There has been a power shift in the job market and the competition to find new talent is becoming harder. Today, we see a surplus of positions opening up and not enough candidates to fill them. This gives candidates a real power advantage and more flexibility in their job selection. Even though more companies are becoming aware of how important the candidate experience is to find and recruit new talent. Some are still stuck in the past. In this blog article, we discuss inexcusable interview mess-ups that will make your candidates walk away.
Attracting and hiring in a candidate-driven market
The number 1 reason why job-seekers decide to turn down a job offer is a negative candidate experience. According to the 2022 candidate experience report by Carreerplug, as much as 58% of candidates claim they declined a job offer because of a poor experience with a potential employer during the hiring process. Understanding what part of your interview process that negatively is affecting your hiring outcome is key to attracting top talent.
Here are four examples of interview mess-ups that can ruin your organization's employer brand:
1. Gender discrimination
Last year a UK-based tech firm was put on blast as a candidate spoke out in social media about her bad interview with the CEO. She claimed that he questioned and ridiculed her taste in music, asked inappropriate questions and then tore apart her resume. And as if that wasn’t enough, he continued to tell her how bad her answers and body language were.
A couple of weeks after the bizarre interview, she was contacted and offered the job. Do you think she accepted the position?
2. Racial discrimination
In 2019, the New York Commission On Human Rights banned discrimination based on hair. Which could sound like an unnecessary law in our modern society. But the reality is that there have been several discrimination cases where candidates have been rejected because of their hairdo. One example was an ivy league educated black woman from South Carolina, who was rejected because the recruiter thought “she did not embody our brand”. Since hair wasn’t included in the list of protected classes of discrimination, the company got away without any consequences.
3. Physical discrimination
An increasing amount of people are getting plastic surgery to get hired. Because in Korea, it is mandatory to attach a photo to your resume and that is the first thing companies look at. And it is specifically women who are judged harshly on their appearance. Even for regular admin jobs, where your appearance shouldn't matter, a resume photo is still compulsory.
4. Psychological manipulation
A controversial American politician, Nicholas Sarwark, has sparked a debate about what we consider to be appropriate interviewing techniques. He suggested that interviewers should take candidates out for lunch and then tell the waiter to deliberately change something in the order to see how the candidate would react. This created a heated discussion on Twitter where people thought it was manipulative and completely wrong to play mind-games with job seekers.
Unbiased recruitment is more efficient
Inexcusable interview mess-ups are not only detrimental to an organization's employer brand, but it is also inefficient and expensive. Having an unbiased recruitment methodology simply means focusing on candidates' skillsets and competencies, rather than their background or appearance. Collecting the "right" candidate data is not only fair to applicants but is also proven to contribute to more diverse teams, which leads to more efficient and successful organizations.
Learn more about the benefits of unbiased methods and diversity hiring.
Ensure a fair candidate experience with AI
To lower the risk of discrimination, HR professionals are now turning to AI for processing large amounts of candidate data in an objective way. We developed Tengai's AI interview to be unbiased by design. This means that Tengai never takes the candidates’ age, looks, gender, or ethnicity into consideration. Equally important is that Tengai won’t judge candidates based on their tone of voice or dialect. The AI interview was created with the candidates in mind, to enhance the interview experience and mitigate the chance of discrimination.
Read more about Tengai enhances the candidate experience here.