We can’t seem to get anyone in our organization to interview prospective candidates for our slightly-mysterious-yet-non-felonious enterprise.
Doesn’t matter if we cajole, encourage, flatter, bribe, threaten, trick…none of it works. We even tried the powerful guilt trip/gaslighting combo we learned from our parents:
“…and those poor applicants stuck in the throes of our hiring process must be SO sad…did that ever happen to you…?”
Nothing. Even if it’s in their JOB DESCRIPTION, nothing.
This situation was really bugging Theodore, our lone HR human person, so he decided of his own volition to conduct a non-double-blind, completely anecdotal survey of department heads to find out why, despite the fact he’s still pissed we replaced our three other HR human people with hallucinating AI subscriptions that are only effective at generating coloring books and (heaven help us) endless reams of pitch decks for a tractor sales company in Coffeyville, Kansas.
Here are the Top 8 Key Reasons Why People Don’t Like Conducting Interviews, according to Theodore’s study, which he named “White Lightening: Why Nobody Will Help Me Around Here And I’m Quitting, Volume III.”
1. The Terror of Being Exposed as a Fraud Themselves Most of our department heads are secretly convinced they stumbled into their roles through a series of fortunate accidents and administrative errors. The prospect of sitting across from someone who might actually know what they’re doing triggers an existential crisis that manifests as sudden calendar conflicts.
2. Interview Questions Are Basically Workplace Horoscopes “Tell me about a time you overcame a challenge” is about as useful as asking someone’s astrological compatibility with Excel spreadsheets. Everyone knows this, but admitting it would require acknowledging that most of our hiring process is elaborate theater.
3. The Paralyzing Fear of Liking Someone Too Much Nothing strikes terror into a manager’s heart quite like meeting a candidate who’s genuinely impressive, because then they’ll have to explain to their boss why this person should be paid more said manager, and likely said boss.
4. Interviews Reveal How Little We Actually Know About Our Own Jobs When someone asks “What does success look like in this role?” and you realize you’ve been winging it for three years while hoping nobody notices, the natural response is to suddenly develop an urgent need to reorganize your desk drawer alphabetically.
5. The Uncomfortable Reality That We’re All Just Making It Up Conducting interviews forces people to articulate what they do all day, which is surprisingly difficult when 60% of your job involves attending meetings about meetings and the other 40% is sending emails that no one will read because they’re not urgent Slack messages.
6. Interview Feedback Forms Are Where Honesty Goes to Die Nobody wants to write “seemed competent but I got weird vibes” in an official document that HR will scrutinize, so instead we end up with meaningless phrases like “cultural fit concerns” which is code for “they asked too many good questions.”
7. The Genetic Inability to Admit When Someone Is Overqualified Telling a brilliant candidate they’re too good for the role is like admitting your department runs on duct tape and hope, which, while accurate, feels unnecessarily vulnerable.
8. Interviews Force You to Pretend Your Company Culture Is Intentional When candidates ask about work-life balance and growth opportunities, you have to act like “organized chaos with occasional pizza parties” was a deliberate strategic choice rather than what happens when nobody’s really in charge.
Theodore noted in his methodology that responses were collected via anonymous survey, though everyone wrote their complaints in their distinctly recognizable handwriting and several people forgot to remove their name from the document properties, 100% of whom had just been promoted to our Data Security Division, so we’re likely totally hosed.
Oh well, it’s better than the air conditioning going out again. It gets real musty in here, real fast, come July. In the meantime, we’re going to develop some organizational pyschology-based approaches to remeding the above afflictions: our people deserve to feel better, and besides, how can we expect to get anywhere when, deep down, we think we’re not up to the job?
Don’t answer that.