Employers increasingly jilted by job seekers

Eve Tahmincioglu • Profile • E-mail

The first step to acing the interview: Show up!

I know this sounds obvious, but apparently not to everyone. Recently I had lunch with a recruiter who shared one of his latest pet peeves: Job candidates who never show up for the first interview.

“It happens all the time lately,” says Emmanuel Conde, director of recruitment for Alliant Technologies, an information-technology staffing firm that estimates about 50 percent of entry-level IT professionals they try to place don’t show up for interviews. Among senior level folks, about 20 percent skip it.

Turns out, Conde is not alone.

The no-show phenomenon is a growing problem for many recruiters and hiring managers, and it’s pervasive in a host of industries from high tech to health care.

Career experts believe an increasingly tight labor market and the deterioration of common courtesy is contributing to the trend, but it may also be that job applicants are being treated as commodities today thanks to the proliferation of online job boards and the cost-cutting frenzy among businesses.

"The Internet has turned job hunting and dating into similar endeavors," says Seth Godin, author of "The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)."

"Companies get thousands of resumes, and no human being can read them all. So everyone is a cog in a wheel, a commodity," he explains. "Most hiring managers aren’t asked by CEOs, ‘How can we get the most amazing people?’ They are asked, ‘How can I get enough cheap people to get the work done?’”

In many cases, it’s the lower-level job applicants that are apt to be no-shows.

Take frozen food company Contessa Premium Foods. Rosslyn Banayat, the human resources manager, says candidates fail to make the first interview nearly 10 percent of the time.

"We’ve found that candidates who fail to show up are generally seeking entry-level positions, and they’re typically responding to an ad we’ve placed on a large posting site like monster.com," she says. "These candidates have probably submitted their resumes to multiple companies and really have no obligation, loyalty or focus as to which company or position is best suited for them. In other words, they may not have much invested in the interview process."

At 1-800-Got-Junk?, about 50 percent of candidates didn’t show up for interviews during a recent five-month period when the company conducted group interviews for sales agents.

"People want to work here," maintains recruiting manager Jamie Hoobanoff.  "However, with the job market the way that it is and unemployment at a 30 year low at below 4 percent, it means that we have to be more resourceful and work harder to get the volume and caliber of candidates to fill these roles."

(The U.S. unemployment rate was 4.7 percent as of November 2007.)

Since there are so many applicants, thanks to online job boards, sometimes recruiters don’t do a great job matching the job to the candidate, making it more likely that the person won’t show up for the first interview, says Matt Johnston, CEO of Workway, a staffing agency.

And it’s not just about Gen Y workers slacking off. While there are a lot of younger candidates skipping out of interviews, older workers, who should know better, are also getting in on the no-show act.

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