Look, by nature, the interview process is going to require jumping through hoops and putting a little bit of yourself out there—and it's a lot like dating in that respect. The whole thing may seem like an unnecessary performance, but like with a first date, the idea is that setting a basic social exchange with some universal ground rules in place allows each party to assess the other party and decide whether there is any compatibility for proceeding further.

Job searching can be a painful process, and trying to stand out from a crowd through an electronic submission is difficult to do, meaning that you'll probably submit hundreds of applications to jobs—most of which you'll never hear back from. In a hundred submissions, you might hear back from a few—let's say 5%—so five interviews per 100 applications, which is a generous estimate. Of these five, you'll actually sit a first-round interview for three, hopefully getting asked to come back by two of…

You wake up every day and drive into the office to do your job… and there's a comfort in that dull mundanity, a consistency. You've got a mortgage to pay and a family to feed, so you're happy (enough) and more or less resigned to the arrangement. Yet, as time goes on, you find yourself doing more and more work, your coworkers are leaving, and no one is being hired to replace them, leaving their workload split up amongst those remaining. The company is floundering—that's easy enough to see—and u…

It should be no surprise to any worker in this day and age that companies usually have a far greater hiring budget than the budget for retention and raises for existing workers. Hiring and filling positions is a priority, and there is little consideration of the fact that they fail to offer competitive rates and incentives to their workers to encourage them to stay, which is the reason why they need to hire so many new workers in the first place. It makes logical sense when you quickly lay it o…

Hiring for a position as a regular manager is an exhaustive process, draining your time and resources, so it's really hard to imagine something like this ever happening with a manager who is concerned about their own time. But, there are those within certain organizations whose job it is to recruit full-time, and these recruiters and certain members of HR constantly scout and search for strong talent even if the organization really doesn't need them. This works in large corporations that are li…

People work jobs to get paid—it's as plain and simple as that. It's not something we're doing out of goodwill because we care so much about our boss that we want to fatten his wallet up for him. While our bosses might wish that this was the case, the arrangement of employment is based on a simple transaction: The worker's time and skills are provided in exchange for a consistent paycheck.

The inconsistency of eyewitness testimony is something that is often discussed, owing to the fact that the mere recollection of an event changes the original memory that we had stored in ways that can cause us to convince ourselves that we remember something that never really happened. Beware of being so wholly convinced that you're unmistakably right about something. You should always leave room for the fact that you might have made some margin of error. After all, that's what a “mistake” is b…

There are a lot of things that could happen during the interview process that might make you lose faith in it. You'll find yourself completing endless applications that you'll never hear back from, getting ghosted after first-round interviews, even completing three rounds of interviews during which the interviewer insists you tell the owner of your current company that you intend to leave, only to ghost you for a month before confirming that they went another candidate; you might even successfu…

One of the benefits of working in a particular industry is that you get key insights into how things work, learning all kinds of insider information from working behind the scenes. Often, though, all this insider information does is lead back to the fact that the entire thing is just an elaborate charade. This knowledge is, of course, a double-edged sword because often you joined that industry in the first place due to a personal interest, and now you have to live with the knowledge that the en…

If you're free to work, you'll work for free… At least, that's what a lot of hiring managers these days seem to reason. If it's not asking you to develop a new sales vertical and make actual cold calls, it might be asking you to use your marketing expertise to develop an actual campaign—all with the assurance that you might get the job.

The interview process is unique because of the high stakes involved for both parties; the implications of ending up with a dud candidate can be disastrous for an organization or workgroup of any size, and a candidate ending up in a job that's not the right fit can be a huge misstep for them as well in their career. Likewise, the interview process is hugely resource-consuming for both parties, so wasting the other party's time with missed or rescheduled interviews and misleading promises or expe…

When you're walking into an interview, it's always best to have done your research. Be prepared with some strong questions you might have that demonstrate your interest in the role and organization, and, of course, have some understanding about the role and industry you could find yourself stepping into. Doing otherwise would be like stepping into a boxing match with one hand tied behind your back, metaphorically speaking. And when you're interviewing with an employer, you're already taking the…

Things took an interesting turn in this post, where a candidate shared their story of leaving an interview after feeling that their time had been disrespected. The candidate recounted their experience of attending an interview where the interviewer was late to attend. They found themselves still waiting after the appointment had been scheduled to start. After being asked to wait for a moment, a representative of the organization returned, claiming that the interviewing manager had been delayed…