Years ago I was Product Director for a health tech startup in Cambridge. We were going through a lot of change, splitting the company to focus on two very different core areas of business. As per every other UK-based health tech company backed by VCs, one side was going after the US market, the other was a delivery partner to the NHS. At the same time, I was hiring for two product managers to join my team so we could move faster. It was chaos.
I also felt deeply conflicted. The change impacted me directly as my reporting lines changed. Whereas before I had reported into someone I greatly respected and admired and learned loads from, now I reported into not one, but two people, with deeply conflicting ideas of what should happen. To make it worse, both wanted to be in the detail. Often I felt caught between a rock and a hard place, with little leverage to resolve conflict or make my own decisions. I was beginning to feel that this wasn’t the place I wanted to build my own career.
And yet, I had to sell the company to candidates. I had to look for the positives in all this mess. And don’t get me wrong, there were some — not least their vision and mission which I still found entirely compelling. I agreed with the what and why; my issues were with the who and the how. I experienced cognitive dissonance and frustration on a daily basis, and I wasn’t the only one. My counterpart in Engineering felt the same, and we leant heavily on each other for support.
Why am I telling you this? Because as candidates applying to roles you don’t really know what is going on behind the scenes.
I coach job seekers who are having a tough time of it: ghosting, rejection, withdrawing offers at the last minute. That’s rough. But it’s not necessarily personal, nor something that the hiring manager always has complete control over.
In an ideal world, companies would be transparent about their current state and challenges. But then, would candidates really want to walk into that?
My own experience with this particular company six months before was that I was joining to own a particular product where we wanted to grow, and naively thought in doing so that I was going to change the world. Instead on day 1, I was dropped into the deep end with my manager saying he was leaving in less than a month, and that I was actually going to lead a cross-functional task force with people I didn’t know yet to solve the company’s biggest problem that had been festering for months.
It was overwhelming.
And the question is, had I known all of that, would I have accepted?
Probably not.
There’s an awkward dance that hiring managers and candidates go through. On the one hand, hiring managers want to paint a rosy picture so the candidate is excited and wants to work there. It’s about selling the company and role, painting them in the best possible light to engineer desire in the candidates.
And candidates want to be sold on this version. They’re often looking because their last role didn’t work out — they no longer enjoy it, there’s no more growth or opportunities, they’re not getting along with their manager, their role was made redundant. They’re looking for the greener grass, a fresh start, a place where all their problems become a thing of the past and work is amazing once again.
So both sides are performing. Both sides are filtering out the unpleasant bits. The system runs on mutual self-deception, until its conclusion when reality hits on day 1.
Once you recognise that this is how hiring really works, then you can learn not to take it so personally when things happen that seem totally bonkers and unfair and dehumanising. It’s not intentional.
And what’s more, you can appreciate how hiring is a two-way process. You are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. Now, the trick is that you can’t ask direct questions like ‘what’s the culture like?’ and get an honest answer. But you can look for the red flags that might indicate there’s a deeper problem. And these surface in what they do as much as what they say.
Watch how they communicate. Are they prompt, or do they leave you hanging? When they respond, is it clear and kind? Are they setting expectations for what happens next, or are you chasing? Communication in a hiring process is a preview of communication on the job.
Watch how they treat your time. Are they moving through rounds at a reasonable pace, or dragging you through an excessive number of interviews? Are they leaving proper space for your questions at the end of each round, or rushing you out? How a company values your time as a candidate tells you how they’ll value it as an employee.
Watch who they put in front of you. Have you met people from different teams and levels, or is it the same two or three people every time? Are they giving you specific, actionable feedback between rounds, or generic pleasantries? The breadth of people and quality of feedback tells you how the company shares information and makes decisions.
You may believe that it’s on you as a candidate to impress the hiring manager — but it’s also on them to impress you. We assume a power imbalance, because companies are making the decision whether to offer or not. But that imbalance is not strictly true, because you also have the power to accept, or not.
If you're in job search right now and this resonated, I've built a course that shows you how to handle this. From Stuck to Hired is a self-paced programme for senior product people, covering everything from how hiring managers actually read your CV to navigating interviews as a two-way process. It's £149 until the end of September.