My good friend Amit turned vegetarian after many years of meat eating, to align with his love for animals. All went well for a while until one day when he was ill and I dropped in to look him up. There he was, looking weak and sitting up in bed gulping down — mutton soup!

“Whoa! What happened to your vegetarian vow?” I remarked. Apparently, the doc thought mutton soup was just the right thing for his health. As Amit remarked dryly, “I’m all for the cause, but if it’s either me or the goat, then it’s the goat”.

Last fortnight’s piece ‘Dealing with Professional Adultery’ on ‘ghost’ candidates ‘who disappear at any point in the hiring process’ was mainly from the hirer’s perspective. However, a deluge of responses to the article over a twitter chat conducted on the issue seems to point to a ‘me or the goat’ situation that led to candidates changing their loyalties. Here’s a look at the key issues that came out of the views from the ‘other side’.

1. Company behaviour and HR practices clearly need to shoulder some of the blame. Tweets from Anurag Shrivastava @hrnext, Megha Khushalani @mk_talkies, Austin Kiyomiya @akiyomiya and others mentioned a range of issues, including predatory poaching and deliberate incitement of competitor talent, cartelisation and no-poaches to restrict opportunity, promises to retain that were not fulfilled and abrupt layoffs without consideration, as reasons why employee trust is lost. The resulting ‘each for himself’ culture meant future employers in the market get treated as ‘bakras’ rather than career opportunities!

2. Long notice periods are certainly a bane, as tweeted by Achyut Menon @achyutmenon, Siddharth Nagpal @siddharthnagpal, Aravind @netcitizen, K Sudarshan @sudarshanEMA and others. This seems to be a simple economic calculation. Candidates who have long notice periods get overlooked by a majority of the opportunities they would otherwise be eligible for. So they even the scales by breaking the code — accepting, resigning and continuing to interview, thereby increasing the options with each passing day. Then if the companies play along by upping the offers, who’s really to blame?

3. The interview process seemed to be a key grouse, with Rama Venugopal @ramavenu, D Prasanth Nair @DPrasanthNair, Gautam Ghosh @GautamGhosh @PDA Vivienne @vivienne8726, Luciana Lambert @LucianaLamb, Fantome_Black3000 @PederNoir and others reeling off what sounded like a list of ‘worst practices’. Problems shared include companies that post fake positions, unpleasant one-way interactions that border on callousness, including long waiting times.

Take the ‘walk-in’ interview process which seems designed solely to suit the convenience of the company, not considering comfort, confidentiality and choice — issues that are key for the candidate. Also, there’s very little information sharing, but companies expect that ‘if you’re interested, you should have researched and know all about us from our website’. Candidates would much rather be introduced to company culture in person, in word and in deed, than read scripted lines from the cloud. Then there’s the biggest complaint — companies that just don’t reply or get back to you after interviews!

4. Then there’s the money . Unfair offer practices both within and without can really rub the wrong way as many point out. Take the practice of using the current compensation as a benchmark for making offers rather than the company’s comp-par ratio that is market-marked. Since internal raises are always lower than offer increases, candidates who have moved more often tend to have higher compensation. So if you apply the same ‘percentage of current comp’ formula as a benchmark to all, the steady sort who stuck to her company will always be short-changed. How happy do you think that’s going to make her?

All these are from actual responses on #BLChat and there’s more. Which just goes to show that there are many company practices that have got the candidates’ goat. So what’s the way to sanity? Respect, honesty, fairness and factual information from both sides. Any short-term costs will come back as long-term savings, as any attrition and hiring analysis would reveal.

When companies disregard candidate priorities, I’m reminded of a priceless insight the head of one of the most respected employers in the country once shared with me as he cleaned his pipe. “In any hiring process, don’t ever forget that irrespective of the size of the company, the candidate is always the boss,” he said, “because he has the last word. The most a company can do is to make an offer, which means nothing — till he accepts.”

Dony Kuriakose is Director & CEO, Edge Executive Search, a talent search partner to multinationals

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