The recruitment process that revealed everything
An old colleague shared a recent recruitment story with me, and it left my jaw dropped!
Five interviews. Two written tests. Reference checks. Then: a preliminary congratulations from the organisation.
And then: rejection. An internal candidate got the role instead.
Fair enough. He moved on.
Two months later, they reached out again. He was their second choice, they said. Could he come back in? It was urgent. They weren't interviewing anyone else.
He did more interviews.
Last week, he saw the job posted on LinkedIn.
No one had told him. No email. No call. Just silence, and a public posting.
What this reveals
When organisations string someone along for months, ask them to invest hours of unpaid labour, promise exclusivity, and then ghost them while publicly recruiting, they're playing with people's hopes.
We rearrange our lives around these possibilities. We tell people. We start planning. We let ourselves believe it's real because they told us it was real.
And when we're living in career uncertainty, hope isn't abstract. It's what gets us through the week.
If this is how an organisation treats people when they're hoping to be chosen, what does it look like once they're on the inside?
But here's the harder question
If you're inside an organisation running recruitment processes like this, or you're watching it happen, what do you do?
Maybe you're the one who's supposed to send the rejection email, but you keep putting it off because "we haven't made a final decision yet."
Maybe you're in the meeting where someone says "let's just repost it and see who else applies" and you stay quiet because it's not your call.
Maybe you're the hiring manager who knows this is wrong, but you've been told "this is just how we do things here."
These aren't theoretical situations. They're happening right now, in organisations that have values statements about "people-first culture" and "respect" on their websites.
The question is: what's your part in it?
What it can look like from the inside
I want to be honest about something: none of this is clean. If you're inside a system that runs this way, the path forward is rarely obvious, and the cost of speaking up is real. You might slow things down. You might be seen as difficult. You might be told it's not your call.
I know that feeling. And I still think it matters what you do with the discomfort.
Here's what I've seen people do when they decide they can't stay quiet anymore:
They send the email anyway.
Even when the decision isn't completely final. Even when it's uncomfortable. They find a way to tell candidates where things stand — because silence isn't neutral.
They find one sentence to say in the meeting.
"We told this person they were our only candidate; we can't just repost without talking to them first." Not a speech. Not an overhaul. Just one honest sentence.
They draw their boundary for themselves.
They might not be able to change the process. But they stop making promises they can't keep. They stop being the one who says "you're definitely our first choice" when they know the story is more complicated than that.
None of these moves are heroic. Most of them go unnoticed.
But what's the cost of not making them?
To the candidates, it's weeks or months of their life spent hoping for something that was never real.
To your organisation, it's its reputation. For the people strung along, but also for the new employee, they will remember the feeling of the process, even if they accepted the role.
To yourself, it's drifting away from the kind of leader you set out to be.
Recruitment processes reveal organisational culture in ways mission statements never will.
The question is: what do you want that to reveal about you?
A SPACE FOR THIS WORK
These are the kinds of questions we're exploring together inPurposeful Futures, a space for people who are tired of performing and ready to start living in alignment with what actually matters.
🎧TOMORROW'S PODCAST EPISODE
Inspired by Mark Carney's recent speech at the World Economic Forum, we explore the signs we put up that we don't actually believe in, and what it costs us to keep them there.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts
With you,
Linda
Founder of Touching Distance
