The tech employment market is a highly volatile and unregulated environment. Given COVID-19, the recruiting process for tech companies has had to adapt, and some have succeeded while others are struggling. Recently concluding a job search, I began with my first application sent 60 days ago and crescendoed into insanity in the final 20% of the chaos to reach the offer stage with my company leads. I am exhausted and hope to not have to embark on this increasingly difficult job hunt for the foreseeable future. The curve of “getting back into” the tech interviewing game is a steep reckoning that strains even the strongest and seasoned guts.

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In the first successful job search of my career, I was a full-time job seeker and therefore had ample time to hack the interview process at tech companies by meticulously studying the nuances of data structures, algorithms, toy problems, and scouring online forums for reviews containing insights into the process for specific companies. To ensure the effectiveness of my laborious search, I maintained a commitment to overachieve during the hiring process itself.

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Fast forward to now, despite the breadth of experience I’ve had since my first job, I was steamrolled by the hugely overgrown demand of employers.

I recently dedicated multiple back-to-back weekends to coding challenges for companies which landed me virtual onsite interviews; yet they all led to email rejections weeks later (classy) or ghosting (f*@#! rude). Where did the expectation that candidates should do this much work for free come from? How could the required hoop-jumping be done in good faith? An employer cannot eliminate the risk of mis-hiring, but by attempting to overly minimize the hiring risk by demanding extravagant commitments from potential candidates upfront with ambitious technical projects and a verbose interview process, they’ve broken the system further. The hunger games hiring pipelines led by big tech kickstarted a market for “interview prep” services that train individuals to game the interview processes. Hiring has become arbitrarily selective as even the most seasoned senior candidates are competing with interview hackers beelining for offers; as the interview hackers secure these senior positions, their subsequent on-the-job performance is loosely if at all correlated to their hiring process performance. The very thing employers were trying to avoid by creating an elevated hiring bar resulted in trained players hacking their own game…

Ghosting After All

Along my own journey through various hiring processes, I encountered a trend with companies requesting final virtual on-sites lasting 5-7 hours each. For most currently employed folks, the lengthy on-sites hamstrings them and knocks their resiliency in case of a near-hire rejection (employees have less time off than companies have time to recruit), again shifting most of the risk of rejection on to the employee.

After many hours with companies in technical, behavioral, and meta meetings, it’s tough when a company promises a follow-up call and then weeks go by before an automated rejection email from them arrives in your spam folder. Just because we can automate most things, does not mean we should automate everything. Whether intentional or not, the class and character of the sender are always part of the message received by others. When you claim to have values of transparency and empathy and then promise to call a candidate with an update, do it. It takes courage to acknowledge mistakes when it is easier to hide from them behind process, a commonality in larger organizations where smaller companies can hold integrity over the phone to break the news. Follow through with your commitment, rain or shine, and be authentic throughout all your communication.

Most senior candidates have existing demanding full-time commitments where they are regularly solicited for their expertise. Junior or entry-level candidates are usually unemployed or freshly minted interview hackers with plenty of time on their hands to endure voluminous hiring processes modeled after big tech crafted with hopes to screen less qualified candidates. Unfortunately, the inverse is now true. Junior, inexperienced, but trained interviewees may have little know-how of the world of software development cycle or how to navigate complex real-world systems, but they hack their way through whereas the senior candidate may be left to struggle with their industry callouses.

The silent killer is when you’ve had a great interview process and then nothing. No feedback or follow-up as promised, no signal, no response, just ghost vapors as if the organization had never existed. When dating, this kind of ghosting is rude but common, in the professional world, it’s highly unprofessional.

Real Alternative

I’d like to offer another approach to employers seeking to hire best in-class talent. Provide real-world example scenarios that match up with day-to-day work and see how candidates respond to these prompts. Just because a candidate may be rusty on a trie data structure implementation, should not disqualify them from being a major value-creating contributor to a team.

I consider myself a seasoned software engineer, but I can unfortunately assert that the ease of the job search does not improve with experience or seniority. Regardless of maturity or seasoning, the job search, when seriously committed to, is absolutely exhausting and soul crushing. The energy, grit, and resilience, required to lead a successful search are akin to the traits entrepreneurs need to make it through the valleys of desperation. I’ve Frodo-danced with excitement, Gollum-cried with shame, and Gandalf-reflected with wisdom, all within the same day. The circus of hiring processes are vast and range across many forms from customary to trend-setting, resulting in a volatile environment resembling speed dating with resumes instead of a professionally streamlined and employee-sympathetic process.

A story about The Power of No: I was presented a highly enticing offer from a large corporation with benefits to woo even the riskiest of entrepreneurs. My counter offer was met with a boost and extra gifts to ease my mind into the opportunity to which I found great difficulty in rescinding. I ultimately did not move forward with the offer, and I began to decline inbound requests for interviews from companies as I realized that it no longer made sense to consider opportunities whose underlying product I would eventually say no to anyway. I refined my search criteria and became more selective in what roles I was willing to pursue next.

Here is an example template I’ve successful used that strikes a balance between communicating a negative experience while keeping the door open for future collaboration and still allowing for closure after a ghosting experience (let me know how it goes if you use it):

Hey team,

Since I never received any follow up after our virtual onsite, I hope everything is ok with the team.

In the spirit of transparency, I wanted to follow up to let you know I’ve decided to move forward with another opportunity. I still am not sure where things stood with [COMPANY Inc.] after our onsite.

If the team simply decided to pursue other candidates, I find it unprofessional to ghost a candidate from feedback given the amount of time invested by all parties in interviewing and the final onsite. If I was in fact ghosted, please try to avoid ghosting future candidates, as it is stressful, disrespectful of their time, and reflects poorly upon the company’s culture.

Despite my negative experience as a candidate, it was a pleasure getting to know each of you on the team and wish you all the best. We all make mistakes, it’s how we learn from them that matters.

Sincere regards,

Ghosted response email template