Breaking news: A lot of people love holiday traditions. Example A: Thanksgiving
Nearly every family in America has that one dish they make, song they sing, or place they go because that’s just what they’ve done for generations.
The same tendency exists in recruiting and hiring. The same old practice has been in place for decades, so hiring managers and recruiters do it over again.
Read on to find out which Thanksgiving customs and hiring equivalents to kick to the curb.
1. Thanksgiving Tradition: Black Friday
Black Friday stinks. It requires shoppers to get out of bed before dawn on a bank holiday for sales that usually aren’t that good. It’s a nightmare for store employees, who have to get out of bed even earlier just to risk getting punched by a customer. That a website called blackfridaydeathcount.com exists is reason enough to put this tradition to bed.
Analogous Recruiting Tradition: Aggressive Recruiting
In the same way some shoppers take Black Friday as an excuse to pillage their local Best Buy, some recruiters have started to take the phrase “war for talent” a bit too close to heart. Think constant phone calls, phone calls during a candidate’s current work hours, demands for salary history, pressure to accept a job offer right away, etc. Being proactive is great. Inspiring job hunters to file restraining orders, not so much.
2. Thanksgiving Tradition: Cranberry Sauce with Non-Cranberry or Sugar Ingredients
Cranberry sauce is the overlooked middle child of American cuisine. Nearly every day of the year, it goes unnoticed. Finally, one day a year, we all grab a bag of cranberries, mash them into sauce, and display the result in our finest china.
Except some thoughtless goons won’t even let the poor cranberry have that much.
They insist on sneaking orange slices or even ginger into their cranberry sauce, stealing the berry of its one chance to shine. Ginger has no place in cranberry sauce. It hides the cranberry’s delicious tartness and makes the whole dish unnecessary.
Analogous Recruiting Tradition: Ridiculous Interview Questions
There might be times when asking people what they would bring on a deserted island could provide useful info, but a job interview is not one of them.
Questions like that one don’t give you any insight into candidates. Instead, they waste time that candidates could use to discuss their skills and experience.
3. Thanksgiving Tradition: Bad Thanksgiving Manners
You know the drill. An uncle has one too many and brings up a slight that occurred in 1979. A great-aunt asks why you aren’t married yet. A cousin asks Grandma if she’s given any more thought to adjusting her will.
Bad manners at the Thanksgiving table have been fodder for many a holiday movie, but that doesn’t mean you have to put up with it. There’s no shame in saying no to an invitation to a dinner that will make you miserable or setting boundaries with family members when they say something unkind.
Analogous Recruiting Tradition: Ghosting
Rude.
It’s not only rude, it’s also a habit that give recruiters, and the employers they’re recruiting for, a bad reputation. Even in big cities, professional ghosting can come back to bite you years down the road. Applicants who won’t be moving forward don’t need dissertations, but they do deserve a quick email letting them know the situation.
This Thanksgiving take a moment to consider your traditions, professional and otherwise, that may have exceeded their usefulness. And remember, if you fry your turkey, don’t do it inside the house.
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