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Ask HN: As a startup CEO, if your HR is screwing up, do you want to know?

18 points by relaunched ↗ HN
After reading the Oct hiring post and having gone through the process myself, there are some egregious offenders of the golden rule in HR. I'm not even talking about the "I applied and never heard anything!" (which isn't good). I'm talking about interviewer no call no show for phone screen, rescheduled to do the same thing 2 more times, then the job was filled by the time the phone screen actually took place (that was with a direct referral).

For some positions, it's a employers market. But, HR is the first point of contact for potential employees, many of whom won't get the job, which is the nature of the beast. But, when the process is abnormally disrespectful to the applicant, because HR doesn't think it's important enough to do the non-fun part of their job, your brand suffers. That candidate will tell everyone who will listen about their terrible experience and that'll hurt your future recruitment efforts.

Many thought leaders believe that a critical part of a startup CEO's job is to recruit. If this is happening at your startup, do you want to know?

If you have had a terrible experience (above and beyond submitting a resume and not hearing anything back), tell me about it below. If you are feeling bold, name the company so others know who to be weary of.

11 comments

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jeffool
Just wanted to chime in and say that, as a job-seeker myself, I'm absolutely with you. Not getting a job sucks, but I can deal with that. Complete silence in the face of effort, however, is just offensive. Doubly so in the form of broken engagements and lead-ons that were never intended to be followed up on.
smhinsey
Why wouldn't you want to know?
relaunched
I'm sure in a public facing forum, no CEO would say, "I don't want to know about HR destroying our brand in the eyes of potential hires." But, for practicality purposes, the CEO has finite time and an abundance of things to do.

I could see sending your interview process horror story to a startup CEO and them not even read the email or it not being so bad that it makes the list of action items worth addressing. On any given day, where you are trying to meet operational goals, keep morale high, balance board / adviser obligations, raise that next round, give face-time to existing customers / while spending time closing new customers, making nice with the press, speaking at that conference and so forth...there's always 20 other things that need to be addressed today. After all, that is what you have a head of HR for, right?

How many CEOs have gotten that type of negative feedback and gotten directly involved? That's probably a better question to ask.

mgarfias
Complete silence after wasting a day interviewing.
bartonfink
I once interviewed at a small startup for a software engineering contract, and when time came for salary negotiations, the CEO said "so you're looking for $15 an hour for data entry?" I explained that I was not at all interested in that, and wondered why they wanted someone who knew Grails, Javascript, etc. for data entry. The CEO apologized, and said that they posted the same job description under different titles and salary ranges, just to see if someone would slip up. Needless to say, I passed.
md1515
Well, if you are a small startup (>20 people) I would say that recruiting is probably a job you should take over yourself, much less want to know.

You need to know that type of thing. As a startup, word of mouth is a huge factor in your success. If you have disgruntled people who were mistreated, you're going to be in trouble.

I make sure I answer every email (we're ultra small at 2 people). For partner companies I even brainstorm some ideas to help them/make their life easier. It at least shows I care about them. You have to be really involved so...yeah, you should want to know!

joshbert
Of course I would like to know!

Gathering a team of stars in critical to me and my Startup, so if the processes aren't optimized in order for us to get the talent, something is wrong and my job as a CEO has not been done.

Mamady
If someone in your company is screwing up, you always want to know. Now whether you want to take action or not, may vary depending on the situation.

Sometimes it's a difference of opinion - if you are getting lots of applications, should the HR person waste time responding to failed candidates, instead of sourcing more candidates? Maybe you think they should - and it's not a waste of time, but rather common courtesy - if so, point it out to them.

I think as a CEO, it's important you set certain policies where you think the industry standard may not be aligned with your company standards. Then make sure you communicate these policies to your staff.

kingofspain
should the HR person waste time responding to failed candidates, instead of sourcing more candidates?

It isn't so difficult to BCC a big list of failed candidates a form letter to say thanks but no thanks. It's a little impersonal but I'd much rather know than sit around wondering if anything will ever come of it - and given some stories I've heard about 2-3 month response times for successful applicants, that's a lot of fingernails you can save.

alainc
Oh, let's just start naming names! It would be more fun that way.
kellco
I would want to know what's going on if I were the CEO. And regardless of how many applicants, I believe in common courtesy and being upfront with people. I'm probably going to be very involved in the hiring process until the company gets so big that we'd need a HR department.

I really can't stand all the problems/complaints about the whole tedious job search process right now and that's why I'm going to build my startup to fix some of these problems. It's nice to know that my startup is in the job search industry and how much flaws and complaints there are, so I know I'm on the right track to doing something good for a lot of people.