It's Time For Job Seekers To Get Paid for Interviewing

We are in a hot job market. Businesses—ranging from mom-and-pop shops to mammoth global companies, such as Apple and Amazon—are desperately trying to find workers. Managers are also fearful of losing their best and brightest to their competitors.

You’d think in this war-for-talent environment, corporate leaders would bend over backward to attract and retain talent. Many empathetic companies have offered free college tuition payments, remote and hybrid work options, along with mental health days off, Zoom-free Fridays and other initiatives, in an effort to improve the working lives of employees.

There is one aspect that hasn’t changed with the times. Job hunters are still being treated shabbily. They are forced to endure a gauntlet of three to 10 interviews, spanning up to six months. In between meetings, there are gaps of communication and an absence of feedback, which makes applicants wonder what is going on.

Companies arrogantly feel that it is an acceptable practice to make applicants complete tasks. Employers assign work under the guise of seeking to learn if the applicant has the skills for the role.

The requirements range from coding a website, submitting ideas about how to solve a real-life issue that the firm is dealing with to asking a graphic artist to submit samples for the company’s new logo.

These and other undertakings require a significant amount of time and energy. You often hear complaints from candidates that say the company used their ideas without obtaining their permission, nor were they offered any acknowledgement of compensation.

We all know that the job market is incredibly challenging. Companies are having great difficulties finding people, and when they do, they’re subjected to spending hours going to meetings and running the risk of having their bosses find out and potentially losing their jobs. Given this fact pattern, shouldn't companies start paying candidates for their time?

Since this doesn’t already happen, you may feel that this doesn't make sense. Pre-pandemic, we all thought remote work or becoming a digital nomad at scale was impossible. Now, it's been a proven success, as the economy rebounded, the stock market hit record new highs and real estate prices went through the roof.

Consider this—if a company pays an applicant for each interview, even if it's a token amount, they’ll have skin in the game, especially if the firm has tens of thousands of employees, and interviews a significant number of people on a daily basis. All of a sudden, the CEO and C-suite will pay rapt attention to the interview process, as it's costing them money.

When an executive knows that candidates will be paid, the number of interviews will be scrutinized. The CFO will question the necessity of paying a candidate to go on nine interviews instead of wrapping up the process in one day with maybe two interviewers. When you multiply out all of the interviews they force an applicant to undergo, by the amount of interviews that take place on a weekly or monthly, the costs will be substantive.

In a belt-tightening measure, management will quickly issue an edict to slash down the number of interviews, whenever practical. This policy will push hiring managers, recruiters, human resources and talent acquisition professionals to pay rapt attention to how many interviews are really necessary.

Furthermore, hiring personnel will have to be taught how to render a decision on their own without relying upon a consensus from 10 other people—most of whom are loosely connected with the job.