Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio
Decades ago, when I pledged a coed fraternity in college, there was a ritual where you were told you were standing on a ledge high above a New York City street and asked to take one step forward.
As pledges, we were each blindfolded and led up through the brownstone next door, so we wouldn't recognize the stairs, and out onto what we were told was the edge of the roof, four stories up. It was December, and the cold air hit my face as one member delivered the instructions in a speech designed to be as intimidating as possible.
I told myself there was no way the drop was really four stories. Everyone who had pledged before me was, after all, alive. It was a final exercise in trust, the kind anyone who's done a trust fall would recognize.
I stepped forward. I was standing on a ledge between two brownstones. The drop was about six inches.
I thought about that ledge years later, in the middle of a job interview process that wouldn't end.
The process from the first interview to hired took four months. There were multiple rounds of conversations with future co-workers, conversations with colleagues I would rarely if ever see, and collaboration exercises, each one framed as evidence of how selective they were and how seriously they took the hire. Every round carried the same implied message as the ritual: step forward, prove you'll do it, and you'll be one of us.
Once I was inside, I noticed something. When it came time to hire someone else, no process took nearly as long as mine. Later hires got an express pass. If the four months had really been about rigor, everyone would have faced them. They weren't rigor. They were rituals.
Here's what I've come to think about processes like that one.
A long hiring process doesn't screen for ability. It screens for availability and endurance: who has the free hours, the flexible schedule, the childcare, the savings cushion to keep showing up for months with no offer. By month four, a company isn't finding the best candidate. It's finding the candidate who could afford to wait.
And then there's the difference between the two rituals, which took me a long time to see.
The fraternity's ledge was a trick, but the trick was in your favor. The fear was manufactured and the danger wasn't real. You stepped into the dark, landed six inches down, and the lesson was that you had been safe the whole time, surrounded by people who had you.
The company's version inverts it. The process is designed to feel like rigor, like care, like an institution worth enduring something for. Then you step forward, and the drop is real.
The interview had already shown me how this place spent people's time, and the job confirmed it. My time there was full of rituals that didn't lead anywhere. Meetings turned into fights. Workshops turned into complaint sessions. Quarterly updates dangled carrots, and executives worked hard to convince employees that their stock options were worth more than the big nothing they turned out to be.
Four months of initiation, and no one was holding the other end.
This issue's question:
What is your hiring process actually screening for?
If you're hiring, add up the hours you ask of a candidate before you make an offer, then ask who in your applicant pool can't spare them. Better job description language won't fix that. The process is doing the filtering for you, and not in the direction you'd choose.
If you're job hunting, you're allowed to notice. A company that treats the interview as a test of endurance is telling you exactly how it will treat your time once you're inside. Believe it the first time.
Until next time,
Mary
P.S. Bad Fit tells the full story of what came after that ledge, including the warning signs I can see now from the outside. Buy Bad Fit here.
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