Over the past few years there have been multiple articles, posts and op-eds about how there is a lack of skilled resources and how people “just don’t want to work anymore”. If you only read these posts then it is understandable if you think that people don’t want to work anymore. i.e. until you start reading posts from hiring managers who explain why they didn’t hire someone and they give some doozy reasons to not hire people. In this post I am going to showcase a couple of them that caught my eye.
Showed up early for the interview
I had a candidate show up 25 minutes early to an interview for an office administrator position last week. That was a major deciding factor in why I didn’t hire him. What are your thoughts on candidates showing up significantly early? Here is why I saw this as a negative. Showing up early is good. Showing up extremely early can suggest that someone is not good with time management or that they expect to be accommodated time wise. In this case he showed up as if he was on time – didn’t make any comment about being early.
This guy didn’t hire someone because they reached the interview early and didn’t say anything about it. I am someone who hates being late and usually keep a significant buffer factored in to ensure that I am on time. At times this means that I reach the venue early. Once I was on my way to an interview and because Bangalore traffic is unreliable I had kept a 45 min buffer to ensure I wasn’t late, that day I didn’t see any traffic and ended up reaching the office more than an hour before my interview time. So I waited outside the office for a while and then about 30 mins or so before my slot went up to the desk to let them know that I had reached and to let me know when the interviewer was ready for me.
Rejecting someone because they are early doesn’t make any sense to me. Obviously if they show up hours before the interview then there is a problem but 25 mins is nothing. That said I am strict about folks being late for interviews. If you don’t have a good justification for being late then that is a major strike against you in my book and in the past I have rejected candidates who were significantly late for the interview. One memorable one was a guy who was scheduled for an in-person interview and when they didn’t show up 10 mins in I gave them a call to find out where they were and the guy just went oh yeah, I will come for the interview and will be there in 30-45 mins. So I told him not to bother and hung up. There was another case where the person was late because he was coming from the hospital because his mother was hospitalized earlier that day and I told him not to worry and rescheduled the interview for a later time.
Candidate had a girlfriend
Had a call with a strong engineering candidate today
He was two minutes late and looked apologetic.
“I’m so sorry for being late!”
I said, “That’s okay. Everything alright?”
He replied, “Yeah, I was just helping my girlfriend with some errands.”
I paused.
“You… have a girlfriend?”
He nodded. “Yeah, we’ve been together for three years.”
I sighed. Red flag.
“I’m sorry. I don’t think this will be a good fit. Wish you all the best.”I ended the call immediately.
If your software engineer can talk to women, that’s not a good sign.
The best male engineers can barely make eye contact with one.
If your male engineer is in a relationship (or God forbid, married), he’s at best a B-player
Always hire A-players
To be honest I am not sure how much of this is just trolling but I have met with enough ‘tech bros’ with this kind of mindset that I can imagine this happening. This guy is parroting that old worn out stereotype that any person who is good with tech can’t be good with people. There is a sub-category of autistic folks who whom this is true but for the rest this is absolutely categorically wrong. They might be a person who can’t talk to women but that is not true for the rest of us. In fact in today’s mixed work environment this would be a major liability for any person.
One of the things I teach all freshers and junior folks that I mentor is that they need to let go of the myth of the lone warrior/geek writing code without working with others. In fact, it is the opposite. If you are not a team player it counts against you and in one of my previous companies a guy was actually fired because he wouldn’t collaborate and work with others. I spent months trying to get him to explain his code and the system he had created but then finally had to reverse engineer it because he just wouldn’t share.
I have worked with folks coming from very conservative village backgrounds where they didn’t have the opportunity to talk/interact with the opposite sex and that was a major issue and we worked with them to overcome this issue by enrolling them in trainings and personality upliftment etc.
There are many more such examples that I have seen and Jani keeps sharing real life examples that HR (mostly) has used to reject candidates. A lot of this comes down to simple gatekeeping and *that* is the reason for these absurd rules that people use while hiring.
Personally I would be happy if I was rejected by any of the people above because if they are this weird while hiring then I am better off not working with them.
– Suramya