Most employers do their best to ensure job candidates have a positive interview experience, with varying degrees of success. Some try harder than others, some have more consistency in their process, some just have better managers and recruiters.
Any decent HR person knows and will be happy to tell you that if a candidate has a bad experience, it can potentially tarnish your company’s via word of mouth, and now in the era of YouTube, it can potentially hurt a brand exponentially in today’s world of viral video.
Maybe McDonald’s is just too big to care, but the recent video of the woman totally going off about her interview experience there was a crack-up at McDonald’s expense for sure. Will they sell less hamburgers as a result? Maybe not. But as the recent video fiasco with Domino’s has proven, employers need to be wary of the intersection of brand, interview experience and viral video.
As a candidate…Should you get out there and spread the word like this? Amusing as I might find some of this stuff, I have to say no, since whatever you do out there on the WWW is there forever, and if a future employer finds you going off about another employer, they are going to avoid you like the plague. Why wouldn’t they? They wouldn’t want to risk you doing the same thing to them!
As an employer…It pays to note what folks are saying about other employers, competition or not, because there are definitely lessons to be learned. The McDonald’s rant woman had a couple of good points buried within her hilarious diatribe, the first of which, “Why the fuck are you calling this a job fair if only one position is available?” I had to agree with. There’s nothing more annoying than employers overselling what they have, whether it’s a role or the number of roles. Treat candidates with respect and be straight with them.
I particularly loved the well meaning manager who tried to explain to the candidate that she needed a resume, receiving a response of, “You don’t think that I know how to flip a patty? You don’t think that I…Can go from ripping a bag open of French fries and dropping them in the hot grease…You think I need a resume to know how to do that?” Most of us would probably agree with the candidate on this one. On the other hand, it’s a well known fact of life that you have to have a resume for just about any job. Like it or not. Bringing a resume along is now as much of a requirement as wearing clean presentable attire, even for the most entry level jobs. So, employers, be prepared to treat your candidate like a grown-up. And candidates…be prepared to act like one.
tracy c
