Hiring at Companies is Confusing, Not Evil

By Soozy G. Miller, CPRW, CDCC, CDP

I hear and read fantastic and horrible hiring stories from both sides of the hiring desk.

I have helped several clients who were laid off, saw their job posted online, applied to it, and got re-hired.

Job seekers feel very frustrated and annoyed and start cursing the company when they see their old job posted on a job board. It’s disheartening.

Then I saw a very smart post from one of my colleagues:

These companies aren’t “evil.” They’re trying to figure out how to survive … how to survive for the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years. The world is in an exciting and unpredictable place right now. Technology is changing. Companies are trying to anticipate the future and have the right skills (i.e. people) in place.

Also, something my colleague didn’t mention is that there might not be adequate communication among Human Resources (HR) / the hiring team / talent acquisition people and the rest of the company. Colleagues have told me nightmare stories about their hiring leadership not talking to HR or recruiters about the open jobs. As a recruiter, I have experienced that as well.

I’ve recruited for two companies at which nobody was talking to anyone else about hiring. One hiring manager always had her Slack profile on silent and answered me about every 3-4 days. The job postings constantly changed, job requirements constantly changed, and the interview processes constantly changed. Nobody updated me, the recruiter, about any of this. Due to this lack of communication, I’ve had to keep jobs open for weeks and stave off the angry applicant masses while the hiring team was … well, I don’t know what they were doing. They definitely weren’t talking to me!

I recommended one excellent candidate to a hiring manager, the hiring manager thanked me and told me he was awesome, and 9 weeks later he still hadn’t been hired. Why? His personality assessment indicated that he does not enjoy conflict. Should they have hired someone who does enjoy conflict?

Another recruiter colleague told me that his company clients will have him post a job on LinkedIn while they pursue hiring internally. Then the applicant pool for the public posting grows, and nobody so much as glances at those applicants. Then they just take the post down after they have internally hired. My colleague thinks the public post is simply a back-up plan in case the internal hire doesn’t work out. That’s maybe not the best plan? Chances are that nobody at that company is discussing what is the best plan.

None of these hiring problems exist due to incompetence or evil. Everyone is simply trying to figure out the best move forward with hiring, with the understanding that the best candidate is just as likely to move on, the world is big and chaotic, and hiring is expensive. And nobody is communicating with anyone else.

Companies are not evil. But confusion in hiring abounds. This is why I always recommend multiple paths for the job search.

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Better job. More pay. More control.

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