Ask HN: When did corporate America become so flaky?

45 points by geeky4qwerty 3 years ago | 58 comments

HI HN!

TL:DR - When did poor communication etiquette become normalized in American corporate culture?

I re-entered the job market several months ago after not needing to touch my resume since 2008 (see last submission) and my experience has been nothing short of brutally sobering. My age (40s) and experience (20+ years in IT) was definitely helpful in keeping me resilient through the process, and I'm extremely fortunate to have landed a senior IT leadership role that I love.

BUT I have come away from this entire ordeal a touch jaded and syndical towards much corporate America and how people are treated within the job search process (almost all other job seekers I spoke to had very similar experiences) . These are several key takeaways from my job hunt that I wanted to get some feedback/input from the HN community on potentially why this is happening and why it seems to be so prevalent across so many companies today:

1. Of the 13 staff-level (not recruiters) virtual interviews I had where no job offer was given, 9 of them that moved onto second interviews, 4 to third, I only received follow-up "dear john" communication from 2 of them. Ironically these were both from first-round interview companies. Is it normal practice to ghost applicants at the staff-level interview process? In brutal self reflection I even recorded several of the interviews and shared them with friends in senior leadership positions to ask for coaching advice and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

2. Communications, especially logistical planning for interviews, was at times borderline comical. This is not hyperbole when I say that more often than not I would need to write follow-up emails after an email communication would go unresponded to for over a week, sometimes longer, sometimes not at all.

3. I have, as of today, well over 30 ATL optimized applications still sitting in "applications purgatory" with many large fortune 500 companies. Most of these applications are from 3-4 months ago. The fact that these companies have no automated purge/rejection process seems bizarre to me.

Help me out HN. How does your company handle communication etiquette? Am I out of touch to be expecting email replies to relevant, time sensitive information within days, not weeks? Why is ghosting tolerated, or is it normal now and I'm just expecting too much from this new generation?

logicalmonster 3 years ago |

IMO, here's 4 partial explanations, that I may or may not be right about.

1) Companies fear being sued for discriminatory hiring practices. There is zero risk of being sued if you keep your mouth shut and don't communicate with candidates. There is a minor risk of being sued if you give any feedback, even if you don't intend any offense. Sadly, the legal culture means that the safest thing to do is ignore candidates.

2) I don't mean offense to anybody and this is obviously not true in anywhere near 100% of cases. But as a generality, the people who tend to gravitate towards a career in HR departments in today's world are useless and often petty people who have often never held a real productive job.

3) This is more noticeable, particularly in CURRENT_YEAR, but society has broken down in some ways due to current events as well as the media's business model of fear-mongering. Regardless of political stance, a lot of people are feeling scared and hopeless about the future and that has an impact on normal interactions.

4) This may be controversial on HN, but Corporate America learned during Occupy Wall Street that they can take heat off of the 1% by bending the knee and taking certain stances on certain social issues. Keeping the attention off themselves by having the correct politics and flying the correct colorful ribbons is about the only "ethical" issue they care about.

Red_Leaves_Flyy 3 years ago | |

1- only reasonable if the companies staff are prejudicial against protected groups. Granted this is true of most companies, so perhaps reforming toxic culture should take a higher precedent if lawsuits are so scary…

2- have you had an hr job? I haven’t, but have had the misfortune of working closely with several different hr agents and the shit they deal with is exhausting.

3- accurate

4- this is losing its efficacy as even the poors are realizing all the glitz is for show when the cashier wearing a corporate mandated pride flag and blm patch will still mutter slurs under their breath.

I would add 5- recruiters have had the tables turned on them for the first time nationwide outside of history books about dead or dying people. These folks weren’t trained to sell but to extract and most people simply aren’t elastic enough to adapt as fast as their potential victims are adapting.

6-generational and class divide. There’s the generation and class of people who bought homes, second homes, summer cars, boats, rvs, and had litters of children on meager salaries. Many of these folks aren’t well educated or informed and have no way to conceptualize how much the world has changed around them as they’ve sleepwalked through life working, raising children, and watching television. Even if they can conceptualize a piece of the new world they inhabit it’s rare that they can reform their entire worldview to incorporate the new information and adjusting their opinions is an entire other bag of worms.

patrick451 3 years ago | | |

> 1- only reasonable if the companies staff are prejudicial against protected groups. Granted this is true of most companies, so perhaps reforming toxic culture should take a higher precedent if lawsuits are so scary…

You seem to be assuming that lawsuits are only filed for legitimate grievances. It's easier to never have to deal with a lawsuit than try to prove you didn't discriminate.

humanistbot 3 years ago |

> more often than not I would need to write follow-up emails after an email communication would go unresponded to for over a week

I know this is a "kids these days" anecdote, but I'm seeing a big generational gap in this kind of activity. I was in a frustrating conversation with an undergrad intern who hadn't responded to an e-mail. I was trying to make it a learning experience: at least in this workplace, if I send an e-mail with a question or task, I expect a reply in a reasonable time. He said that I should have sent him a reminder or ping, in a tone implying that it wasn't really his fault. I said that if you have trouble remembering to do your job, that is your problem and something you need to work on.

He did not respond well to that.

throwaway8374ac 3 years ago |

1) Any feedback is viewed with the fear, real or imagined, that it could lead to some sort of hiring discrimination claim.

2) There are too many people involved in the modern tech hiring interview process and they are perennially confused about their role in the process. Maybe the hiring manager thought their internal recruiter would send feedback. The recruiter thought the “talent acquisition specialist”would send the feedback. The talent acquisition specialist thought the recruiting software would do it.

3) Any technical position posted attracts a huge number of candidates, most of them completely unqualified. (I don’t mean “Go backend dev applies for Swift frontend job”, I mean person with no education or obvious relevant experience with a background in various MLM endeavors applies for a sr-level architect/engineering manager position. Sometimes there are hundreds of unqualified applicants for a single position.)

4) Candidates are ghosting companies just as much, and the recruiters/hiring managers get jaded.

5) The hiring manager — the person with, arguably, the most to lose from a poor candidate experience — probably does hiring the least of their major job responsibilities and just isn’t very good at it.

* Bonus #6 I forgot — if your LinkedIn profile sucks, and by “sucks” I mean doesn’t stand alone as a portrait of your skillset, fix that. Put a summary under each job you’ve held, have a paragraph in there about your strengths, goals, etc. I cannot count the number of times I’ve interviewed someone and been given the candidates “resume” only to find out it was a screenscrape of their linkedin profile that was completely useless, but that the candidate did upload a detailed, well-thought-out resume which our talent management software discarded for no discernible reason. Now, those are just the candidates I’m aware of - I imagine the number discarded by the recruiter based on a faulty assessment driven by the same data is much higher. *

Just my personal opinion, based on my experience as a hiring manager at a medium-sized tech company.

hnaccount141 3 years ago | |

> 1) Any feedback is viewed with the fear, real or imagined, that it could lead to some sort of hiring discrimination claim.

My favorite is getting ghosted by the recruiter when asking for feedback after an onsite only to get an automated email a few days later asking to fill out a survey about their hiring process.

giantg2 3 years ago |

I have noticed that communication has gone substantially downhill since the pandemic. Even communicating with people like some doctors, paralegals, and nurses has been tough.

There's some incorrect information in my kid's medical file. It's basically impossible to get it corrected. The courts will also take the word of some nurse who entered the note over the parent. Why? Simply because they're a nurse. Yet they're still human, and there's no audit or error correcting mechanism/process in their note taking.

I'm not sure what may be causing the communication issues. My personal theory is that people don't care. The narrative is out there that people don't want to work, etc. Even if it's not true, I think many people have taken that and the relatively safe job market to slack off on stuff they don't see as important. I see this somewhat in my own career, although there are a few other factors there.

Unit520 3 years ago |

Some sort of systemic corruption in corporate culture must have emerged at least around the time when Personell was renamed to "Human Resources". I mean, think about it for a second, if you were to hire some people to help you with something, would you unironically call them "human resource"? Even if you might think about them in private as easily replaceable and therefore not of much value, would you go ahead and call them "human resource" to their face without feeling weird at all?

Something strange is going on here.

thenerdhead 3 years ago |

Misaligned incentives.

If you align with the incentive, you'll be properly escorted through the red carpet like the rockstar programmer you are.

As soon as you don't align with it or fail to meet expectations, you'll be discarded like the rest.

We have surely lost our grace to make a little more money in the process. The generation that was raised with these normalcies are now the ones recruiting & hiring which make it the new normal.

I don't tolerate ghosting, especially when I make a final round. I follow-up until I hear an answer such as "we went with another candidate". If people waste my time, I will be asking for theirs. I just can't believe it has become just as normal at the end as it is the beginning. It has burnt many bridges of "I definitely don't want to work there in the future".

shapefrog 3 years ago |

> 1. Is it normal practice to ghost applicants at the staff-level interview process?

Apparently yes. Also, am I meant to follow up after the interview, write a thank you message etc?

Reminds me of this gem (2019) - I've been hiring people for 10 years, and I still swear by a simple rule: If someone doesn't send a thank-you email, don't hire them. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-write-thank-you-email...

> 2. Communications ...

Email hasnt been instant or efficient since the last blackberry rolled off.

> 3. I have, as of today, well over 30 ATL optimized applications still sitting in "applications purgatory" with many large fortune 500 companies ...

LinkedIn applications? I have/had one many years ago, it sat there for multiple years - just waiting for them to get to it and let me know if they want to give me the job or not.

Congrats on getting back in - I expect you are probably seeing these things are no different on the job.

jasonladuke0311 3 years ago | |

> Reminds me of this gem (2019) - I've been hiring people for 10 years, and I still swear by a simple rule: If someone doesn't send a thank-you email, don't hire them. https://www.businessinsider.c

A fuckin thank-you email?! That lady is out of her gourd. I didn’t receive a response (even an automated email rejection) to over 50% of the hundred or so applications I submitted during my last job search. Half of the companies to whom I applied didn’t even acknowledge that I applied to work there.

badpun 3 years ago |

> How does your company handle communication etiquette?

There's no etiquette in hiring today. Anything goes is the current de facto standard, and anything above it is extending courtesy to the candidate.

chitowneats 3 years ago | |

I'm inclined to agree. How long do you feel this has been the case?

happymellon 3 years ago | | |

Longer than COVID.

Before COVID I had a couple of applications with some large consulting corps. One is still open, like the status of the job position implies that they might still reach out however unlikely it is at this point.

Another closed the position, then emailed me telling me that HR had closed the position because of funding, they hadn't hired but they had just opened up an identical role with the same team and would like me to apply for it.

Any they wonder why people don't care about the companies that hire them. They dick us about to see how much we will put up with.

grldd 3 years ago | | |

It changed around 2015-2016.

wbsss4412 3 years ago |

I’m not sure when, but as someone who is in their early 30s, what you’ve described is all I’ve ever experienced.

It seems that it likely started to change post 2008 due to the persistently high unemployment and the shift to online applications leading to much larger volumes of applicants for every open position. Now, despite the much tighter labor market, a generation hr employees have entrenched that same culture and people seem confused as to why it’s so “difficult” to hire.

slt2021 3 years ago |

People dont have time to respond to each and every applicant, given that there are 100s of them for each job. And teams have multiple job opening.

Also they have current job responsibilities/deliverables which are of higher priority.

Basically you can only expect good communication if you are top tier candidate for a critical job function, and company really really needs you. If job is not business critical - it will be slow.

Most of companies are freezing hiring/slowing down, and are not as desperate for people as they were before.

goosedragons 3 years ago | |

What frustrates me is many many companies will force you to rehash your resume into individual fields so they can search it up in some database better but they can't have the courtesy to have a "reject" button somewhere in whatever client they are using that tosses out a template email. It's ridiculous. Loads of effort to make their life easier, zero concern for the people applying.

rupi 3 years ago | |

This.

Also, I have friends in high level HR roles and HR functions have become smaller and smaller over time with a lot of offshoring and outsourcing. So a lot of 'nice to do' things that were traditionally done by HR simply aren't done anymore.

mouzogu 3 years ago |

I remember only 12 or so years ago, there wasn't really such a thing as a hiring manager, or recruiter.

Now there seems to be several layers of gatekeeping, an industry built up around hiring, with it a stream of "shit" jobs like "talent managers" and so this kind of shitty bureaucracy you described.

ktrnka 3 years ago |

I saw it decline over the last year at my employer. In 2021, the recruiting team and I were all on the same page about letting candidates know the decision within a day either way. In 2022 there was some desire to do that, but the recruiting team lost their most senior people and became very understaffed for a while, so it often took a while to get notice sent.

In 2021 my recruiting partners were cool with me moving candidates through stages, which triggered automated notification emails for the candidates. In 2022 I didn't have the permissions for that. Not sure how that all happened, but there was definitely a lack of an ATS admin of some sort.

mikewarot 3 years ago |

I'd say it started with a Corporate Lawyer named Abraham Lincoln[1] and his defense of the Illinois Central Railroad.

  "What status did Abraham Lincoln believe corporations held? In one of Lincoln's railroad cases, a plaintiff's attorney attacked Lincoln for defending "great soulless corporations." Lincoln's response indicates that he viewed a corporation as a "legal person"."

[1] - https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/217044254.pdf

tomcam 3 years ago |

Americans became flaky long ago. I just made reservations at a veterinarian and a restaurant. Today they both called me on the day before the appointment to make sure I would be there. My doctors are threatening fairly substantial penalties (say, around $75) for missing appointments, a practice of which I approve heartily.

dirtybird04 3 years ago |

I recently read there that someone waited 9 months to go through Google's hiring process. That's a LOOOONG time to be waiting around for one job offer, it's ridiculous!

Tech hiring in America has been broken for about a decade now. Shitty leetcode style coding questions, unprepared interviewers, lack of any decency or communication etiquette, merry-go-rounds of design interview, it's really insane when you think about it. But everyone puts up with it because there's so much money involved. And that money is not going away anytime soon, and unfortunately, neither are these practices.

Mezzie 3 years ago |

My favorite was the giant university who flew me across the country for an evening + 8 hour interview for a tenure-track position and then ghosted me. Bullet dodged, in my opinion.

faangiq 3 years ago |

It’s actually better this way. Rather than a veneer of politeness, let the race to the mercenary truth begin. Also you’re not old enough that this should be a new thing to you.

dmitrygr 3 years ago |

> I even recorded several of the interviews and shared them

Oof, watch out, in many states this would be quite illegal

mrguyorama 3 years ago |

It saves them like 3 cents worth of effort and they'll never hurt for applicants, and if they do they'll just go on empathetic news networks and bitch to boomers about how "nobody wants to work anymore"

Employees have no power in the relationship, so there's no reason not to treat them as expendable trash

danbmil99 3 years ago |

As an aging Boomer I find this ghosting shit completely unacceptable. Are Millennials really such delicate flowers that they can't be bothered to tell someone they're not going to hire them?

I have the funny feeling they're importing these practices from their dating life. I would find it unacceptable in that context as well, but to be honest as long as I stick to my age range I don't see that happening. Our generation was just brought up better than that.

jaygreco 3 years ago | |

See many of the reasons listed above for the non-responses. Almost none of them boil down to the reductionist generational stereotypes you’re throwing out here as if they’re fact.

I’d hit you with the “ok boomer”, but this is HN and I hold my comments to a higher standard than that.