Job interviewing is generally awful. Not only is it stressful, but many companies treat employees like they should be thanking their lucky stars that they even got an interview–and therefore, candidates shouldn’t expect to be treated like an actual human.
But, not all companies are evil interviewers. Glassdoor put together a list of the top 50 companies to interview at. Here are the first 5, and to see the rest of the list, follow the link below:
1. Sherwin-Williams: “They are friendly and honest.”
2. Grant Thornton: “They emphasize fit.”
3. Caterpiller. “It’s more than just an interview.”
4. BNY Mellon: “The process is transparent and comfortable.”
5. J. Crew: “The managers are friendly.”
I guess a lot depends on the interviewee, too. My interview with Booz Allen Hamilton was not pleasant. The two young women who conducted it were extremely confrontational and clearly did not know much about the job requirements. I was polite and professional, but they seemed to resent every question I asked. As for Lockheed, I was interviewed by two people. The woman was very nice and we immediately clicked. But the man was very standoffish and rude. I thought maybe they were doing a “good cop/bad cop” routine, but a job interview is a very inappropriate situation in which to do that. I left both interviews feeling bad, but knowing that if people who worked there treated job applicants that way, it wasn’t a place where I wanted to work. Don’t HR people understand that THEIR behavior is important? If you treat job applicants badly, they’ll tell people about the experience, and generate bad PR for the company. I’m in PR & marketing, and this is a basic principle that many employees — especially haughty HR staff — don’t seem to grasp.
Haughty HR staff is precisely the way to explain that. I literally don’t understand why so many HR departments don’t care how job candidates are treated.
Yeah, I also wonder how many of these vary between corporate and retail/branch locations for a company. When I read “Managers are friendly” for J. Crew, that doesn’t say much to me about what type of positions they are talking about. Maybe they are just talking about certain retail locations, but corporate is a different story. One of my biggest complaints about Glassdoor is that it really doesn’t do enough to separate the different areas of large corporations (without you having to keep feeding it). For example, there is a lot of evidence that there is a HUGE difference in how employees are treated when working for Amazon’s warehouses and their corporate offices. But lists like this just show companies like they are one thing. Makes getting a real feel for a company’s headquarters (what I’m usually looking for) and corporate culture really cumbersome when you keep finding out that the review you just read was actually a manager/sales associate/operator in a completely different state.
Yeah, that is a problem, but it also allows it to stay anonymous. If you narrowed it down too much, negative reviews could impact individual employees and that’s not good either.