Prospective employer Googles your name, sees that you recently trashed their company (or strategic partner, or largest client), and decides to take a pass.
No, I know it wasn’t anything personal. Google is a big company and my application probably got lost in a sea of applications. Still, I think it reflects poorly on a potential employer to ghost candidates.
After applying to a faceless mega-corp, I somehow found the hiring manager on LinkedIn and politely messaged them. Totally ghosted me. Later received the customary automated rejection email.
What if the recruiter tells you that Google/FB/etc reviewed your resume and you didn't make the cut? (When in actuality they just don't want to pay the commission)
You wouldn't dislike them, but you might then not apply for a job there (thinking you had already been turned down once), and then Google/FB/etc misses out on any chance to hire you.
Red Hat: Resume submitted in spring, still being reviewed. (It says so on their careers website.)
Mozilla: Have a non-responsive e-mail address on their careers page, advertise jobs for months even though the hiring manager has left the company, provide zero feedback in nonacceptance e-mails (just some boilerplate text + request to connect with the recruiter on LinkedIn). One hiring manager there asked me for suggestions to solve a specific big data problem, then failed to follow up to my reply for more than two weeks. After contacting him on IRC, he sent an awkward e-mail that he'd like to postpone the project until later in the year. I sent a lengthy e-mail complaining about the ridiculously unprofessional conduct and he didn't have the grace to send any kind of response. Definitely one of the most fucked-up hiring experiences in my career.
I wish people would name the company, especially when it does something this awful. Why be coy? It’s not like there is a chance that you’d get the job anyway. You could save lots of other candidates time and grief. Name the company and the first and last name of the recruiter who stonewalled you when you told them you were stranded at an airport due to their unacceptable behavior.
I think I got one of these a few months ago. A recruiter at "an executive search firm" emailed saying my name "was mentioned in connection with a CTO/SVP Eng brief" they were trying to fill, specifying that "It’s a confidential search". Which at the time I assumed just meant they couldn't mention the company name, but then in an (unsolicited) followup email they told me the company name, so possibly they did mean they were trying to keep it quiet.
The kicker is I'm a junior dev not long out of uni, and not qualified to be CTO of a ham sandwich. If they were trying to keep it quiet, they were doing a pretty terrible job of it.
I recently received a mail from them which was like "We found your profile interesting, so we automatically created a profile for you in our career web and will notify you about any matching job openings", all after I turned them down multiple times in the past. I basically just said whatever and let it go.
Wow, a single offhand comment could doom a candidate from ever being hired?
I wish the same high standard applied to companies interacting with candidates. I've had a Google engineer literally scream at me in an interview. I've also had their recruiters reach out to me for a role, schedule an interview that seemed to go well, then completely ghost me.
I do not judge a company that doesn't hire me, even if they don't give feedback - that is understandable given the legal climate in the states. But it is unacceptable to simply disappear, and actions have consequences.
(In my case, I do not take Google recruiter comms, along with any other company that engages in abusive behavior during the interview process)
Many years ago, I applied for a Google job that I was totally unqualified for. I didn't even get an interview, but they sent me a nice snail mail paper rejection letter anyway. I've heard mixed things about their interview process, but I still get a have a nebulous warm fuzzy feeling when I think about possibly sending a resume in again one day, because of one simple, probably automated, $.29[1] response.
Conversely, at a company I won't publicly name, I got the silent treatment [2], after getting an offer, for asking if I could take two months off between jobs. I can only imagine what would have happened if I tried to negotiate salary.
I understand and appreciate the blogger's comment that people should behave decently, by the simple virtue of being human. But, that's not going to convince anyone who doesn't already want to be a decent person. But what ever happened to unenlightened self-interest, naked greed, and pure avarice? Not only did they sour me on the company, they lost two other potential hires into the same group, when I told them how their potential future boss treated me when I didn't take the offer without negotiating, after being asked why I didn't take the job.
There's pretty much no benefit to treating people shoddily, and a huge potential downside, when the candidate pool you're trying to employ hears about it. Why do it?
[1] Probably less, since they doubtless qualify for bulk mail rates.
[2] I sent a couple of emails to follow-up, and tried calling and leaving a voicemail once. I had the hiring manager's number (and that's the person I would have been directly reporting to), because he gave it to me in case I had any questions. Months later, I asked a friend of mine at the company what happened, and he told me "Yeah, X is pretty busy". The funny thing is, it was a huge microprocessor project that was staffing about 40 circuit designers / logic implementers, and the hiring manager told me they were expecting to continue hiring for another six months. It actually took them longer than that to fill all the positions they wanted, and I would have started before they were finished with the arch/perf simulations and moved onto real logic work anyway, even with a two month delay. I would have saved them paying me two months salary without having any work for me to do!
EDIT: Sorry for adding something after there have been replies, but it's been a long time since this happened. After looking through old emails to jog my memory, I see that they sent me a standard form with a bunch of info they wanted filled out, before I interviewed. One of the fields was availability, which I listed as 2+ months out. It's a big bureaucratic company, so it's understandable that there are standard forms which get sent out that hiring managers never look at, but ignoring this particular thing this particular time is a bit funny, ex post.
sometimes companies can be disorganized, especially at various inflection points during their growth.
i had a similar experience with a company years ago... had a laugh about it with some friends and thanked the recruiter for their time anyway. six months later they came back and offered a more defined role, but i was already down the path with a different company.
i think, maybe, publicly shaming the company is not the best strategy. if they figure out it was you, and it does damage to their reputations, none of the people involved will ever want to work with you.
After moving to California in 2011, I decided I missed the office banter and started looking for a job. I found a listing on a large, tech-based recruiting firm (cybercoders) and the job was perfect for my skills. I applied but heard nothing back.
After a week I reached out to the recruiter, and she replied with a curt, "You're not qualified for this role so we're looking elsewhere." I was a bit surprised as the reqs they described in the job listing were exactly what I had been doing for the last 3 years. But it got me thinking whether the company (HR, Hiring Manager, etc) had made the decision or if the recruiter had?
In addition, there was no additional offer from the recruiter to work with me? It was literally that one line. It got me thinking that maybe my experience(s) wasn't valued by the recruiter as someone worth pursuing, as I may be more "work" to land a job than she would want to invest?
Anyway, with my pride slightly dinged, I immediately wrote off the recruiter (and cybercoders as a whole) as someone I wouldn't want to work with in the future. I got a job at a larger company and a few years later, enjoyed responding to the SAME recruiter asking if I was interested in some jobs she had to offer (nothing bridge-burning worthy, but it felt great saying "NO THANKS")
I've had firms contact me to tell me they've passed me over for consideration ... for positions I've never applied for. Apparently even rejecting various pseudonyms I've generated.
Which I suppose is the flipside of your situation.
Sort of orthogonal, but a perhaps culturally telling anecdote: a few months ago I was actively looking for a new job, and got a cold email from a technical recruiter from Roblox (via linkedin). I was curious, so set up a time to call, he asked for me to submit my cv (which is 90% things you could see on my linkedin, but sure, whatever) through a upload page on some recruiting site of their. Within minutes of submitting the cv, I got a rejection email from them, even though I had already scheduled the call. I figured it was an error, but nope, crickets when the time for the call came around.
That happened to me with Amazon and Microsoft. I asked Amazon to never email me again, and then I get a "got it, removing you from our list", and then the same recruiter emailed me saying I was a perfect fit.
This happened to me with RedHat. They were my first choice, so being ghosted by them delayed my job search by several weeks. It was a serious problem for me.
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