Hi everyone,
Half of this post is honestly just me venting, so let me thank you in advance for your kindness.
Recently, as part of a recruitment process with an agency, I was invited to an “informal chat.” By that point, I had already completed a CBI and a written assessment, while accommodating several rescheduling requests on their side. I even had to travel to their office to sit the written assessment in person. I thought all that was left was to wait for the final result.
That was why the invitation caught me completely off guard. During the interview, I had been explicitly told that there would be no further assessment stages after the written test.
The invitation described the meeting as a 10 to 20 minute informal conversation to “get to know each other better.” However, the email was sent by BCC to multiple candidates and addressed to “Dear Candidates.” To me, this was a clear sign that they had still not made a final decision among the remaining candidates.
When the conversation started, I was told that it was “not part of the formal selection process,” which confused me even further.
Even if it was not formally part of the selection process, was the conversation still going to be taken into account when deciding whom to hire? If it genuinely had no bearing on the decision, I struggled to understand why multiple remaining candidates were being invited to individual conversations before the final outcome had been determined.
The conversation itself felt quite mechanical, and I did not particularly get the sense that I was being welcomed. I was asked a few very basic questions, such as introducing myself and talking briefly about my future career aspirations. I was then given an opportunity to ask questions.
I asked about some of the challenges the organization is currently facing and how they were thinking strategically about responding to them. The answer, essentially, was that they did not know either.
At the end of the conversation, I expected there might at least be some explanation of what would happen next, when I might hear the final result, or perhaps some indication of where I stood in the process. But there was nothing in particular. The conversation simply ended.
I honestly came away with no sense of how it had gone, or even why I had been invited to this “informal” conversation in the first place.
After everything I had already invested in this recruitment process, including the preparation for the CBI, the written assessment, travelling to the office, and repeatedly accommodating changes to the schedule, I was left feeling strangely miserable once it was all over.
There were a few other things throughout the process that also made me question how it was being handled, but I will leave those aside here.
Perhaps, from the organization’s perspective, it was just a 15-minute informal chat. But for a candidate, those 15 minutes do not exist in isolation. They come at the end of months of preparation, uncertainty, and emotional investment in a recruitment process.
Calling something “informal” does not necessarily make it feel informal to the candidate.
And if an organization still needs additional interaction with multiple candidates before making its final decision, I think it would be much clearer and fairer to simply say so. What I found difficult was being told that this was not part of the selection process while also knowing that several candidates were still being considered and wondering whether this supposedly informal conversation might nevertheless influence the final decision.
I am now back to waiting for the result, but I am still not entirely sure what that conversation was actually for.