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How to tarnish your reputation with poor recruitment
Copyright Alex Gough, 2002.
The idea, you see, is that Azad is so complex, so subtle, so
flexible and so demanding that it is as precise and comprehensive a
model of life as it is possible to construct. Whoever succeeds at the
game succeeds in life; the same qualities are required in each to
ensure dominance. -- The Player of Games, Ian M Banks
Over the last six months I have been winding my way through the
recruitment channels of a range of organizations in search of a
graduate IT position. I am now employed, and happy with my
appointment, but my experiences with many of the companies to which I
applied has left me with a reduced level of confidence in their
ability to deliver high quality products or services. Simple and
easily avoided mistakes have left a bad impression which may affect my
willingness to send money towards these companies in the future. This
cannot be good business sense, especially given the large amounts of
time and effort which have been spent on making me think this, and may
well cause you to miss out on a good applicant.
In the rest of this article I will talk my way through my final year,
from careers' fair to job offer, picking out those low points along
the road which have blackened the names of a fair few potential
employers to a potential customer. It should be noted that I am not
an expert in recruitment, and have little understanding of its
complexities and pitfalls. Because of this I will try to pick out
some examples of good practice so that a modicum of balance is
preserved. As background: I am a final year Master of Physics student
with good expectations of a 2:1. I am
technically competent, having worked on a range of software projects,
presented papers to programming conferences and performed technical
reviews for a couple of well regarded publishers.
I began my final year with a well formed idea of what I wanted to do
with myself for the next few years, and the sort of organization I
wanted to work for. Software development and design, IT with a very
technical bent, under a flexible employer that followed good practice
in both employee relations and software engineering. It was then, I
hoped, a simple task to match myself to such organizations from the
start. This, alas, was not to be the case.
Although pamphlets and web sites were keen to highlight the innovative
nature of each business, the excellent training available and wide
range of generous benefits on offer, often little was said in detail.
I want to know which courses might I be sent on? How many days of
training I could expect to receive in a year? Was it all external or
internal? How much of the budget is set aside for training? Which
technologies would I be working with? I certainly cannot find answers
to these questions if all I am offered is a glossy handout with lots
of ``WOW!'' and little ``What?'' While the flashy advertising might
get my attention, you're more likely to get my application if you
accompany your brochure with a couple of closely typed pages full of
information.
Extending the gee-whiz factor onto the Internet, I found that many of
the graduate recruitment web sites were hard to navigate, concentrated
more on style than substance -- a cardinal sin in a medium where
substance is cheap -- and, more often than not, would display
incorrectly when viewed from a Unix or Macintosh machine. If I'm
considering applying for a technical position, at an organization
which derives all its income from software, I will find this very
off-putting as it shows a clear gap between the ``talented''
colleagues the web site boasts and the reality that leaks through to
me. I often wondered what many companies actually did, other than
offering ``business-critical innovative technical solutions from a
fast-moving company''. Phrases like this which are nothing more than
a piece of marketese serve to obscure the nature of the company.
Either I end up wondering if the company has nothing to sell and is
covering up with big language, or if all they offer to their clients
is empty consulting... would I end up having to write trite English in
place of solving problems if I worked for them?
The careers' fair is your final line of defence if you wish to avoid
looking foolish. If you can convince me that it's not worth applying
in the first place I'm less likely to see the glaring holes that later
rounds expose. The best way to lose my attention is to treat me like
an idiot when I ask detailed questions; I'm familiar with the software
industry and have some idea as to what I consider good and bad
practice. If I don't receive sensible answers to my questions about
your design process, your quality assurance or your relations with
your clients as a project progresses, I'm not going to want to work
for you. It's essential that you man your stalls with both
recruitment professionals and technical people who can talk about
these areas. It's not enough for someone to say ``Yes, we have an IT
department, it's quite large but I've never met them.'' My best
careers' fair experience was provided by a friendly five minute chat
with someone who remembered my name when I later visited them for
their first round of selection exercises, a personal touch that was
repeated throughout their recruitment process. As a final note, I am
now in possession of ten mouse mats and five bottle openers, please be
a little more creative in your provision of trinkets.
Following the careers' fair comes a few weeks' of presentations.
During my penultimate year these formed a good route to a free meal
(assuming a convenient habit of turning up an hour late by mistake)
but this time round I started paying proper attention to the
proceedings. These events usually provide the final catalyst for my
application, moving me from a maybe into either a yes or a no. This
is a big decision, given that my entire future is at stake, so I'd
like it to be well informed. I wouldn't be at a presentation if I
wasn't at least a bit interested in working for you, so you can
probably skip most of the slick advertising and concentrate on
delivering detailed information which will turn into reasons to work
for you. Pay careful attention to how you run the evening; sitting in
a chair sipping wine in front of a screen of adverts while I wait for
the official start tells me nothing -- and bores me a lot -- while
circulating around intelligent employees, talking directly about what
they do and why, might just fire me with enthusiasm. Once the slide
show starts, make sure everyone can hear you, make sure the slides can
be read by all of your audience, don't overdo the changeovers with
animations and use your clip art carefully. I'm not a fool, this is
why you might want me working for you, and I can spot a badly planned
and poorly executed talk a mile off. When you invite questions
afterwards, make sure you don't tell me lies, I might check up on what
you say. If you announced a 5% cut in your work force a week ago,
don't dodge this, but say why. I will not want to work for someone
who does not seem to be honest and professional, and I may think twice
about entrusting part of my business to you in future.
So, you've not yet managed to put me off -- although someone with less
patience may have long since run for the hills -- and I'm about to
enter a dangerous period of direct communication. I made all my
applications online, saving you from my handwriting, in the most part
using long and complicated web forms. These provide yet another
opportunity for something which should Just Work to instead fall apart
horribly. It is a little embarrassing if during my application I find
myself composing an email to you detailing what you need to do to fix
your server so that it no longer generates errors and instead eats my
hours of hard work happily. Remember that I will wonder if I actually
want to work with people that consider this level of performance and
availability acceptable. Given the amounts of confidence this
inspires, it is very worrying to submit an application and then not
receive an immediate acknowledgment, a worry I could certainly do
without. At the same time automated replies which consist of very
large Word documents should be avoided; one organization sent me an
email which was too large to fit into my inbox, but contained only
thirty seven words of text. I've still not worked out why they
thought this might have been a good idea.
Web sites also do not offer a helpful editing environment, with the
text boxes on forms often being too large or too small for the
expected response, and without many of the features of a good word
processor. This makes my application take a lot longer to fill in,
not because I'm thinking carefully about my responses, but because I'm
fighting the form. While this might not put me off applying it does
annoy me, and puts me in a foul mood. This is easily avoided by
distributing application forms as RTF documents, which are then filled
in by applicants and returned by email. It's then trivial to extract
parts of the response to a database, and the applicant can be sure of
how their form will print out for their interviewers to read. I was
very pleased when this option was offered to me.
On paper I'm up to scratch, so I'm invited to a first round of
assessments (almost everyone followed a two round pattern, with two
exceptions). In many cases I'm called away from university, requiring
a whole day of traveling, sit an hour of tests then return. While my
expenses were always covered, this is a large chunk out of my week and
it would be nice to feel that I've gained something from my visit to
your offices. A half hour tour perhaps, or a presentation over lunch.
After all, if I'm given an offer by another organization between your
first and second round, but don't feel inspired to carry on, I might
just jump ship.
As for the tests themselves, if you are using aptitude tests, make
sure you use originals and not photocopies. It's against copyright
law and, for companies which sell intellectual property, otherwise
known as software, it raises questions of honesty and integrity.
These might not be big issues to many applicants, but for those of us
that are well informed it stinks, and the smell will stick. Can I
trust you to keep to the terms of a contract when you so blithely
avoid paying for the tests I'm sitting? When giving written tests,
make it very clear what is expected and what is being assessed. It's
hard enough to answer contrived questions, and doubly so when the
audience isn't known to the candidate. Where technical problems are
posed don't hide them behind quaint stories and don't use situations
for which engineered solutions are likely to be known by some
candidates, as they will be left working out not how to answer the
question, but how much they should let on about what they do know.
Should they write at length about monks carrying tablets between
philosophers or merely state that ``TCP with monks ferrying datagrams''
is the best solution?
By this stage in the application process I've had plenty of chances to
make a fool of myself, and begin to receive rejection letters, but in
some cases I'm (un)lucky enough to be invited to attend a dreaded
assessment centre. The invitations themselves were often a source of
much amusement for me as I was subjected to some of the worst English
I have read for some time. In one case a spell checker had turned me
from a graduate into a gratuity and in another the address of the
building to which I had been summoned included a street which was five
miles away in a different town. Do you really want a member of the
public, for that is what I am, to see that some of your staff -- and
my potential coworkers -- would fail a basic English language
qualification?
Further complications occurred when my instructions failed to warn me
that I would need to bring my passport along as identification, when a
site tour covered only a fish pond and a squash court because my
guides hadn't gained the correct access codes beforehand and when I
went without food for eight hours because catering wasn't ordered by
the organizers of the selection day. Every one of these mistakes
could have been avoided with a little thought and careful planning,
something I expect of a ``world class'' business, and each one
reflects badly on the entire corporation.
The tests themselves formed something of a mixed bag. For the most
part I could work out what was being assessed each time, could see the
connection between the test and the job I might end up doing and felt
that a fair assessment of my abilities was being undertaken. In a
couple of cases though I was left feeling mystified. Silly games with
more similarity to Twister than any task I might perform during my
employment appeared to be ice breakers but included markers scribbling
down my every move. Many exercises were based on an abstract logic
puzzle with a tenuous connection to IT thrown in at the end and in one
case we were asked to discuss religion -- a topic best avoided when in
unfamiliar company -- in the context of an alien visitor. I used to
do this during drama lessons at school, but I'm an adult now and quite
capable of grasping real world situations. The evening meal, between
two intensive sessions of exercises, required a full seating plan and
the presence of the people who would assess me the next day. Was this
entirely consistent with the promise that any decision about me would
only be made on the basis of the formal tests?
Almost everyone provided a friendly face who would run the day and not
assess candidates directly, this was helpful in general as it made it
possible to relax a little between exercises and collect my thoughts
before interviews. Of course it is important that those thoughts are
left to collect by themselves, mentioning that I shouldn't worry that
my interviewer looks like Jesus is probably a bad thing as I'll spend
most of the interview with precisely that thought floating through my
head.
I cannot say if everyone will gain the same impression of these events
as I did, but I could certainly see large differences in approach and
organization between employers and have certainly come to some
conclusions, both good and bad, about them and how they operate as a
result. In short, be careful, I'm not the only party being assessed.
In the most part I now find I'm not up to scratch and, as expected by
a perennial pessimist, find myself without an offer at the end of the
day. I prefer to receive my rejections as soon as possible, as
there's nothing worse than getting one's hopes up to find them dashed
cruelly against the hard rocks of reality, and if a decision might
take longer than a week it's helpful to be given a time by which it
will be made. This makes it much easier to consider other offers and
ensures that should you want to employ me I'll avoid taking up any
other offers in the meantime. Any rejection should also try to keep
me on your good side, perhaps by detailing areas in which I am weak
and strong. You should also avoid looking like a leaking ship,
stating that you cannot employ me now, but might in a year or two,
doesn't fill me with confidence in your company's ability to survive.
This will have knock-on effects if I'm ever in any danger of engaging
your services, as I'm sure to consider how well you plan into the
future as a part of my purchasing decision.
On a slightly brighter final note, I enjoyed almost all of the
exercises I faced during my quest and met a good deal of interesting
people along the way. A couple of companies have even managed to
leave a good impression and may find this beneficial one day -- make
sure that yours is one of them!
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