May 2017

There's no smoke without fire

“Wow! Just had another candidate cancel an onsite interview based on a Glassdoor review. Pulling out of an interview based on a Glassdoor review is the equivalent to making a critical life decision based on what a Kardashian said...rant over.”

When I saw this post on LinkedIn last week I was really surprised. Apart from the rather odd Kardashian comparison (say what you like about them, they’ve made a fortune out of their brand), it also seems pretty short sighted. Candidate experience has been a huge trend for 2017 yet here was a recruiter openly criticising someone for doing their research and deciding the company probably wasn’t right for them.

It can be easy to forget that as an employer you are being interviewed too. You’re not doing the candidate a favour by granting them an interview and they have every right to do their homework. If you checked out a candidate’s Facebook page and discovered they had a penchant for posting about their hard drug use, you’d probably deem them unsuitable and pass them up. Why should it be any different the other way round?

When I was job hunting, I did as much research as possible about the companies I was applying to. Sure, it was up to me to impress them but I wasn’t going to just accept the first role I was offered. It needed to be a good fit. I scrutinised websites, social media profiles and in some cases I even reached out to people I knew who had worked there to find out what they thought. In short, I did everything I would expect a prospective employer to do to me.  

To be fair to the recruiter, we don’t know the full details. Maybe it was one bad review from a bitter ex-employee among plenty of good ones. Even so, attacking his candidate for making an informed decision doesn’t reflect well on him, or the company he was representing. The 2,500 odd comments that followed were mixed, but many pointed out that there is rarely smoke without fire. Rather than complain, the recruiter should have passed this feedback onto the company and given them the opportunity to address the underlying issues.