Kelly & Co

Audition Reluctance

4 min read

An interview asks people with options to audition for a job they cannot yet evaluate.

Senior people will tell a recruiter they are open to a conversation. Fewer will agree to an interview. The two sound like the same thing. To the people being asked, they are not.

A conversation is two parties finding out whether there is something worth pursuing. An interview is an audition. One side performs, the other judges, and the judging side decides whether the performance earns a callback. High performers with options know the difference. They know they will spend most of the hour on the back foot, and many of them decline.

The room is uneven

At the first interview, usually a screen, the person across the table is often less senior and less experienced than the candidate. They also hold everything that gives a meeting its shape: the script, the scorecard, the plan for the hour, and the knowledge of what happens next. The candidate holds none of it. They do not know which questions are coming, what a good answer looks like to the interviewer, or where the conversation will go.

Seniority does not help. In their current job they run the meetings. Here they do not.

The proof runs one way

The candidate knows the purpose of the hour is to prove they are worth the next stage. Part of that proof is mission theatre: stating why they are excited about a mission that is not, at this point, a priority of theirs. They have read the homepage. They have not been told enough to hold a view.

They also cannot judge whether the job fits them until much later. Most job descriptions are static lists of duties and experience that offer no context. The questions that decide fit (who they would report to, what they could decide without permission, what they would inherit, what is likely to go wrong, where the seat leads, the number) are answered near the offer, if at all. So they are asked to commit to enthusiasm before they can evaluate.

For the proven, the trade is worse. Their career equity is the reason anyone approached them. The audition asks them to set it down and re-prove themselves in an hour, judged on how they present rather than on what they have done.

The later rounds do not change the direction. Each is another audition, often with new people asking them to prove it again, and the questions that would let them judge the role are still waiting. They re-prove themselves at every stage and learn little more about the job than they knew at the first.

Disclosure runs one way

The questions are personal. Their greatest weakness. A time they failed. What went wrong with a manager. Why they want to leave. Some of it they might not even share with a partner. Here they are expected to share it with strangers, and to be scored on how well they do it. Why they want to leave is the hardest for high performers with options, because the honest answer is that they do not, yet.

The company, in return, has shared a list of duties.

Silence is read as bad news

When nobody explains the process, candidates assume the worst: more rounds than they would agree to, a case study at the end, a panel of strangers, weeks without word. The candidate has no information to set against that assumption, because the company has not supplied any.

The approach, then the audition

For people who were approached, the order is backwards. Someone contacted them about a role. Then the first question in the room is why they want it.

The costs run on top. Hours of their time before the role is fully understood. At the end, often, a template email or nothing. The cost of curiosity is too high.

One process, as posted

A software company hiring a Director of Talent Acquisition, reporting to the CEO, printed its process in the posting:

  • Screening call with the Talent Acquisition Specialist (40 mins)
  • Technical interview with the Hiring Manager (60 mins)
  • Competency-based interview with the Talent Acquisition Specialist (90 mins)
  • Test task (2-4 hours)
  • Call with CEO (30 mins)

Every stage on that list is standard. Most companies run a version of each. The order and the people are important.

Added up, it asks for between five hours forty and seven hours forty of the candidate's time. The longest stretch, two hours ten across two rounds, is with a specialist who would sit beneath them in the new Director's own team. The test task comes before the CEO. The person the role reports to has thirty minutes, last, with a shortlist four stages have already built.

The role is to run the company's hiring. The process is what they would inherit, and they are asked to pass through it before they are allowed to meet the person they would work for. Candidates who are employed, and whom nothing is pushing, read the list and close the tab.

Who agrees anyway

People put themselves through this when they have to, which is usually when they have come to dislike their current job and most alternatives look better. That is push, and it describes the willing. The audition expects candidates to want the job, and the willing do. What they want from it is an exit, and an exit is worth the same whatever the job turns out to be.

So the format sorts before anyone is scored. The people it keeps are those with the least to lose from auditioning. The people it loses decline at the invitation, and a declined invitation leaves no record.

The audition is a failsafe for a weakness upstream. A vague job description gives neither side enough to judge fit, so the interview has to do that work. The company learns what the role needs by watching the candidates perform, and the candidates learn what the role is by sitting through rounds. The ones who stay long enough to find out are the willing.

None of this requires anyone to have designed the interview badly. It was built to compare applicants, and it does. It assumes the people in the room have already decided they want to be there. High performers with options have not, and the audition gives them no way to decide.