Tag: candidate experience

The Dark Web of EMPLOYER References

by Robin Schooling

It goes both ways of course; candidates seek information on a prospective employer AND companies search for nuggets of digestible content on a new hire.

LinkedIn profiles are examined and mined not only for information but also for contacts, connections and leads. Various and assorted chrome extensions are added to the recruiters’ toolkit and every nugget of publicly available information is dissected and served up on the new-hire-prospectus. Facebook? Twitter? Snapchat? Who are the candidate’s friends and what, if anything, can we see about what s/he posted, liked, or retweeted?

Fancy and techy and useful…sure. But sweet baby Moses if we’ve sat through one presentation or demo on this sort of stuff…we’ve sat through 100. We get it; tech is our savior and time saver. We can source and search and seek intel all day long.

Yet…

… now, here’s a guy.

He’s a friend and former co-worker who got recruited for a job. He’s been phone interviewing and in-person interviewing. He’s been researching and calling people. He’s been immersed in the voir dire phase with a bunch of know-nothings as he attempts to find out “who knows who and what and when and how did they know it?” He’s been navigating this discovery for a role, and an industry, where people are not online. Glassdoor and Indeed feedback is minimal. (I know ya’ll find that hard to believe. But it’s true.)

His personal research has revealed data-less LinkedIn profiles (if they have one at all) for all the big players. The gig is in an Amish-style industry (who said incestuous? not me?!) where outsiders are rare. Still, at the same time, previous employees and his own personal industry contacts, once known, have fallen off the grid.

Phone calls? Unanswered.

Google searches? In vain.

How, one asks, can he find any meat about that prospective employer when the only food being served is pablum? There are only slim morsels available; lovingly and expensively regurgitated on the company career page. (#EmployeeBranding!! #JazzHands!!)

“Time,” said I, “to head to the Dark Web.”

And then we giggled. Because neither one of us have any freaking idea how to actually ‘get’ to the Dark Web.

BUT… how cool would that be? A secret bitcoin/botnet place where candidates could find info – the real deal! – about their prospective employer.

Priceless.

(not Collinsworth-less) 

Branded a Loser: Vintage Candidate Experience?

by Robin Schooling

offending_stewardesses-211x300Ah yes the ’70s.  Post the introduction of the Pill.  Post Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. The era of Title IX and the (failed) attempt to get the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) ratified by the states in order to become part of the US Constitution.  Those pesky second-wave feminists were busy.

And in a decade when air travel was still viewed as a glamorous experience complete with ashtrays, cocktails in stemware and people who dressed up for a trip to the airport (I’m looking at you guy-in-sweat-stained-unbuttoned-shirt with a bag from McDonalds’s that sat next to me on a recent flight) the fine folks at Eastern Airlines apparently settled on a way to make sure their consumer brand (especially for the male business traveler) matched their employer brand.  Their solution? Shame not just their job candidates but all women.

“Presenting the Losers” (picture above)

The copy reads:

“Pretty good, aren’t they?  We admit it.  And they’re probably good enough to get a job practically anywhere they want.

But not as Eastern Airline stewardesses.

We pass up around 19 girls, before we get one that qualifies.  If looks were everything, it wouldn’t be tough.  Sure, we want them to be pretty…don’t you?  That’s why we look at her face, her make-up, her complexion, her figure, her weight, her legs, her grooming, her nails and her hair.

But we don’t stop there.  We talk.  And we listen.  We listen to her voice, her speech.  We judge her personality, her maturity, her intelligence, her intentions, her enthusiasm, her resiliency and her stamina.

We don’t want a stewardess to be impatient with a question you may have, or careless in serving your dinner, or unconcerned about your needs.

So we try to eliminate these problems by taking a lot more time and passing up a lot more girls.

It may make our job a little harder.  But it makes your flying a lot easier.”

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How nice.  They actually ‘talked and listened’ during the selection process rather than just judging hair, nails and bust-waist-hip ratio. And check it out 1970’s job candidates – if you were fortunate enough to pass phase 1 (the ugly screen) Eastern Airlines kindly laid out the job competencies right there in the advertisement: patience, personality, maturity, intelligence, intentions, enthusiasm, resiliency and stamina. 

After your trip to the beauty parlor and the make-up counter you might have had enough time to think about answers for the moment you were actually deigned worthy enough to enter into conversation about actual skills and abilities.

Groovy. 

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This post originally ran over at the HR Schoolhouse in 2014. Thanks to my friend Trish McFarlane for reminding me about it yesterday which led to my re-running it from the archives.