The Hiring Process: Job Posting Blues

🗓 Whenever I talk with people about job hunts, I like to tell the story of how I once waited over two months to get one of my job openings approved before I could even get it posted to the public.

The position was critical. I thought it was a no-brainer.

🙋🏻‍♂️🙋🏽‍♀️🙋🏼‍♂️ I had lost three people in about six months, which was a third of my entire technical team.

Those who remained were all drowning in projects—huge, multi-year, multi-million-dollar beasts 👹. Plus, they still had to handle most of the day-to-day operations for several of the company’s most critical systems.

😫 We were already short-staffed before anyone left. After the three departures, we hit a level of desperation.

As luck would have it (she said sarcastically), the company was also in a financial crunch. Although hiring wasn’t frozen, filling any open position—even one to replace three critical people—required approval from the head of the department. 💵

After losing so many team members, our high-profile projects were suffering badly. I didn’t think for one second that we would have any problem getting approval. The real challenge would be finding someone out in the world with the right skills and experience in a very competitive market.

But of course, I was wrong.

✍️ I wrote up the job posting and gave it to my boss, who gave it to his boss. Let’s call my boss’s boss “Ross.” Because it rhymes with boss. 😬

Ross is a great guy. I really do love him. I worked with him on many projects and assignments over the years and he is truly a wonderful human being. We were a good Yin and Yang because he is professional and somewhat reserved, while I tend to tell strangers my life secrets and my idea of professionalism might involve bacon protests and 30-second dance parties. 🕺🏽💃🏻

Ross received the job posting and all he had to do was take it to the head of our department for approval. We’ll call her Sabrina, like Sabrina the Teenage Witch. She’s not a witch, I just like the name and I think if I were her mom, I would have named her Sabrina. 🧙🏼‍♀️

👊 Sabrina is a lot like me—decisive, not afraid to take risks, outgoing—except that she is way more professional. Which isn’t saying much because most people are way more professional than me, at least in the traditional sense. 🥓

Sabrina is also amiable and approachable. So why it took over two months to get my job posting in her hands for approval boggled my mind.

⏳ Every week I’d ask my boss if he’d heard from Ross on the job posting.

“Boss, did you hear anything from Ross about my job posting?”

For weeks all I got was, “He said he’s still looking it over” or “He’s just waiting for the right time”

📆 📆 📆 Week after week after week. It became comical. How hard is it to give your supervisor a document to review? I might have taken it upon myself to step over a management level or two, except I knew there was an unspoken protocol here. Chain of command.

Meanwhile, project tasks were piling up for my team and their morale was dropping. We had a shitload of work to do and couldn’t fit it all in. Even after we got approval, it would take weeks, maybe months, to get through all the screenings and interviews and decision-making before we could actually bring someone on board to help. 😳

I kept asking over and over. Finally, one morning over eight weeks after the posting was delivered to Ross, my boss told me it had been approved.

You want to know how it went down?

According to my boss, Ross finally took the posting to Sabrina, explained that we lost three people, and she said almost immediately, “Yes, approved! We lost people, of course we have to replace them.” 💄💪

I wasn’t there but I imagine it was about a 30-second conversation. No pushback. No protest. No adjustments. Just “Yes. Of course.”

🧐 So why it took two months to get there, I will never know.

If nothing else, this should give you some insight as to why things happen the way they do from that point forward…why there are more delays after the process starts.

What about you?

🤬 Any HR folks or Hiring Managers out there who have similar stories?

🤬 Completely different but equally as horrible?

👇🏾👇🏼👇🏻 Share in the comments and let’s make it better!

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