Monthly archive for April 2024

Question

I’ve been working for company #2 for two weeks. I had interviewed at company #1 as well, but I thought nothing was going to happen there. It now turns out that I have a much better offer (and benefits) at #1, so I’ll take it. I know I’ll be burning my bridges, but I still want to approach this the best possible way. What do you suggest?

Nick’s Reply

This is one of those situations that cause pain. There is no win-win.

A company deserves that a just-hired employee will stay put. It also deserves the employee’s full attention and motivation.

Likewise, an employee deserves the most money and the highest-quality job that the market offers. If you’re going to be distracted and less motivated when you choose to stay for “ethical” reasons, then you’re not being ethical at all.

Integrity vs. more money?

Some will argue that you are obligated to your current employer because you accepted an offer and made a commitment. That’s integrity, they will say. And they are partly right. But they’re also party wrong, because it depends which foot this shoe is on.

I will point out that companies find themselves in the same quandary when they downsize because of sudden financial setbacks. Even recently hired employees get summarily terminated. In that case, it can be argued that integrity dictates no one should be fired — the company should suffer the financial loss and deal with it. Yet the conventional wisdom is that you can’t expect a company to compound a financial reversal by continuing to pay employees it cannot afford. No one’s happy, but “it’s a necessary financial decision.”

There is no win-win outcome. The fired employees are hurt and the company’s reputation suffers damage.

A better job offer… or your reputation?

Money is how our culture measures our success at our work. Like it or not, that’s the standard. It’s not crass. It’s reality. But so is pain and so is reputational damage. Unless you can demonstrate a more compelling measure of your success than money — e.g., the work at company #2 is more satisfying than the work at #1 — then you must act rationally and switch to the better offer. And be ready to accept a ding to your reputation.

Employers face the same choice and pay the same price.

If you’re jumping around for a marginal difference, then I say stay put. The other offer must be compelling.

What’s the best way to quit for a better job offer?

Now to your question. How do you handle this the best possible way? Look your boss in the eye, express your regrets and resign. You are under no obligation to disclose the details — just your regrets.

How to Say It
“I took this job after careful thought — it was what I wanted. But another, unexpected opportunity that is a better choice for me just surfaced. I can’t ignore it. I deeply regret that I must resign to pursue it.”

The only way you can try to avoid burning the bridge is to be honest and to take full responsibility for your actions. It’s good if you can leave any work you started in good condition, and offer to do anything that might help with the transition. Still, odds are high your boss will never talk to you again. You must deal with that. (Beware of other issues with Parting Company.)

A warning: Under no circumstances should you use the new job offer to leverage a salary increase at your current job. If you did that and I were the manager, I’d kick you out of my office.

If your ethical nature really needs to be sustained through this, you could return the salary you were paid for those two weeks.

I hate situations like this. They require an awkward choice, and there may be real reputational consequences. That’s the price. Be ready to pay it and move on.

Have you ever had to choose between a job you just started — and a better deal that suddenly appeared? What did you decide? How did it turn out? How would you advise this reader?

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Question

I’ve successfully searched for work for over 20 years. I always lead with what I can do for an employer and with my ability to learn quickly, and I get hired. But it’s getting harder to find a manager to explain that to! Now it’s ATS this and ATS that. Applicant Tracking Systems don’t ask what you can do or what you can learn. They just want you to dump your data into the bit bucket so they can sort you out. But data about your experience is not useful information until a qualified person reviews it, and the ATS is designed to keep qualified judges away from you as long as possible! No wonder it takes thousands of applicants to fill a job. You’ve written a lot about ATSes. Please give me your low-down.

Nick’s Reply

My good buddy Paul Solman at PBS NewsHour shared with me the most concise description of Applicant Tracking Systems that I’ve seen, an article by Wahyd Vannoni, What are Applicant Tracking Systems? How Do They Rank Potential Candidates? It’s nice and brief and although it wasn’t Vannoni’s intent, it highlights everything that’s wrong with ATSes and how they are used. (It also includes a list of ATS vendors. Bet you didn’t know there are so many!)

I think you put your finger on the fatal problem: Relying on an ATS to select and hire workers isolates the job applicant from the person best qualified to judge them – the hiring manager. That’s how employers miss some of the best candidates and why they frequently interview and hire the wrong ones. It’s why you’re frustrated.

It’s virtually impossible to apply for a job today without encountering an ATS, so it’s worth taking a close look at what we subject ourselves to when we let an ATS process our data. Let’s look at Vannoni’s key points about what ATSes are and how they, uh, work.

Lie #1: An ATS manages the entire hiring process.

“An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is a software tool that streamlines the recruitment process for companies. It is designed to manage the entire hiring process, from posting job openings to screening candidates to scheduling interviews and hiring.”

If the promise of the ATS were fulfilled, who would need an HR department? That’s what the text implies. We know it’s not true.

Companies take their most important competitive edge — the ability to hire the best people — and turn it over to be managed by an ATS, which can be generously called a bag of algorithms that don’t work well, if at all.

Investigative journalist Hilke Schellmann has laid this out compellingly in her book, The Algorithm. (See The A.I. Job Interview: You need to know why it’s crap.) These systems are biased, indefensibly reductionist, and about as smart as a cocker spaniel pup that pees exactly where it peed last time because the spot smells like pee. In today’s competitive hiring market, ATSes can’t deliver as promised. If they did, we wouldn’t need HR.

Lie #2: An ATS is a database of candidate information that makes job matches.

“At its core, an ATS is a database that collects and stores candidate information. When a job opening is posted, the ATS will scan resumes and cover letters for relevant keywords and phrases, and then rank the candidates based on how closely their skills and experience match the job requirements.”

A database does not store information. It stores data. (“Data on its own has no meaning. It only takes on meaning and becomes information when it is interpreted.” -University of Cambridge) More accurately, data collected by an ATS is strings of ASCII symbols that have no inherent meaning like words do. It is a very simple pattern-matching system made to look “smart” because the computers behind it can process staggering numbers of patterns faster than we can conceive.

Matches are made based on how closely one pattern matches another. There is no information, there are no skills, there is no experience, and other than a list of ASCII characters masquerading as semantic entities we call words — and there is no “job requirement.” This is precisely why ATSes can process millions of candidate database records per second. They need millions of those records in order to demonstrate that pattern-matching can sometimes work.

Try an experiment: Give the ATS just 5 records that describe 5 people accurately but include none of the magic ASCII strings and the ATS fails. Try it with a million people and it will perform like a boiler room of monkeys tapping on old Royal typewriters.

Wharton researcher Peter Cappelli tells the story of a corporate executive who asked why, after 14,000 engineers applied to fill a couple of routine engineering jobs, his HR department’s ATS deemed none of them worth interviewing. I’ll bet any engineering manager could screen 20 of those applications, interview three and recommend a good one to hire that would perform well.

Lie #3: An ATS removes bias from hiring and ensures fairness.

“In addition to streamlining the recruitment process, an ATS can also help companies stay compliant with Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) laws by ensuring that each candidate is evaluated fairly and consistently. It can also help to reduce bias in the hiring process by removing personal information such as name, address, and age from the initial screening process.”

Here’s where naivete and ignorance about the ATS industry shine forth. I’ll direct you again to Schellmann’s book, and I can show you 10 more links like this: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women.

ATS and AI vendors market the hell out of “Eliminates bias!” We now know that algorithms can actually introduce more biases.

Lie #4: An ATS saves time and money and results in better hires.

“Overall, an ATS is a powerful tool that can save companies time and money by automating many of the time-consuming tasks associated with recruiting. By using an ATS, companies can more easily identify and attract top talent, ultimately leading to better hires and a stronger workforce.”

First, saving time and money and automating tasks tells us nothing about the single most important metric in a business endeavor like hiring: accuracy. ATSes sacrifice accuracy for volume. But more is not better.

You can build a machine to crush 10 tons of stone per hour, but how much will you pay for one of these if the output you want is wheat flour? ATSes do not produce hires; they produce matches of ASCII strings. No reading between the lines is possible until all of those 14,000 engineer applicants have already been rejected.

Lie #5: If we keep saying it, ATSes will actually work!

Vannoni did a nice job in his brief survey article about ATSes. He clearly gauged it for readers who want the basics. That’s why there’s not a word about the impacts on the job applicants who are subjected to the wonders of ATSes that save companies money and time.

But I do have a beef with Vannoni because he should know better. He’s a communications consultant and marketing professor. Having an MBA, it’s frankly stunning that he doesn’t apply the test all MBA programs teach their students: Where’s the outcomes analysis?

What does it matter how clever the ATS appears if we’re not going to discuss whether it works and how well? But we forget how good marketers are at selling benefits. That is, it’s all about what you can get a market to swallow.

• It manages the whole hiring process!
• It matches jobs with the right candidates!
• It eliminates bias and ensures legal compliance!
• It saves money and delivers better hires!

While I was writing for NewsHour, I interviewed CareerBuilder, one of the leading job boards. I asked about outcomes. What’s the job-filling and job-finding success rate? 57% of all jobs are filled by CareerBuilder, they said. Can I see the data? Well, we don’t release that. 57%. I’m still laughing.

My low-down is that I’ve had a standing challenge to ATS and job board companies: Where is your outcomes analysis? Show us the data about results. None have done it.

What lies have you been told about ATSes and how they’re going to help employers hire you? Do you have examples of how ATSes work or don’t work?

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Question

I’ve been reading a lot of books about job searches. They all say you have to send in your resume then follow up with phone calls. In other words, be a pest! I am really annoyed by the junk phone calls I have to put up with both at work and at home, so I feel really stupid calling busy professionals and bothering them. Is this really the right way to go? Your advice and comments would be welcome. Thanks.

Nick’s Reply

That depends on who you’re calling.

A hiring manager’s dream

Suppose you’re at your job and you need to discuss with your boss how you plan to do your work more effectively and to get the boss’s advice. Would you feel like a pest (that is, annoying or a nuisance) if you called your boss to talk about work? Of course not!

So, how are you being a pest if you call your future boss about the work? You’d be the hiring manager’s dream.

A pest

It also depends on what you’re calling about. Are you calling to find out whether the boss received your resume? Or to say you’re just like all other job applicants — that you’re “really interested in the job”? Whether you call the hiring manager or the Human Resources department, how are you making their day or their jobs better? You’re not being helpful, are you? That’s annoying.

If you think you’re going to annoy someone, don’t call them.

If you think you can help a busy hiring manager (or your own boss) solve their problems, meet the challenges they’re facing in their department and contribute to the bottom line, then call! Good bosses (and smart hiring managers) want to meet job candidates who can offer solutions. That’s who they will hire. Is that you?

Prepare to talk with the hiring manager

But here’s where the fun really starts. Forget the job application protocols you’ve been taught. Skip the traditional process and sequence of events. Don’t act like every other job seeker! Your call need not be a follow-up to a resume or to say you really want the job (like every job seeker does), or to follow up on an interview. Your call — not your resume — should be your first contact with the manager!

Be ready to talk shop with the hiring manager just like you’d talk shop if you called your own boss! Stand out from the resumes.

This advance call about the work creates an advantage that your competition doesn’t have. When the manager finally meets you, they will know you and what you have to offer. The interview will quickly turn into a working meeting where the two of you can immediately get down to brass tacks. That gives you a tremendous edge.

There’s a catch

What’s the catch? You’ve got to do lots of work to prepare a brief call where you can offer the help that a specific manager needs. But isn’t that exactly what thoughtfully picking a job to pursue is all about? If you can’t walk into a manager’s office and demonstrate both your understanding of the work to be done and your ability to do it, then you have no business in that interview! Why should a manager hire you? To pull this off, you must do a lot of homework and preparation so that you will be worth talking with — not a pest!

(When is the last time you delivered a completed project to your boss without first discussing it? A job interview is a project. You can’t do it without first defining the scope and the deliverable. That means talking to the manager.)

Pest vs. dream

Are you beginning to see the distinction between making a useful phone call and one that wastes a manager’s time? The difference lies in preparation. (No idea where to start? Try the most important question in an interview.)

Traditional job hunting protocol says you should call after you submit an application. Yah. What are you going to say? “Did you receive my resume? I really want the job and I want you to know it!” Such perfunctory information is no more valuable than the sixth marketing message you’re harassed with: “Did you get the e-mail we sent you last week? You’re gonna love our product!” It’s all irrelevant and annoying.

Good managers pay attention to smart people who can talk shop. So, worry about being a pest only if you’re going to act like one. Be the manager’s dream by telling them something they need to hear—and relish the advantage you’ll gain over your competition.

So, what should that call be about?

Have I left you wondering… Okay, but what do I say to the manager when I make that call? What should the call be about?

Uh-uh. Nope. I’m not telling you. (I’m not going to set tens of thousands of people loose on managers, making calls reciting the same message.) You figure it out, then give your potential next employer a call. Don’t be a pest. Be the manager’s dream — and deliver value. No resume is required.

I won’t tell you what to say, but I’ll give you this tip: To plan what you should say to a manager, put yourself in the manager’s shoes. If you were a manager, what would you want to hear from a caller who wants to work for you? As the job hunter, What does it mean to talk shop to that manager?

Think. Upon introducing yourself to a manager who knows nothing about you and who has never seen your resume, what could you say to make the manager want to meet you — and hire you? Then come join us in the Comments section below to share your ideas about How to Say It!

NOTE: My apologies for not providing a heads-up that there would be no newsletter last week! I was in Texas with friends chasing the total eclipse, which we found in a Walmart parking lot in Killeen. Four and a half minutes of totality, but only a few glorious seconds without full cloud cover. It was totally worth the 3+ hours each way from Houston!

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Question

I lost my job over two years ago, and have applied for over 4,000 HR (Human Resources) opportunities, with 97 interviews, and I am still unemployed. I’ve updated my resume to an ATS format (Applicant Tracking System) to meet the current job search filters implemented by recruiters who use ATS platforms. I am still being rejected with an automated message saying, “Thank you but No Thank You.” I have an MBA in HR Management. Can you tell me why I am not being hired? I’ve attached a copy of my original resume and a copy of the ATS formatted resume for your review. Thank you for your time and attention. I’ve been following your “Ask the Headhunter” newsletter for at least 10 years. I would like your expert advice on handling the current job search market. I look forward to hearing from you.

Nick’s Reply

Sorry, I don’t review resumes, ATS-formatted or otherwise. It’s not my intent to berate or ridicule you but you do, after all, work in HR. How can you not know how the ATS game is played? The house wins, you lose. The house is the Employment System — ATS vendors and the job boards (and any employers that use ATSes). The rest of us are the gamblers.

The job-search addiction

This gambling addiction is pernicious because that’s how job boards and ATSes are designed! ZipRecruiter, LinkedIn, Indeed and their ilk don’t make the big money when you get a job. They make the big money when you don’t get a job and when employers don’t fill jobs because then everyone keeps coming back to place another bet (or 3,000)!

The fundamental technology underlying the job-board and ATS ripoff is illustrated by another addictive con: dating apps.

Jobs and dating: It’s all a gambling addiction

Consider these clips from recent NPR news items about the “applicant tracking systems” used for dating:

“If you’ve ever done online dating, you know that it can be exhausting — the endless swiping, the conversations that go nowhere, the weird interactions where it feels like somebody is just on a different planet than you… Not to mention the emotional roller coaster of really vibing with somebody on the app and then getting to the date and it’s just nothing. Nothing there. It can make you want to stop dating entirely.” [How to ditch the apps and date offline]

Sound familiar? Endless applications, interviews that go nowhere, weird interactions where it seems the interviewer is on another planet… and the emotional roller coaster when you really think you found a match and BAM! you get ghosted.

It’s all the same gambling addiction. While job seekers haven’t really fought back legally, people seeking romance have:

“The popular dating apps Tinder, Hinge and the League hook users with the promise of seemingly endless romantic matches in order to push people to pay money to continue their compulsive behavior, according to a federal lawsuit filed in San Francisco on Wednesday.” [Maker of Tinder, Hinge sued over ‘addictive’ dating apps that put profits over love]

Addictive features & corporate profits

The parallels to the big job boards and ATSes are startling:

“While Hinge’s advertising slogan boasts that it is “designed to be deleted,” the lawsuit claims Match Group’s dating apps are really designed to turn users into “addicts” who do not find true love and instead keep purchasing subscriptions and other paid perks to keep the publicly traded company’s revenue flowing.”

Addicted to a dating app? (How about a job-hunting app? Is there a difference?) The complaint filed by six plaintiffs from several states claims:

“Match Group has violated state and federal consumer protection, false advertising and defective design laws… Harnessing powerful technologies and hidden algorithms, Match intentionally designs the platforms with addictive, game-like design features, which lock users into a perpetually pay-to-play loop that prioritizes corporate profits over its marketing promises and customers’ relationship goals”

That’s why you’re not getting hired – or finding love

Sound familiar? What exactly triggered you to keep submitting applications after the first thousand? After 3,000? Doing the same thing 4,000 times sure seems like an addiction to me! And, as with the dating apps, at the heart of the ATSes are… algorithms seemingly designed to suck you into believing there’s a proverbial brown pony underneath all that…crap. And you — and millions like you — keep coming back to look some more!

Ka-chink!

You’re applying to thousands of jobs, you’ve done 97 interviews, you have a keyword resume that’s supposed to play nice with the ATSes and you’re still not hired. And you ask me why you are not being hired?

That’s why you’re not getting hired.

What works

As an HR pro, you should know none of that stuff works. Now you know you’re also getting ripped off. As an Ask The Headhunter newsletter reader, you should know that on Ask The Headhunter we discuss what doesn’t work and what does every week. I know this can be hard to see when you’re so close to it.

Here’s my advice on handling the current job-search market. And there’s no A.I. or any algorithm that went into writing these articles. This is what works.

Library Vaction beats the Internet when job hunting

Job search success stories

How to get a job: Don’t write a resume

Drop the resume script: Be the wired candidate

The key to good networking

You mean doing it online doesn’t work?

A number of years ago I did a news segment with PBS News. If you watch it, check the date. Nothing has changed materially between then and now. It’s time for a Congressional investigation.

Is applying for Jobs Online Not an Effective Way to Find Work?

Dating apps, job-search addiction — it’s all the same algorithms

In How to ditch the apps and date offline NPR offers the advice of a relationship expert to help wean the addicted from their poison. Take a few minutes to read it. The parallels to job search make it painfully obvious that the addictions are fundamentally the same — and so is the cure. It starts off like this:

“There is another option. It may not seem like it, but you can meet people to date in person.”

Sound familiar?

When the system is broken, you can’t use the system. You have to go meet people you want to work with — in person! I wish you the best. But, please — if you do get a job in HR, do something to stop addicting people to the algorithms!

What’s wrong with the dominant systems we depend on to match people to jobs? Do they serve us effectively, or are we just addicted to them without much care for how well they work?

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