HOW TO LOSE CANDIDATES AND ALIENATE PEOPLE

When you were young, you were taught to be polite, right?

Maybe not. In which case, I’m here to help.

If you are trying to land a candidate, remember the Golden Rule: Be polite. Treat candidates the way you’d like to be treated. Or simply, use the same manners you’d use at the dinner table.

Or, if you’d prefer to completely ignore that advice, here are five tried-and-true ways to make a terrible impression during your next hiring process:

1. 1. Text during the interview. The candidate won’t mind. While you’re at it, check a few emails and scroll social media. Glance up occasionally so they know you’re still there.
2. 2. Put your least enthusiastic employee in charge of selling the opportunity. Better yet, choose the person with the worst attitude. And definitely don’t tell the candidate why your company is a great place to work. They need you, remember?
3. 3. Schedule one more interview. The first four weren’t quite enough to determine whether an actual face-to-face conversation is warranted. Besides, the candidate surely has nothing else going on.
4. 4. Prioritize the process over the person. Application. Resume. Paperwork. Work sample. Make sure every box is checked before moving forward, even if you already know this is someone you want to hire. Process is process, after all.
5. 5. Go silent between steps. Ignore emails. Don’t provide feedback. And whatever you do, don’t give the candidate a reasonable timeline. People love mystery.

Cringe-worthy? Yes. Uncommon? Unfortunately, no.

Candidate experience is still treated as an afterthought in far too many hiring processes. And I get it, we’re busy. But being busy doesn’t make it good business.

The numbers make that pretty clear. Research shows candidates routinely share negative hiring experiences with others and on employer-review sites, and the vast majority check sites like Glassdoor before deciding whether to pursue an opportunity. A poor candidate experience can even affect whether someone wants to buy from the company later.

Your interview process is part of your employer brand — and sometimes, your customer brand, too.

At some organizations, the process itself has become increasingly burdensome. Multiple interviews. Presentations. Reports. Work samples. Assessments. More interviews. All stretched across weeks — or even months.

At some point, we have to ask: Is all of this actually helping us make a better hiring decision? Being thoughtful about hiring is smart. Creating an obstacle course because we’re terrified of making the wrong decision isn’t. The good news is that the fix isn’t complicated.

Communicate honestly and often. Give candidates a reasonable sense of timing. Remember that an interview is a two-way conversation, so tell them what’s in it for them, too. And, recognize that candidates are people with jobs, families, responsibilities, and lives outside of your hiring process. Their time is valuable, just like yours. And if you forget everything else, go back to the lesson most of us learned when we were five:

Treat people the way you want to be treated.

Turns out, the Golden Rule is also a pretty solid recruiting strategy, too.