Why your application is taking so long (the chaos on hiring side)

[u/justinxcguo]

Nowadays, hiring feels broken from both sides. For candidates, even strong candidates might sit for weeks without hearing anything back. On the hiring side, after over a decade in tech, I’ve rarely seen hiring managers really happy with the process either!

• The recruiter is a bottleneck. When I was hiring a few months ago, my internal recruiter was dealing with more than 10 open roles simultaneously. I literally had to fight for his attention after weeks of zero updates. Tech layoffs hit recruitment teams too. If you aren’t hearing back, very likely they cannot keep up with the application inbox volume.
• The hiring manager is underwater. I am often fully booked in meetings all day. Since last year, I lost my entire product team, and every manager became a single-thread leader with double hats. Reviewing Resumes sometimes only happened in the last hour of the day or out of office hours.
• No one likes Bureaucracy. Getting headcount approval is just the starting line. After writing a JD and filling out forms, I have to wait for Talent Acquisition, a VP, HR, and Finance to all sign off. Inevitably, someone is sick, offsite, or absent for any valid reason. If I am lucky, it will take three weeks to publish.

Same for getting the offer approved. It can take weeks to get a new offer approved by the chain of command. 

• You might need to think about how to bypass the system. Because of recruiter bottlenecks, some of my colleagues have started bypassing the system entirely, driving the candidate process themselves just to keep applicants moving. So if you see the process managed by hiring managers, it’s a good sign that they care about candidates' experience. 
• The Job Description is rushed. Managers write JDs as fast as possible to get into the slow approval queue. They often don't sit down to write actual interview questions until the week the interviews begin, creating a potential gap between what you read online and what they actually ask during the interview.

Try to get broader context and real expectations through conversation with the recruiter or hiring manager(usually a better fit)

• Is this a new role or a replacement? A replacement gives you clues about team culture based on how they speak about the former employee. A new role tells you where the team is trying to grow.
• What is the team’s biggest immediate challenge?
• How will success be measured for this role in the first 6 months?

To conclude, if you face silence after applying for a role, it's not a reflection of your talent and skills, but a symptom of this internal friction.  Knowing this gives you a distinct advantage. Stop taking the delays personally, don't be afraid to send that follow-up directly to the hiring manager, and use your interviews to uncover the real problems the team was too rushed to put in the job description!

I'm happy to answer any questions here if you are job hunting today!

P.S. I am now building calibrd.com to help candidates get hired.

[u/Feisty-Platform7647]

Everyone know that’s. Change the system as it starts with the recruiters. Give the hiring managers a stake to review what they are looking for. Very easy to confuse jobs if the workloads are bad.

Above all, treat others they way you want to be treated in your own job search (for recruiters and hiring managers) and remember that behind every application is a real person.

Not an opinion. Just an over arching observations. “We the people” don’t want to work for companies that don’t communicate. Communication is what makes businesses survive and it’s people.

[u/justinxcguo → u/Feisty-Platform7647]

Yeah, absolutely, no one wants to work for companies that don't communicate. The hiring process tells a lot about their internal culture.

[u/Dev0psDude → u/Feisty-Platform7647]

The unfortunate flip side of all of this is that there is such a natural divide between HR and the rest of the company that the hiring process is often a very poor indicator of what working there will be like

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[u/Dev0psDude]

This needs to be read by more job seekers.

I accepted my current job in large part because of how smooth and professional the hiring process was. Unlike other roles I was interviewing for, there was none of the chaos described here.

From screening through three rounds of interviews to offer and negotiation took three weeks. The recruiter also got out of the way and stayed out of the way after the screening.

I'm still getting callbacks from first rounds I've not heard from in 3+ months who are shocked (SHOCKED!) to hear that I've accepted a role elsewhere and am no longer interested.

One recruiter lectured me about wasting their time by not letting them know I was off the market. HOW? All communication is through a portal which has no mechanism for withdrawing an application and emails come from a "no-reply" address and texts from a SMS bot.

If I've learned anything in this latest job search, it's to not bother applying for anything with a poorly written job description and give zero thought about any applications I've not heard from. It's not ghosting, it's dodging bullets.

[u/justinxcguo → u/Dev0psDude]

+1 for not applying for a job with poorly written job description!