It is a fact that interviewers are paid for their interview time and candidates are not. Though easily disregarded by some as insignificant, the difference has an impact upon proceedings and should be remembered.
Suppose you are recruiting for a company of 5000 full-time people that each work about 2000 hours per year, for example. You are paid for your time of course, and you have a recruiting budget to work with. Your two hours of conversation with an exciting potential new hire represent less than a ten-thousandth of a percent of your company’s total yearly work time. It costs the company almost nothing.
The two-hour sacrifice for this interviewee is much greater. As an interviewing organization, it may not be obvious to you that this is important to remember, because it’s not your personal time. But it can and does influence how effective your interviewing and hiring process will be, because the time spent is factored into candidates’ decisions regarding roles they may pursue.
If the candidate is currently a contractor, he may be effectively paying to speak with you as he takes time out of his work day. A candidate who spends 4 hours per week communicating with recruiters and hiring managers has, at the end of the year, lost 208 hours of work or personal time. That relatively modest amount of weekly commitment could represent a staggering 10% of his annual earning potential. This example is not as extreme as you might think - engineers have been known to interview during their free time nearly constantly for a stretch lasting years. Almost all that time may go to waste trying to engage with lazy companies that run a terrible interview process with poorly-trained interviewers asking silly questions. Let’s not forget the time spent submitting applications into largely ignored interfaces, which may take much longer per unit than does reading résumés.
Hi —-, I just received an update from —- and they have had some changes within their business and have put the Sr. Software Engineer position on hold indefinitely. I’m sorry about this but I’ll let you know if anything changes or if we have a different opportunity that looks like a match. Thank you, —- - letter sent from a recruiter to a job candidate after hours invested in interviews
As a hiring manager, it falls mainly on you to be a responsible steward of the time dedicated by your co-workers, interview panel, recruiters, and candidates for interviewing. Is it possible you may be obtusely burning through recruiters and candidates because you don’t know what you are doing? Run little calculations on all pieces of your recruiting and hiring process to identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Measurable data is good. You may not realize how significant the time commitment to interviewing is for your candidates, because it’s difficult to see from the employer perspective. The wasted time of an inefficient process doesn’t typically register for a big organization the way it does for an individual, but it should because it affects the quality of the results of your hiring. The way this critical business process is managed could possibly make or break the company.
Developers are opting out of long interview processes more than ever before. "But we've always used this process to hire developers!" The market has changed. Developers are not willing to do long coding projects, trial periods, low paid "real work", lots of interviews, etc. If your process takes 3 weeks or more to complete, your candidates will have other offers in hand long before they have finished your process. This is the state of the current developer market. Speed and a reasonable interview process wins every time. - Robert Sweeney, Facet CEO
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