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Ever hear of professional courtesy? I'm beginning to wonder if, like chivalry, it's dead.
Here's what I'm talking about. I recently relocated, and changed jobs in the process. By all accounts, the labor market in my chosen city (Boston) is tight, and companies are having to search harder to find the right employees.
So you might think that companies would try to make favorable impressions on interviewees. You'd be wrong. Apparently, companies still think nothing of treating a job candidate like shit.
At high levels — we're talking corporate CEO or NFL quarterback here, not anything that most of us regular schmucks have experience with — a labor shortage usually results in extravagant bribes in the form of signing bonuses, relocation expenses, and other executive perks. However, no such perks exist for regular schmucks.
In the course of my job search, I mailed, faxed, and e-mailed literally hundreds of résumés. I was prepared for a deluge of form letters and rejections, and I received my share, but I expected slightly more from the companies which actually interviewed me. I was disappointed. A startling number of companies, ones that either did extensive phone interviewing or met with me in person, never bothered to contact me again. Not a peep — not even with the dubious courtesy of a form rejection. How long are you supposed to wait in that situation before you can assume you're out of the running? Follow-up calls didn't help, either — I repeatedly heard either "we haven't reached a decision," which got old after about three weeks, or "we can't give any information at this stage," which was not exactly helpful.
One company scheduled my interview from 10:30 a.m. until 2:30 p.m., but it didn't occur to them that I might want to eat what we regular schmucks call "lunch" sometime during that period. Hey, I didn't expect a catered meal; all I needed was 15 minutes to go grab a sandwich. But none of the folks I met with were spending more than a half-hour with me, and they didn't look beyond the schedules of their own employees.
Two prospective employers actually paid for part or all of my transportation expenses, which I thought was a sure sign of a considerate and compassionate employer. But the first of these lied to me about the terms of their offer, and a week later told me they had changed their minds anyway, and the second one followed the pattern above — I never heard a peep from them.
When I finally did accept a job, one of the first things I did was call the four companies that had expressed serious interest in me and hadn't reached a decision, to let them know I was off the market. To be fair, two of the companies responded politely and thanked me for letting them know. One of them took the "we can't give out any information" line, and I couldn't get them to understand that I didn't WANT information. Finally, the HR person at the last company said, rather rudely, "Oh, we sent you a rejection letter already." Well, EXCUUUUSE ME!
I can always resort to this cliché, which happens to be true: It's their loss.
Wendy Cholbi is a writer who lives with her husband, a philosopher, in Boston. Sorry, employers, she's taken.
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