Job hunting is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad thing.
Lately, I’ve been hearing people be angry with companies for not hiring them after being dragged through multiple rounds of interviews.
I’m a big fan of shortening the interview process, but you should know you don’t have the job if you agree to another interview. If this interview were only a “formality,” then they would have offered you the job already. While it’s true that sometimes you are the only candidate at this late stage, it’s also true that they haven’t decided to offer you the position. If they had, you wouldn’t be interviewing; you’d be filling out new hire paperwork.
Should companies ask you to come in six times? Of course not. Companies that do so are bad at hiring. But, by consenting to come in for that fourth, fifth, and sixth interview, you understand that they may not hire you at the end.
It would be leading you on if they said, “come in the fill out your new hire paperwork,” and then you go there and they said, “oh, wait, Jane wants to talk to you first,” and then they didn’t get around to giving you the paperwork. But, when they say they want you to come interview again, they clearly tell you, “we may not hire.”
You don’t have to go to each interview. You can back out at any time. Yes, it may be worth it to you to interview one more time, but understand, they are explicitly not guaranteeing you a job if you consent to another interview.
While people talk about how there is a labor shortage, that’s only true in some fields. In others, the employers still have a lot of choices. And so they make bad decisions like running multiple people through multiple rounds of interviews. Ideally, candidates would stop playing the game and back out in two rounds if they can’t decide. But, because candidates often really need the job, they don’t.
As I said, job hunting is a terrible thing. But, it’s not surprising when you don’t get hired.
Image by Thomas Wolter from Pixabay
Gosh, Evil, whose side are you on anyway?
You say, “You don’t have to go to each interview. You can back out at any time.”
Really, are you sure? I thought that if a job seeker did not do every single thing a potential employer asked them to do, did not acquiesce to every employer demand, did not answer every question an employer asked, that that seeker’s family would be taken hostage, that the seeker’s smartphone (everyone has one, right?) would be impounded, that the seeker would face jail time.
At least, that’s what it sounds like from many of the disgruntled, abused, taken-advantage-of, helpless job seekers who seem to have hours and hours a day to complain on LI about how unfair it all is, and after submitting 200 applications a day for the past 9 months, still must … must, I say … make it through 10 interviews only to be told, no thanks.
Oh well, I guess we’re all just poor helpless victims and have to put up with whatever those evil (and they’re all evil) employers throw at us.
That many interviews are a big red flag in my opinion. If they can’t get it done in three interviews at most, that’s a sign of larger dysfunction. Maybe internal communication isn’t great or they’re very disorganized in other ways. It might be just the team and not the company as a whole, but either way, it’s likely to be a situation where it’s very hard to get anything done.
Are you saying that multiple interviews are just another version of companies trying to find the cheapest person they can hire for a position that doesn’t need to be instantaneously filled? I agree that interview skills can’t be done correctly but just anyone but with the way employers use computer screening of the application, any review of the candidates past that point should be addressed by a person who knows exactly what skills ( not presented on the paper) they want to hire for the position. Leave the efficiency experts out of the interview process, and stop making it harder for the potential candidates.