How Embarrassing Are Your Hiring Skills?

Just how good are we at interviewing and assessing job candidates?

Are your job candidates too old, or are you and your team just lousy at interviewing? Did you hear the one about how a “Legendary Apple Engineer Gets Rejected For Genius Bar Job”?

This Gizmodo report should worry you. I love that the article doesn’t tell us much—kind of like Dear Abby, who tells us enough to keep a reader’s story (and her advice) interesting for everyone—while leaving us to wonder whether we’re really reading about ourselves.

The title of that article tells it all, except that the job candidate, J.K. Scheinberg, a famous Apple engineer, is 54 years old.

Peter Cappelli, a Wharton labor researcher, tells the story of a CEO who was worried about his HR department missing good job applicants because its applicant tracking system (ATS) wasn’t screening resumes effectively. The CEO submitted his own resume. Sure enough, he was rejected. It seems no human ever looked at his resume, which had a phony name on it, but otherwise was obviously his own.

In this story, the job applicant was clearly rejected by three human interviewers—not by an ATS—after a face-to-face meeting. So what does that tell us?

Well, we can suggest the problem is age discrimination, and it partly might be. But the more parsimonious explanation for why that store just missed out on its best employee ever is that the interviewers were inept. How embarrassing is that?

This might mean they really do discriminate against older applicants. Or that they don’t know how to recognize expertise and motivation. Maybe they just didn’t ask the right questions. Maybe they hate doing interviews. Perhaps HR didn’t train them to interview well. We’ll never know. (See “Talent Shortage Or Hiring Failure?”)

This tale is one that might be about any company. But it’s stories like this that force us to ask: Just how good are we at interviewing and assessing job candidates?

I’m forever telling you that the real cost of rejecting a good applicant isn’t that you lose great talent. It’s that the talent will go to one of your competitors—who will compete with you.

Now, how embarrassing is that?