Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 159: Rejecting candidates and corporate image obsession

Episode Date: May 27, 2019

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m a hiring manager and sometimes have to say no to candidates who interview with us. How do I reject them kindly? In my current company, they only care about reputation of the company. They don’t care about their employees or values, they prefer to invest in other things. One time the CEO asked everyone in the company to create fake accounts in order to vote for the company for an Award. By the way, we received the award. But I don’t know how to feel about this company non-existing values.

It takes more than breaking the build to be a great engineer. This is episode 159 of the Soft Skills Engineering podcast. I am your host, Jameson Dance. I'm your host, Dave Smith. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer all of your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development and feel guilty about breaking the build.

Guilt is a soft skill. You know, we talk about sociopaths a lot on this show, and I feel like that's another benefit. You just wouldn't care that you broke the build. Or I'm filled with shame. Maybe as a sociopath, breaking the build feels bad but breaking human beings doesn't feel bad oh yeah you have empathy for the build it's just not for people all right do you want to talk about our wonderful patrons dave yes thank

you to those who are contributing at the level where they get a shout out every week including matthew voidovich the agile ventures charity zach grannon luis santos nick cantar sean clayton ivo robotnik sunny tie sonic the hedgehog marie rousseau and chris hogan if you'd like to contribute go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon we actually have a special announcement about that that's either going to make you happy or feel spammed so we have a slack team for soft skills engineering and we are going to be inviting everyone who has contributed on patreon and people who contribute in the future should get invites as well if you don't want to join if you have a million slack teams and this is one million and one then feel free to ignore it

but if you'd like to you can come chat with other folks who listen to the show and talk about soft skills and tell us why we're dumb and wrong in slack instead of on twitter yeah we're both we're trying to yeah we're both trying to experiment to make a little community so you should see those invites pretty soon and new donors on patreon should get them as well all right do you want to read our first question oh yeah okay here we go this is from an anonymous listener it says i am a hiring manager and sometimes i have to say no to candidates who interview with us how do i reject them kindly i think you just tell them yes that's the kindest answer it would be too mean to say no to them that's right so they're hired say yes to everyone yeah

huh so this is an interesting question because i feel like the number of candidates you say no to as a hiring manager is usually much higher than the number you say yes to so this is a pretty common experience you'd think we'd be really good at it as a result because we practice it so much more than saying yes well saying yes is just like it's like oprah giving everyone cars right you're like good news and then it's easy to give good news and release the bees or whatever you're doing but i've i've never thought about this very deliberately and i've certainly never had a manager talk about it or had any training about it or anything yeah i think this is just me admitting that i've been winging it this whole time by just saying by saying nah that's the kind

no yeah and i type that out in emails if it's over email nah with like three a's yeah there's so much to talk about here there's like wanting to preserve the image of the company right i think if you treat people poorly in interviews even if you feel like they're not good candidates for the job they have friends and and that word could get around but there's also like all kinds of legal restrictions around uh talking to people about reasons you reject them and again space lawyer here there are things that you can you can use to determine whether a candidate is qualified or not but there are also lawyers that will just take money and sue a company even if you didn't reject them for any of those things but i've heard kind of word of mouth from people before to say

nothing because they can't sue you for saying nothing which feels real bad to me but that sentiment is out there like don't expose yourself to liability so you just say and nah or whatever the business speak version of that is but also i mean do you owe people a reason why there is tension i think to on my part to provide them with good feedback that will help them understand exactly why like i feel that pull but i very rarely have ever provided that you haven't maybe on just a couple of occasions i have a few times i have when people have asked i have not when they have not asked though i usually say something pretty generic like thanks and it just isn't a good fit but a few people have asked specifically for why and those were pretty awkward conversations

to have and i feel like it was good for the world and the cynical part of me is like who cares like why it it didn't do anything for me hopefully it helped them though well did it assuage your guilt a little bit no i felt more guilty because i had to justify it and it made it more clear to myself that i'm ranking them as a human being you know whereas if i say no it's and just don't communicate with them anymore i get to put it out of my brain they don't exist anymore yeah you can't feel guilty yeah i have a hard time i have a hard time saying no to people in general so that applies to candidates that i do not say yes to i should ask some of them if it's been helpful i feel like in the times i've done that it hasn't blown up in my face ever and i have not been sued

fingers crossed knock on wood maybe someone is listening they'll be like gotcha now sucker um i guess i'm thinking out loud here because i don't know rescue me dave okay i'm struggling I mean, this is such a hard one for me, too. And the default. Oh, wait, I have an easy one. You have to actually say no. I have heard so many stories about people getting ghosted by a company. Okay.

Which is incredible to me. That's what middle schoolers do in relationships. Yes. So you're saying that the kindest way to say no is to say no quickly and actually say it. Well, I mean, that's the baseline for saying no is you have to say no. I think you owe it to them to make a decision and not leave people in limbo for months or years or forever. That's a good, that's actually a really good starting point, I think. We can, and it's the easiest thing, right?

Yeah, yeah, that's the easiest advice to give. But I have been around this, and often it's when the responsibility is diffused for who handles candidates. if it's kind of a bunch of developers all trying to do it together and there's not really structure in place then often no one wants to be the one to say no i mean no one's saying yes no one's saying yes let's hire this person but then there's this weird feeling of maybe we'll change our minds later or maybe we'll suddenly decide yes there's this big middle ground sometimes between yes and no and i feel like that middle ground is actually no but sometimes it doesn't get acknowledged yes You know, what happens here, I think, in some companies is you've got this candidate.

They're pretty good, but you're not totally convinced and you want to see a few more candidates before you really decide. And so you string them along as you're trying to interview more people. And you hear this from companies because they'll say, thank you. We've done the interview. We've collected the feedback. There's a few more people we want to talk to before we get back to you. And then you never hear from them again. Yeah.

Right. and so I think that is a symptom of the company not having a deterministic hiring process that applies candidate by candidate but instead it's relativistic based on the other candidates that happen to be interviewing at the same time as you and to me that is a huge no-no like you have a bar the candidate either meets the bar or they don't and it doesn't matter who's going to come through the door tomorrow I don't know if you have one I think for a company as a whole that sounds great But if I am running my team and I have one opening, I can hire one person and there's someone interviewing this week and I kind of liked them and there's someone interviewing next week, I'm going to wait for that next person. I feel like there's some fuzziness there where if the timing is close enough, it makes sense to compare people.

Even if I actually have said that before to my team, we just make decisions one off. But then I've also gone against that before and said, actually, we're going to wait and compare this person. so huh and then do you now you have to have like a tracking system where you're like okay here's this backlog of people we need to say no to but you have to anyway but it's like not you do have to track them but now the time to response varies based on conditions that are outside of your control i feel okay about that because the bar is so low the fact that i that it takes two weeks instead of a week is is a win for most processes okay have you been ghosted i don't think so have you been given feedback ever or has it always just been a no you assume that i've ever been

rejected so first of all how dare you second of all that's what you say to the company that rejects you right that's our next question is how do you respond after getting rejected first of all how dare you but yes in the times i've been rejected i have been rejected in a timely manner without feedback nor have i you know i think i have asked for it but you know companies have this approach where they will usually put a recruiter between you and the people making the decision and they're yeah their job is to get the company not sued yeah and that at that point yes um yeah so they you know you'll ask for feedback and then they'll say now that's where you get ghosted right the recruiter says no you say can you give me some feedback and the recruiter goes

sure i'll see if i can get that from the team and then you never hear from them again it is hard so when i've done this it's been a lot of work for me because it's it's hard to give feedback that to people that you work with and have a close relationship if it's negative or something that you want them to change and this is a relative stranger in most cases so it's for me at least I kind of agonize over the wording a lot and second-guess myself, and it causes some stress. So I can see why that gets dropped sometimes. So we've kind of hit on saying no as the first step to saying no. What else do you do?

You kind of mentioned timeliness there. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, speed, you've got to get, I think, within, yeah, I think two days, two days from the interview. I don't know where I came up with that number, but it's a really good number. You sound very sure of it though. Oh yeah. It's probably good. I mean, I'll tell you this, like at some startups I've worked for, we are, we were so fast on the hiring decisions. And when we identified a really stellar candidate, sometimes they would have an

offer before they finished driving home and we could do that. And that was, I think that was great for the candidate because it's like, they don't have to be in limbo forever. They just go, boom, come join us. And by the way, well, oh wait, well, hold on. Sorry. I'm way off topic. We're not talking about offers. We're talking about rejections. They could have a rejection in their mailbox before they got home. The candidates love it. I mean, I think faster is better in general. It's a stressful time, and the faster you get an answer,

as long as it's not too fast so that you feel like they didn't actually think it through at all. If you get a text message halfway through your last interview that's like, eh, nah, then that would make you feel sad. I think I've told this story on the podcast before, but it's been a long time. So I worked at a startup, and we brought in a candidate to interview them, and they went through the rounds with a couple different people, and then the candidate was kind of standing maybe 10 feet away, and the last interviewer came out and gathered up all the other interviewers and said, so what do you think? And I looked at the candidate standing 10 feet away, and I turned into a rocket ship and blasted off to the moon to disappear. so that is that is too fast okay wait until you can talk about the candidate okay candidly uh more tangents yeah so fast i mean the question says kindly i think you owe it to them you

shouldn't take this as an opportunity to dunk on them yeah sorry we don't hire dummies here oh no yeah i mean i think you want to be as brief and to the point as possible so don't mince words i think i think it's worth differentiating between people you think might be a good fit later and people you think might not and you probably need to have a generic businessy like thanks for interviewing with us it's not a good fit good luck type of thing for those people and and you should thank them they put in a ton of time it's stressful it's a lot of work if they did some code samples or code challenges or whatever that's even more time that doesn't cost you anything but i feel like you do need to handle those people that may be a little too junior or not the right

project for the not the right skill set for for the opening you have or something how do you handle those people where you're saying not this but maybe some other thing later so i have actually had a couple of those in my career when i was handing out offers and rejections and i actually told them i said look we see a lot of potential here but the position we're hiring for right now requires more experience than you have. Come back in one to two years, and then we'll talk. And you know what? In one case, that candidate did come back in one to two years, and they got hired. So yeah, I think it's really a good idea to distinguish between candidates who are probably never going to be a fit for your company, or at least in the foreseeable future, versus those that

need more time, or those that need to pivot into a different role in your company, where maybe they came in for an engineering role, but it turns out there's actually a better fit for them based on their experience and based on what they expressed in the interview doing something else and all of those need to be handled i think differently yeah i've heard about the we'll keep your resume on file line yeah and i don't like that line because it's wrong it's it's a lie most of the time oh so you're going to keep this out of date point in time document on file so that in the future when you look at it it might spark joy like yeah yeah i like the spark joy metaphor here to marie condo those candidates well it's hilarious because it's like wait so let's say i re-interview in three

years is that because you're going to pull up my three-year-old resume and yeah that's that's more out of date you weren't qualified before but as the industry has advanced we've actually gone backwards so your lack of experience is a benefit now yes in fact we're hoping you've done nothing in the last three years so this resume is valid listen a blank slate is not ruined yep yeah what about i mean does it matter the medium you do it in email phone call singing telegram oh that would be great you know that would take some of the sting out of it if it was a barbershop quartet that showed up on my doorstep it's like wait would that take sting out thank you jaybison

we regret to inform you do you really think that would take sting out or would that add sting back in no yeah that would add a prodigious amount of stink you know what i was just thinking wouldn't it be cool if along with every rejection letter you sent out a gift card to a nice restaurant i mean we're talking so little money compared to the amount of money you've invested in the interview process as a company why not just send out 50 bucks or 100 bucks and just say hey thanks for your time and you know go treat yourself to a nice dinner maybe we'll talk again in the future i like the idea of living in a world where that would happen quietly

that sounds great and i feel like it would have a hard time getting through someone that controls how money is allocated well next time i'm in that position i'm gonna push for it i think it'd be awesome i think you'd have to be careful of incentives but i mean i guess the incentive you're providing is like make sure people do well enough to qualify for an interview in whatever screening process you had before which is probably fine yeah cool well uh i'll be interviewing shortly and then i'll have my fake double mustache because i already have a mustache walk out the door and then put it on and come back in and interview again i have heard of paying folks for their time in

interviewing especially if you do pair programming some interview processes are kind of like do work with us i guess that's separate from rejecting candidates though true but you'd pay them whether you rejected them or not i assume yeah and the arguments for it that i have heard yes i've never seen a company do that but it sounds pretty cool i've i've heard people talk about wanting it to exist and there's probably someone out there that does it okay and here you were poo-pooing my gift card idea come on well i have similar sentiments i would like to live in a world where that is widely practiced it makes sense people are giving up their time and it's a big investment and it's yeah maybe i'll do it someday when i get big and strong and famous look if you're if you're a

company like apple you could give like a itunes music store gift card or something and if you're like a b2b enterprise consultant you can give you can give a license to their hr planning software that costs a hundred thousand dollars a month but you get one month for free all right yeah i think that's how you reject candidates and we solved it i'm just thinking of opening an email that says congratulations you've got one month free for our hr planning software oh and we regret to inform you we've decided not to hire you congratulations have one month free license to oracle enterprise forms whatever it is thing yeah that would sting worse than the singing telegram barbershop quartet

okay so i think we've come up with a few solid ways not to do it and the universe of ways to do it we've eliminated most of the bad ones so everything else is on the table yep there's a wide middle ground where you can do a good job good luck good luck do you want me to read the next one please do okay this is from an anonymous listener in my current company they only care about the reputation of the company they don't care about their employees or values they prefer to invest in other things one time the ceo asked everyone in the company to create fake accounts in order to vote for the company for an award by the way we received the award but i don't know how to feel about this company's non-existing values i love this that's so funny we received

hashtag growth hacking that's someone's job oh man it was probably like a best places to work award or oh yeah innovative company award or something like that i don't know very much about those they seem like a racket from the outside are they a racket the best places to work awards yeah do you just like pay money and then get on a list oh good question probably i mean how else would these companies find out about these like little niche startups i yeah i don't know they're just exhaustively touring offices non-stop just embedding like anthropologists yes which would actually be really cool that would be really cool is what those lists do oh yeah i mean very rigorous um in inspection process walking through

with white lab coats and and white glove tests they surface they have figured out how to measure productivity and innovation and so they just do uh an ordering yep just sort it weird the ceo of a company doing something sketchy so weird yeah i like how he said create fake accounts which presumably means create as many fake accounts as you can and revote for us yes twitter or facebook or something yeah it's not just like log into facebook and click the like button with your account it's like create 50 fake facebook accounts i would like to imagine the ceo as a youtuber and he puts out a video that's like smash that like and subscribe button and sends it out to the whole company

make sure to follow retweet like subscribe thank you to all my fans and all the fake accounts that they have created uh use creator code ceo so what what do they do about it well i was trying to think of like if you could mount an adversarial campaign where you are like trying to vote for the worst ceo and get your employees to create a bunch of fake accounts and put your ceo on the list and i see how he feels that's like five percent of the effort of 4chan like 95 horrible stuff and then five percent horrible stuff enacted through like gaming these polls of what to name something or best something or worst something so you're saying shame your ceo by getting him on a list of worst ceos and use

your sock puppet army to vote him to the top exactly okay nothing a little cron job and some crafty python can't do give him a bad yelp review this reminds it's a little bit this this uh you know vote voter box hacking reminds me a little bit about a competition about 10 years ago at a company we had um where we used to do this thing called mustache march madness and it was all about growing the weirdest mustache you could grow and then competing for awards and there was a guy in the office who already had a mustache and uh he did not enter the competition but one of my co-workers wrote his name on one of the awards and stuffed like 50 extra votes into the ballot and he ended up winning that category of

the competition even though he didn't enter it was awesome i assume this was a pretty small company oh yeah i mean there was like 50 40 or 50 people yeah okay so that and it was a paper ballot so you know yeah what you need is one of those highly secure electronic voting systems yes unhackable so this feels bad what's the question here just like how do i deal with the fact that my company did something weird well the question is i don't know how to feel about this company i mean i could give you some feelings feel bad yeah they're scummy i think it kind of depends on the awards that the company's going for here i mean is this like a big industry award or is this just like you're gonna say it's fine for the ceo to pressure employees to make fake accounts

to vote for the company for something you're right once again your ethics prevail i've defeated you in the ethics contest my questionable judgment once again folds i mean there are worse things that ceo's that ceo is probably done but it seems dumb and i think you should feel that he is dumb okay that's the feeling you should have feel about this company hmm there's like a kool-aid sent to this question of like the fact that this suggestion would fly means that there might be a lot of a lot of kool-aid being drunk here where people are like really proud of the company and really wanting it to succeed and and maybe taking an uncritical eye to the culture of what is going on so i don't know this this this would be a warning sign to me i guess especially if it's

a small company i i feel like in my head there's a sliding scale of ethics where the bigger the company the more i expect the ceo to be a lizard person but if it's a small company there's still a regular person and you should expect them to do good things i see so okay so sketchiness levels are acceptable when there's a large enough population i think so yeah i mean they're not but i expect it okay oh okay okay i thought i was about i was about to question your ethics again you don't you don't well i will i will destroy you in the ethics duel i don't know i don't have any more wisdom some but some of these awards are pretty sketchy on their own right so it's like i mean i'll give you an example i recently heard from a friend of mine that some company approached

him and said we'd like to nominate you for an award it's like best machine learning scientist of the year or something and you know it's a it's a one thousand dollar award if you win and it costs uh nine hundred fifty dollars to enter your name you know yeah to get a ticket to the ceremony or something yeah exactly it's like to the gala you pay 950 bucks you might win a thousand and i'm like wait a minute this is a raffle there's a name for this yeah i mean kind of sucks that it exists there's this layer of i don't know how to characterize it but i don't think i have any wisdom because i don't know what the soft skills question is like quit your job i guess start your own awards show oh great idea and just do it like dave said earlier

where it's correct using only the finest d-ball voting machines yeah they only care about the reputation of the company they don't care about their employees or values yeah that does seem like a weird sign where they care a lot about the public reputation of the company but if the question asker is correct then they don't care about how they're treating their actual employees i feel like the companies i have the highest regard for is because of how it seems like they treat their employees not because of i mean maybe that's a different kind of marketing too but not just because they show up in consumer reports as like coolest ride-sharing company or whatever hottest b2b enterprise hr planning software startup

now i want in on that yeah i got a few months i really trust readers digest i'm out of words okay that's normally that's your job to come up with the good words so i guess that means we answered the question yeah good luck uh starting your own competing award that's right all right what can people do if they want their own questions answered go to softskills.audio and click ask a question you can fill out a form there also if you'd like to support the show go to softskills.audio and click on support us on patreon and follow us on twitter at softskillseng where we post occasional updates and show announcements and if you if you really like the show and you want to support it click on your i your uh what do they call it your podcast app

and leave a rating we prefer six stars we're kind of trying to set the bar a little bit higher so this is going to end up in an indictment someday exactly this is when dave committed hacking by proxy by encouraging someone exactly and you know if you have to create a bunch of fake accounts that's okay you're just the conscience of the show dave right all right we'll catch you next week