Getting Hired, Never a Picnic, Is Increasingly a Trial

By ALINA TUGEND

Published in NY Times: October 9, 2009

IT has happened to so many job seekers I know.
They've sent out their dozens - maybe hundreds - of résumés and finally
get the call to come in for an interview. They're asked back for a
second round. Sometimes there's even a third call. They've met
practically everyone in the company. They don't have just a foot in the
door, they have their whole body.

 

Ramin Talaie for The New York Times

Katie Murphy, who is looking for a public relations job, has been
interviewed four times for one position, with no official offer yet.

Or so it seems. Suddenly all
goes quiet. In a week or two, or a month or two, they get a message, if
they're lucky, telling them that someone else was picked for the job. If not, it's just deadly silence.

"I
am currently waiting to hear back from two positions," said Katie
Murphy, who has been looking for a job in public relations in New York
for almost a year. "One I've now interviewed with four times, they've
offered me a contracted three-month position, but I've yet to receive
an official offer. And they've just asked to do another interview."

While
there is no hard data, recruiters and academics who follow such trends
agree that more people are being asked to do more interviews before
being offered a position. They also say it has become ever more common
to ask prospective employees to work temporarily for a few months, with
the possibility of a permanent job at the end.

"Hiring managers
are increasingly prone to shopping," said Todd Safferstone, managing
director of the Corporate Executive Board, a research company. "The
perception is that there's lot of great talent out there, and even if
the person across the table is great, there might be someone else even
better."

While the current recession may have intensified the
trend, the hiring process had already become more protracted over the
last few decades for a number of reasons, said Lawrence Katz, a
professor of economics at Harvard University.

Human
resource departments have become more professional, he said, and
employers now need to diversify and justify their hiring processes to
meet affirmative action and civil rights laws. Technology has also made
it easier and less expensive for companies to conduct background checks
and personality tests, Professor Katz said.

But there is little
doubt that the current gloomy economic climate - with job seekers
outnumbering openings six to one - makes it more likely that companies
will think long and hard before hiring.

"We're definitely putting
people through more paces than ever before," said Michelle Robinovitz,
a recruiter for AGH, a midsize accounting firm in Atlanta. "In better
times, we did one or two interviews. Now we really want to make sure
someone will fit and we do a minimum of four interviews."

I
hear stories all the time. A friend of mine in publishing was one of
100 people interviewed for a position. She got the job about five
months after her first interview. I ran into an acquaintance recently
who told me that he had had eight interviews for a position and was
still waiting to hear.

Erin Slattery, for instance, is looking
for a position as an account executive after leaving her job in Kansas
City to move to Arlington, Va., to be with her boyfriend. She said she
had been searching for almost a year and interviewed with a public
relations firm twice in July. She was waiting to be called back for
Round 3 when she heard the post had been filled. She is still hoping
another position may open up at the company.

"The hardest part is
that it never leaves your mind," she said of the endless waiting.
"Every single morning and every single night, I think: ‘Will I hear
from them? Should I call them? Should I wait?' You don't want to come
off as desperate, but you want to make sure that you're still on their
mind. It's like dating - do I follow the rules, or am I scaring them
away?"

While she looked for something permanent, she decided to
do some temporary work, and even that had a more extensive screening
process than she expected.

"I had to do two phone interviews and one in-person interview to land my current temp position," she said.

From
the outside, the hiring process can seem arbitrary and even cruel. But
it's important to see where companies are coming from, said Alec
Levenson, a research scientist with the Center for Effective
Organizations at the University of Southern California.

"In
an up market, say the late 1990s, the cost of making a bad hiring
decision was low," he said. "The company could be a lot more cavalier
about hiring, because if the worker doesn't fit, the chances are that
he'll move on soon." But with jobs scarce, an employee is more likely
to cling to a job, even if it isn't the best. So the employer has to
take the steps to fire that person, which usually involves a lengthy
documentation process, warnings and meetings. It consumes a lot of time
and energy, Professor Levenson said.

Ms. Robinovitz said her
company, like most nowadays, was very lean and no longer had the
capacity to absorb a new employee who turned out to be mediocre.

In addition, fear of wrongful termination lawsuits makes firms more leery of hiring someone who may not seem perfect.

"There's been gradual erosion over the past 30 years of pure
employment-at-will as more and more people have come under employment
protection laws," Professor Levenson said. "It's become more and more
difficult for companies to cavalierly hire and fire. Even if 100 people
are eligible to sue, only one or two might, but that's all it takes" to
scare a company.

That's one of the reasons hiring people
on a three-month trial basis - usually without benefits - has become
increasingly popular, he said. It's a way for both employee and
employer to see how things work before committing. Think of it as
moving in together rather than marrying.

But more interviews
don't necessarily mean better people are being hired, Mr. Safferstone
said. In 2003, his company asked 28,000 new hires across all fields how
many interviews they had to get their current job. The researchers then
used performance management data and interviews with managers to
evaluate the performance of those 28,000 hires. Controlling for all
other factors, it turned out that those who were interviewed four to
five times were considered the best workers - better than those who had
been interviewed one to three times or six or more times.

That
may be because as a company does more and more interviews, the best
people drop out, Mr. Safferstone said. "Another theory is that if an
organization needs to do six, seven or eight interviews, there might be
a large question about that person or about the position."

Even
though economic times have changed since the information was collected,
Mr. Safferstone said he believed that the findings would be similar
today.

There are other reasons the hiring process may drag on and
on. Human resource departments have often been downsized, so there are
fewer people available to do all the work involved in getting someone
new on board, said Karen Danziger, managing partner at the
Howard-Sloan-Koller Group, an executive recruiting company.

Also,
the concept of fit - not only must the person be able to do the job but
her personality, priorities and work style must complement the
workplace - has become more and more important, Ms. Danziger said.
Having a potential employee meet as many people in as many departments
as possible is a way to try to ensure that the fit is good.

But
even if there are substantive reasons for companies to take so long to
decide, many job hunters ask why so many employers interview them once,
twice or more - and then never get back in touch. And for that
question, no one had a good answer.

Rejection, whatever form it
comes in, is always hard to take. But those who have successfully
navigated the process say that as difficult as it is, you should try
not to take it personally. And more important, don't stop looking for a
job until you have that signed contract in hand.