It is a cold Monday morning in the dreaded year of 2020. Many are waking up thinking about their long day of work ahead virtual or in office, children who are preparing to go to school or getting ready to be in front of computers. And he gets up early morning at 6 AM, makes a hot cup of coffee, has eggs for breakfast, takes bath, and sits in front of the laptop.
He begins his day by loading the job websites on multiple tabs: LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed, Monster, and many others. He starts searching for jobs that are relevant to his experience and applies to them diligently. Though, most organization use 3 or 4 major HR solutions, they still expect the person to create an individual profile in multiple versions of the same website, remember a zillion passwords, and track these bazillion candidate homes to track the status. (Okay, digressing from the topic a bit, this is nuts!)
He is one of those who moved to a different country in the middle of the pandemic to be with his partner. As part of this move, he had to leave his well-paying job at a major MNC. He changed his profile to be open for opportunities with the hope of joining another organization where he could be of value and also have a career path to work towards.
So, what went wrong. The crazy intermediate systems were introduced as a means to quickly help companies identify good candidates to fill in their open positions quicker than the human-driven recruiting system. But, in turn, what this has done is make the entire process into a strategic step by step process to even get the candidate in front of a human.
He submits his profile clearly reading the requirements, sees if he matches the job profile, and applies for it. Then the crazy ATS system or whichever artificial intelligence the companies use filters out the profile based on some keywords and only takes those profile which has those exact words in their resume. I mean you could not have a leader in place of a head if “head” is the word the system is asked to look for. So, what has this forced him to do? Instead of spending his time learning new skills, or engaging in any kind of activities that could help him move towards his dream job, he is creating different versions of his resume to match the exact keywords on the job posting.
And even with that, it’s still by luck you could get picked by the system. So, he identifies similar profile candidates or the potential hiring managers in these companies where the roles are interesting to him. He diligently sends a message to them with a short summary of his experience and requesting if he could be considered for a role in their team. And most folks don’t respond, few good souls do and that could help him get his profile in front a human again.
Then, if the higher power does decide to smile upon him that day, he gets a call or an email to do a culture fit/HR discussion round. This is where the first-ever human to human interaction happens and he has sure jumped through many hoops to be able to get this. He prepares and sometimes even over prepares before the meeting. Hell, he even wears complete formals for even phone calls sometimes to show his commitment towards the company and the job. He does the interview round, most HRs have a set of questions they go through to do what is called a culture fit and some even get down to the details of the actual job role even though they are not equipped enough to answer his questions regarding the job.
After this is where the never-ending frustrating waiting job begins, sometimes another round of interviews gets set up right away but after that, it is radio silence and many times it’s even before the next round is scheduled. And he waits for a few days to be respectful of the recruiter’s schedule and work, then it becomes a few weeks. He drops a kind note asking for an update, and all he gets is zilch from the recruiter who seemed all excited to have him join them. And there are so many glitches all along the way, they request for an available time from the candidate and the recruiter, interviewer sometimes come late, sometimes do not turn up at all blaming on his/her crazy schedule and few turn up uninterested. He has to go through all of them with the same level of excitement.
A few weeks go by and then a few have the courtesy to respond about an update, maybe another interview, or that they have filled the position. And he loses some hope and ends his Friday hoping for a better Monday (going through the entire craziness from the beginning).
What is wrong here? Everything! The companies need him as much as he needs the job. And why is that he is expected to put it a 1000% whereas the company has a broken human resources system which has more system and less human in it. Why can’t this be fixed? Why can’t there be transparency both ways? How would companies or the recruiters respond if they received similar ghosting and lackluster responses from the candidates?
We want to figure out a solution to this! We are social beings. Why can’t there be the value provided for the $$ amount a few spend on getting a premium experience? What is missing?
I do want to put in my two cents of what I think could help us fix this. On how to use the technology enable us better and not cripple us. I will put those in another post, for now, I wanted to put the question out to understand if there are more who feel the same.
Please provide your experiences or feedback on comments.
