Letting Candidates Know They’re Not Moving Forward

This is the sixth blog post of a series titled Hiring for Engineering Managers. I plan to write a few posts on this topic since I'm incredibly passionate about how to hire for, and grow software engineering teams.

The practice of "ghosting" candidates, i.e., not letting them know that they're not being moved forward in an application process, is extremely prevalent in the software engineering industry (I'm not sure what it's like in other fields). Basically, when someone applies for a position and they're either passed over, or never even looked at, they often don't get any type of response back from the company.

(Some people refer to "ghosting" only when a company stops responding to a candidate after an initial interaction. That is even worse, but for me it's bad enough already that companies leave applicants without any feedback from the initial application. So, I'm mainly focusing on ghosting from the get-go in this blog post.)

Why is this so common?

I believe there's a few reasons why this happens so much:

1. Little downside — since so many companies operate this way, yet another company doing it is not really seen as a big deal, and it doesn't hurt their reputation.
2. Fear of confrontation. By actually letting someone know they're not a fit, you're opening the door to some confrontation. And most of us avoid it like the devil — it can be uncomfortable.

And then there's some more practical reasons:

3. Gaining time. Sometimes, one might not be sure about whether to advance a candidate or not. By not responding, the company gains some time. But this can easily escalate to ad infinitum waiting.
4. Giving other positions/teams an opportunity. While a candidate might not make sense for one open position, they may be good for another team. So, similarly to point above, we have to wait.

My personal experience as a hiring manager

In my previous job at SingleStore, early on when I became a hiring manager, I made a commitment to never ghost anyone who applied for my team's roles. I set up our applicant tracking system (Greenhouse) to make this as easy as possible. It features this "Tinder"-like interface where every day, I would sign in and then immediately approve or reject candidates. For rejections, I had to issue only a few clicks to send a templated rejection email which included the position's title to make sure candidates knew they could still be considered for other roles.

This worked quite well and the system I put in place lasted a few good years. Every now and then, people would even respond asking for more feedback or thanking me for the email.

I do wish the Greenhouse UI would have made it even easier to do this. I should have been able to 1-click approve or 1-click reject candidates. And sometimes, Greenhouse would forget the template that I wanted to use for emails, and I'd have to set it up again.

Finally, I have to say that many recruiters I've worked with have been very surprised by this approach. Some were even resistant to this, but I've always held my ground — I think it's of the utmost importance to respect everyone's time.

Side Note: HN's Who is Hiring

Hacker News has a monthly "Who is Hiring" thread, and I've been consistently posting on it every month for the last few years. It has helped me find some truly amazing folks over the years.

Two weeks ago, I posted for the first time as a Neon employee and so far I've received ~40 emails with resumes (when I worked at SingleStore, I never got more than a handful emails). I did respond to every single one, but because it's email, it's quite a lot more work to do this.

Going forward, I think I'll setup an email alias for Hacker News postings, and try to streamline the process of responding to everyone somehow. Another idea might be to rotate who has to do this every month because it's really a lot of work.

A Final Note...

I recently watched this video by "Theo GG" about tech hiring, and one of his points really resonated with me. A couple of times during the video he talks about candidates not wanting to go through bad interview processes[1] because it means that the people you'll end up working with are people that tolerated that interview process in the first place. If you're a great engineer, and you want to work with other great engineers, a good way to sniff them out is by the quality of the application processes they're willing to tolerate.

Of course, there's a lot of nuance and exceptions to all this. But, in general, I believe it holds true. So, if you want to hire great people, you need great interview processes that don't burn people out, and you also need to have a good reputation around getting back to people and being communicative with candidates.

Feel free to reach out on Twitter!

[1]: Whether it's because they're too long, or slow to respond, or have weird interviews.