A reader writes:
I’m so curious for your thoughts on this. I stumbled across a social media post (somewhere deep in the pools of Reddit) about “hacks” for job searchers. The poster claimed to have gotten multiple interviews for jobs by finding a company advertising a position she was interested in, and emailing or calling the org to “confirm her interview time tomorrow,” then showing up and acting as if she’d been part of the candidate pool all along. According to the poster, she’d gotten many interviews and had even been hired multiple times this way, and only once had the person she got in contact with called BS on her claim to have an appointment.
Am I crazy for thinking this is crazy? I suppose it’s possible that at some, maybe a lot, of large orgs the person at the reception desk would just assume they missed the memo and the person is indeed supposed to be scheduled for an interview. Putting myself in that receptionist’s shoes, I have to imagine that if I got a call from someone claiming to have an interview that I can find no record of, that would raise a red flag, but maybe that’s not realistic. Maybe if the person pulling this trick also submitted their resume, so that if anyone checks the candidate pool they’ll see the name come up and it will seem like the error is on the company’s end?
I’m not saying I’m going to do this or would recommend it to anyone because I think it’s unethical in any case, but on a practical level what do you think? I kind of have to commend the creativity but … if this even worked would you consider that a red flag for the company itself that they didn’t catch the mistake or look further into it? Or am I too attached to processes and maybe this is a great idea?
No, this is bananapants, and I’m really, really skeptical that it would work anywhere except for somewhere extraordinarily disorganized, and maybe not even then.
If a random applicant calls to “confirm” their interview time for the next day, the person who answers the call isn’t just going to be like, “Oh, I don’t see you on our schedule so I better slot you in somewhere, how’s 2 pm?” They’re going to see there’s no record of an interview being scheduled for the person and so they’re going to check with the hiring manager or HR, and that person is going to say, “We never invited this person to interview” (or even, “We haven’t even begun contacting candidates yet, so this person is in fact wearing the pants of a banana”). Then they’re going to come back and tell you, “It looks like there was some kind of mix-up; we don’t have any record that we invited you to interview.”
I suppose it’s possible that if you had the perfect storm of conditions — a disorganized company, bad internal communications, a not-particularly conscientious scheduler — it could work, but good lord that’s basically just screening for the exact sort of company you don’t want to work at once you’re there. And even if you did make it to an interview that way, there’s a very good chance the hiring manager is going to realize they didn’t put you in the to-interview pile and will just go through the motions out of courtesy while not having any real investment in you, unless you somehow manage to blow them away in the interview against all odds, which I am very doubtful will happen if you’re someone who’s resorting to this kind of subterfuge in the first place.
There are a lot of really weird job search “hacks” floating around out there, and they grow in number as people increasingly think the system is stacked against them and see it as an adversarial process that they have to hack their way through. (See also: showing up without an appointment, being intentionally late as a “strategy,” sending the hiring manager chocolate, and on and on.)
They generally don’t succeed, are more likely to harm you than help you, and are largely pushed by people who don’t understand how hiring really works. It’s basically clickbait.
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