By J. Dean Spence
I think that hiring managers at some organizations suffer from amnesia. They sit in their cozy offices, collecting their fat paychecks and forget how difficult it is to get a job. Either that or they are sadists who enjoy making people suffer.
They seem to think that their time is more important than the job seeker’s time. Why, for example, when I submit a cover letter and resume to some employers do I then have to spend an hour manually entering the exact same information on their website?
Some companies also think so highly of themselves that they expect you to fill out a survey that “tests your problem solving skills” (As if a survey can accurately test how someone will perform in a work environment—yeah right!)” Count yourself lucky if you’ve never come across these surveys:
“Ψ Ω Ω ω ψ… What comes next in the sequence?”
My response? MEGO: “my eyes glaze over” it.
I absolutely refuse to fill out such a survey. Spend an hour trying to make sense of squiggly lines is, in my opinion, an insult to any professional’s training or education. Spend an hour feeling stupid and then not even getting an interview? Personally, if I want to feel stupid, I’ll spend a day binge watching Jeopardy! For a long, long time very good companies were able to find very good workers without the aid of such ridiculous tests. Now, all of a sudden companies can’t find good people without forcing them to squint at a random sequence of ideograms?
I think the most despicable hiring practice is the unscheduled phone interview. The hiring manager intentionally tries to catch you off guard (supposedly to see how well you think on your feet) and asks you elaborate questions about their company. “Um, excuse me? This morning I sent out my 250th resume, and you expect me to remember all about your company?” Unless you’re hiring someone to be an improvisational comedian, give your interviewees a heads up otherwise you may not be getting the best person for the job—just someone highly skilled in the art of B.S.
Some of the questions I’ve been asked by interviewers have left me shaking my head. “When you wake up in the morning, do you feel tired or refreshed?” “If you were an animal, what kind of animal would you be?”
I’ve been to a few interviews for strategic communication roles, and many ask some iteration of “If given this role, how would you promote our company?” I can tell such interviewers spend some time coming up with such cute questions. Too cute!
Any strategic communicator knows that to successfully promote a company, product, service or idea you need a thorough understanding of the proposed audience. You need research. That research will then, in turn, inform the strategies and tactics you use to fulfill your promotional goals. It makes no sense at all to speculate on such strategies or tactics without research. If I were to step into a strategic communication role and develop a communication/marketing plan without doing my research first, I might get lucky guessing the right strategies/tactics, or—more likely—I might fail miserably like the recent Pepsi/Kendall Jenner commercial fiasco.
Perhaps that is what these interviewers want to hear. But I get the impression that what they really want is a catalogue of different communication strategies and tactics—so why not just ask, “What are the different strategies and tactics of which you are aware?
I could go on and on about my distaste for the antics of hiring managers I’ve come across. For example, I’ve been in interviews in which it is obvious that the interviewer is just winging it and is not prepared for the interview. Now, I’ve been on both sides of the seat, interviewer and interviewee. I know that the interviewer has to be just as prepared as the interviewer, but by the questions some interviewers ask (or don’t ask) and by their abrupt, hurried manner, this is not the case.
I think that for a hiring manager to be really good at his or her job, he or she should always be mindful about how it was for them when they were jobseekers. Unfortunately, it seems that hiring managers don’t care about the time jobseekers waste filling out surveys and re-entering information the company already has in the form of resumes, they don’t care that they catch you off guard with unscheduled phone interviews, they sometimes don’t even care about preparing thoughtful interview questions. All they care about is filling a position.
Some hiring managers have a bit of a ruthless streak in them.