly (yeah, I know that sometimes it is more than a quarter) edition of my newsletter. These newsletters are in the format of thought of the time + digest of articles about leadership in engineering teams and interviews with experienced engineers and leaders. Happy reading, watching, and listening ??!
This time I will talk about my experience of setting up a hiring process and how I ensured quality feedback to all rejected candidates.
It's just a gut feeling
Throughout my career in various organizations as hiring manager and CEO, I have screened hundreds of CVs and interviewed dozens of people from around the globe for various positions and internships. Most of experience was related to researchers and engineers from hardware to software disciplines.
Similarly, I had experience as candidate of going through hiring processes in various organizations around the globe for engineering, research and management positions.
What I saw was that in many places, rejected candidates did not get any feedback. And if they got feedback, it was something generic like this:
"We have with great interest reviewed your profile and work experience. However, we would like to inform you that, after reviewing all applications, we have decided to proceed with other applicants who had a closer match with the job requirements for this specific role."
I have to admit that in one case when I was applying for the head of department position, the head of the unit in which that department was, booked with me a meeting titled "Way forward". First, I thought I was hired and the meeting was to discuss ways forward with this position, but then I thought that something was not right as otherwise I would have received an offer letter from HR. Indeed, he just wanted to give me feedback on why I was not hired.
His feedback was just like that - "Some people say you are stubborn". Of course, I asked follow-up questions, but it was all nicely turned into "I cannot say details as it might compromise the identity of those people". After that meeting, I did not sleep but was thinking hard about why I got such feedback and what I needed to change or improve. Eventually, I got depressed, because the only thing I managed to do was to recall how about a year ago my manager said the same thing to me. Then a thought flashed in my mind if the current manager at that time influenced the decision of the hiring manager.
Looking through my experience I started wondering why is that rejected candidates do not get feedback or given something generic. That is because most organisations regardless of their size have no clear selection criteria and evaluation process. Yes, there is a generic process like creating a job description, getting approval for hire from the superior manager, posting job ad, screening CVs, interviewing and signing contracts or employee agreements. But all the rest of decisions is made based on... gut feeling.
That is why, most people do not get rejection letters with clear and actionable feedback to their job applications.
And why there is no evaluation process in place in most of the organizations? Because, hiring managers are often overloaded and expect that HR would help out with that while HR is also overloaded, has no domain expertise and expects instead hiring manager to handle evaluation specific to his/her domain.
It can and should be done differently
So, why is it important to give quality rejection feedback? First of all it is not even about feedback itself. If you cannot give clear concise feedback, it means you have no idea who is the right candidate. It means your process is inefficient and not data-driven.
Secondly, it is a disrespectful to people who put their effort and time into submitting applications and keep their hopes. It puts the company in a bad light and creates negative branding image. Next time there is an opening, there might less candidates and not the ones you want.
Many organizations put some effort into the onboarding experience for hired people (that's a topic for another time) but neglect the overall hiring experience part.
When I founded profibook , I decided to apply all my knowledge and experience to make sure that we have:
To gauge the hiring experience, I created an anonymous survey sent to all rejected candidates.
Here is the anonymous feedback I got:
Besides that, I also got lots of emails sharing full of appreciation for the given feedback.
Thanks to this approach I was able to contact previously shortlisted but rejected candidates and hire them fast. Because such respect and effort to provide feedback did not go unnoticed.
How to achieve streamlined hiring process
There were cases when for one position I had more than 200 candidates. How do you manage to review and provide feedback to all of them? There needs to be a clear plan thought out in details. In my case, the whole process was designed to take 4 weeks maximum regardless of the number of candidates.
Once you have your plan think about what and how you can automate. Things like audio notes and speech to text are one of those things.
Scoring system
Here is an example of the scoring system I have created for application screening. If candidate was getting total score of 7, then that candidate would be considered for the interview stage. For each criteria I have made sure to put a detailed guide on how to set the score for that criteria.
The scoring system was as follows:
Similarly, separate scoring was for brief interview stage:
One of the ways to test communication skills was to ask candidates to explain complex technical concept in the way they would explain it to the kid. Most of the candidates failed this part. The reason I asked such questions was to see mastery of the subject. If you know the subject well, you can easily make it simple to understand.
Reviewing and filtering application
However, scores by themselves can be misleading and there is always a need for notes that justify those scores and have timely material for feedback.
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Taking notes can be very time consuming. However, I have came up with a fast way to create them as can be seen in the flow above.
Time to give feedback
Now when you have the plan, tools, clear evaluation criteria and documentation, you can provide detailed quality feedback to rejected candidates. Not only that, you also have all materials to learn from own mistakes and make improvements in your hiring process.
Here is the example of the rejection letter that I was providing to every single candidate.
Quote of the day
While walking in the Deira area of Dubai, which is considered an old part of the city, I encountered the quote of the Ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.
Do not practice your work as an employee, but practice it as a leader who loves his country, as a maker who loves his craft, and as an artist who creates his art
Noteworthy, that the banner with this quote is on the Dubai Municipality building that I think serves as a reminder to people working in that building to have the right mindset. Our mindsets play key role in how we perceive life. In the same situation, one can be happy and another be sad. If more people have the mindset of living to the fullest, there will be more integrity in the society.
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Thank you for reading this newsletter! Share with me your reflections on the topics I discussed in this newsletter - I would love to learn your perspective.
Yours not yours,
Nodirkhon aka Nodir