Job Rejections
You probably weren’t rejected — you were fumbled.
I’ve been lucky enough to sit on several hiring committees. Let me tell you the story of one such hiring process. I’m going to anonymize the story a bit to protect the guilty, but the important stuff is all true here.
They put the job up on Monster, and waited until 5000 resumes came in. That was about an hour; then they took it down. We sat in a room as 5000 resumes screamed off a printer. We developed software at this company, so I asked… why not look at these resumes on a computer? As the youngest in the room, this suggestion was not well-received.
We began looking over resumes, and to be clear “we” was just whoever raised their hand in the dept when asked, “who wants to read resumes?” The first several generated a lot of discussion, but we eventually acknowledged we needed to allot less time to each. And less… and as the hours wore on the sense of urgency escalated. Eventually the most senior member of the team innovated, by throwing about 4500 resumes in the trash. “We’ll never get through 5000,” he said.
This is just one (funny and tragic) story of how this has gone, but in general this incredibly important task is handled with a consistent amount of folly. This hiring process was terrible from every perspective, employer and potential hire. As a rejected applicant, you were not weeded out amongst the best of your peers and edged out by someone just a little bit better. It wasn’t your cover letter, or your resume. You probably weren’t even looked at. You were fumbled.
In fairness to employers, there’s a reason hiring processes are so bad. For one, growing businesses do the most hiring, and they’re always a mess. If everything was in order, they wouldn’t be hiring. But there’s too much work to do, everything is chaos, can you come join us and clean it up a bit? For another, a lot of jobs in growing fields like tech are handed off to Recruiters, and those Recruiters get paid for how many seats they warm up, that’s it. It’s way cheaper to hire non-technical people to find, recruit and vet technical people, so an army of people with no idea what Java or C++ is, are out there right now demanding applicants know Java and C++. It’s easy to lie in that interview.
And of course, those Recruiters are supposed to add a lot of integrity to the hiring process, but instead they add keyword screeners on resumes, backed by that staff that can’t tell a lie from the truth. It’s all a little funny, but it’s not overstating things to say this is how Americans find work, and it defines the shape of the American workforce. When a lie is going to reach a lot farther in all these resume screeners than the truth, what have we done to the US employment market?
Now, I’m sure there are a lot of employers that read the above comedy of errors and go, “My hiring process is better,” and… maybe. But after having seen many hiring processes in a wide range of industries, I think you should allow for the possibility that yours is pretty terrible too. To get some perspective, let’s take a look at an excellent solution.
Nobel prize winning economist Alvin Roth noticed that doctors graduating from medical schools consistently hated their first job, a Residency at a hospital. The hiring process was extremely inefficient: These highly qualified people would all do the same research to determine which hospitals were hiring, those hospitals would interview them once, twice, maybe 3 times, supposedly vetting them for whether they were adequate for their hospital’s high standards, job offers would go out and 6 months later most would quit and leave for another hospital.
In the snootiest view, these interviews were ensuring these doctors were a good fit for each hospital’s high standards. But shouldn’t it be a bit humbling that those doctors leave 6 months later? Perhaps, your hospital, your company, the job you’re offering, isn’t that unique. Maybe all these hospital jobs have a lot in common, and the process could be simplified by collaborating. And maybe doctors wouldn’t leave so fast if they weren’t always in the hot seat — what if the applicants had a say too?
And that’s exactly what Alvin Roth did. He took an economic solution to something called “The Stable Marriage Problem,” and applied it here. He created a single Residency pool, where a much smaller number of employees from the pool of hospitals would vet candidates for entrance into the hiring pool. Once you got past that much shorter interview and vetting process, you were hired. Now — you just had to pick which hospital you liked most. The doctors interview the hospitals, examining them for the best place to work, and the place that best suited them.
To summarize the Pool/Stable Marriage algorithm, the employers rank every applicant, and the employees rank every employer. The employee with the highest average rank gets their first pick of employers, and so on down the list. Everyone gets the best employer and employee they can “afford” given their quality. In some cases, your weird might match an employer’s weird — you might be the only ones that gave each other a 1, even though neither of you averaged very high, allowing unique fits a conventional resumes-to-trash hiring process would likely never find. Alvin Roth’s solution worked, and is now used in a wide number of Residency programs; in the first Pool he setup, the average employment time at first hospital quadrupled.
This happens to be applied to a single hiring event once a year in this example, but it’s easy to envision how this could be a hiring pool that moves on a rolling basis — with enough employers looking for a category of employee, you already have year-round hiring, may as well open the till year-round, rather than the ol’ “Whatever arrives in 1 hour, and we’ll throw 90% of those in the trash.” Let the best employees approach on their schedule, rather than the brief window each employer opens the till.
If employers got together to form these hiring pools, employers would now be able to point to the pool’s vetting process when poor candidates who, say, can’t create a text file, slip through. Not every company that’s hiring has expert people at hiring; companies that must grow can participate and benefit from the pool without having to excel at employee vetting. And, most importantly, qualified employees could get their pick of employers, which in addition to the obvious benefit to employees, could save employers a lot in training and turnover.
So, if you’re an employer, how is your hiring process looking now? If you are an employer, I’d ask that you look around and consider how many employers around you are hiring for some of the same positions you are. Maybe you can work together to form a hiring pool, and get rid of those unqualified recruiters.
If you’re a job applicant, stop feeling so down about sending out resumes and not hearing back. In the majority of cases, you weren’t rejected. You were fumbled.
