Episode 127

Ika C. Amonath on Importance of Transparency, Right Fit and Bias Prevention in Hiring

TIM: We are live on the Objective Hiring Show. Today we're joined by Ika. Ika, thank you so much for joining us.

IKA: Thank you so much for inviting me.

TIM: It is my pleasure, and I'm pumped to speak to you. I think you're a very interesting character. I think you've got that kind of enthusiasm, which I find really infectious and interesting. Really pumped and excited to have a chat, and I think a good place to start is just to hear a little bit more about yourself so our audience can start to understand who they're listening to today.

IKA: Great. I'd like to introduce myself. I'm Ika, and I do recruitment and headhunting. Actually, this is my first year of being fully self-employed. So everything is new, and I'm. I'm still trying to find the correct or the best ways for myself because I'm actually pretty sure that there's no real right way, but rather there's the correct way, so I'm still trying to figure out the best way for me. But the only fact I know for sure is that they love hiring people, and I love to change jobs. In this case, it's not my job, but somebody else's job.

TIM: And whereabouts in the world are you joining us from?

IKA: Currently I'm in the Netherlands, but normally I'm from Frankfurt, Germany.

TIM: To Holland?

IKA: I think it's a really nice place. I enjoy going to the beaches with my dogs, and I've really enjoyed it. We have more sun in here than we have in Frankfurt right now.

TIM: Okay, that's good. Yeah, I was in Holland. Holland or the Netherlands? Should I say the Netherlands? Is that more correct?

IKA: Actually, I think it's similar.

TIM: Yeah,

IKA: I think there's no real, I think there's no real difference in that case. I think the Netherlands is covering the whole countryside, but in this case it's Holland.

TIM: Okay, excellent. Yeah, I was there myself a few months ago, and it was nice. I was only there for a few days. But it was good. You also. Have a podcast, don't you?

IKA: Yes, I do have it; it's called HR is TAS.

TIM: Okay. And what does that translate to?

IKA: It basically means HR is hate, which sounds really angry and mean, but I'm convinced that if you love what you do so much, you are allowed to hate it sometimes because this is the emotion I'm feeling when I'm doing stuff. I'm into it. I'm absolutely keen on every mini detail. So sometimes, obviously I hate what I'm doing, but it's just because I feel so much emotion about what I do.

TIM: Yes. It's better to be that than to think I am apathetic, I think.

IKA: Yeah, absolutely. I think you cannot care less because this is what you do the whole day. If I cared less, things wouldn't be working out the way I want them. I think you need to aim for 110 percent just to be within 80 or 90, because if you only aim for 80, you will get stuck at 60 percent, and it's just not enough. Um, regular HR day-to-day topics, like what happened last week? What was your most annoying moment of the week? We share best practices. We share things that make us happy, like what's the best moment you had in recruitment like this week? Because. It happens a lot during the week because you work with people. I do have a lot of phone calls and a lot of meetings going on. So there's always something to share. And from every bad topic, you can always create a best practice, like how not to do it, how to do it better, even for myself, because I like looking back to old episodes of Higher Tasks, and I noticed I grew from there because my view was it's somewhere here, but within the last year, I really grew my skills and also my mindset,

TIM: That's awesome. One interesting little analysis I did with our show, which. You might like to do what I did, which was to get the transcripts of the first few shows and then the transcripts of the latest shows and ask Chachapiti to do a comparison of me as a host, including analyzing my filler words. That was one thing I was trying to reduce: just a little bit fewer ums and ahs. And so it was really interesting when I did that analysis; I got some interesting feedback from

IKA: That's brilliant. Actually, it's a really good idea to analyze your skills of talking and of walking people through how your questions are made up and how you structured your wordings. That's brilliant. I'm going to take that from you. Thank you so much. Already a good best practice up front.

TIM: No worries. And when I told a few people about this, they said, Yeah, that's fine. But bear in mind, it's only based on the text, so it doesn't have the context of the video and audio, fine. And the other thing they said was, make sure it's not a substitute for just listening to yourself. Because you have to be able to deal with that cringe, you don't want to just palm it off to an AI as well.

IKA: This is what I wanted to say. Do you feel cringe when you rewatch old videos of yourself? I do. I definitely do. I even feel cringe when I'm listening to old voice memos I made.

TIM: Yeah, I have in the past, and I think if I said to myself, I don't know, eight or nine years ago, Part of your job would be was like all of your job would be dealing with people and doing sales and then a podcast of I'd be joking me right like that would not be anywhere near what I'd be interested in doing or be good at doing. So I feel like, yeah, maybe I've also grown a little bit as well over the years.

IKA: I think it's all about growing because leaving that cringe factor behind and being able to create something that is really worthy, which is really interesting. And actually what helped me the most get over my cringe was people coming back with seriously lovely messages sending me. kudos and telling me I did great and actually listening to what I said. So sometimes it actually means that sometimes I'm not the one who can decide if this is good stuff or not, but the audience is deciding. And I really had to learn from this, but it helped me lots to get over my, the real cringe feeling. So I can be here watching myself back.

TIM: Yes. And are you someone who, in the past, has been able to accept compliments? Or would you brush them off normally?

IKA: The compliments I enjoy the most are working or evolving around my brain. So if somebody compliments my work or the way I approach stuff, I can absolutely agree because I'm pretty sure that what I do is good, and I'm really happy that it is that way, and I worked really hard for my work to be that good. So this is something I can accept really well. I'd rather not have compliments on my optics and visuals and stuff because I'm like, okay, I cannot do so much about that. So I really enjoy compliments that are around my work. Yeah.

TIM: with how sometimes forthright people are with their biases. And so just to open up the discussion around this and what you've seen in recruitment in terms of biases.

IKA: Absolutely. I do think a lot of biases are unconscious. So the most people would say about themselves, they're not biased at all, but I think nobody can write that off the list because not even I can say. Everybody is biased, and you can also be positively biased. This is called the halo effect, but this is also something that is happening. So I think if somebody says they're not biased at all, something is wrong because they're just not aware that they are. So I think the first and most important step is noticing that you are biased and trying to find workarounds that do not affect my day-to-day work because, especially when it comes to hiring, you cannot judge the candidate by his face. You cannot judge the candidate by his name or ethnicity or where he comes from or where he studied. It doesn't really matter. This is bias, and to change that point of view, I like to use a feature from LinkedIn where it allows you to place out the name and also the face. You do not have a picture, you do not have a name, so I only see a list of skills. And I judge by that because this is the only evidence-based hiring decision I should be taking. There's nothing for me to judge on his or her face or, especially if it's not a he or she, maybe something in between. I don't care, and I shouldn't be caring at all because this is not my topic to discuss. I am all about skills and a match for the customer to create.

TIM: Yeah, 100%. I couldn't agree more, of course. I have to say one of the features I'm proudest of that we built into our product quite early on was a feature called candidate cloaking, which effectively does the same thing. It removes anything that you can use to identify the candidate, their name, their email address, where they're from, etc. It just strips it back to their skills and performance in an assessment. Now, what I'm also interested in is that my perception, particularly in talent acquisition and HR circles, is that reducing someone down to some numbers and a score on some skills gives them almost like a negative feeling, as in, you've dehumanized them with sometimes the perception that I got back, whereas for me, it's like not really, because I've removed the stuff that you don't need to know. So you can focus on the facts. Have you? What do you think about that perception?

IKA: I think it's two-sided, as you said; it dehumanizes. But in specific stages of recruitment, you do not need to have the full human experience at all. Especially in the early steps, when it comes to just tracking down the skills and requirements, you do not need to know who that person is. You need to know, is that person suitable or not? Because you do not want to break out with them because they're not fitting, because of something they cannot do something against or for, because if somebody has all the skills, they can be in the hiring or recruitment process. And of course, you will know who this person is after you invite them. Having a first real conversation via phone or via Teams, Zoom, or whatever, you will figure out who that person is. But in the first steps, you do not need to know at all. So I think dehumanizing isn't something really well, but breaking bias and also creating fair chances helps a lot in the process.

TIM: Yes. And so we're talking about the fact we've all got biases, and some people might not acknowledge that, or we might be unconscious of some of them or what have you. I think what becomes helpful is if people could look at macro-level studies and not even think about themselves, just look, okay, in aggregate, how does bias happen? And there's been all these different studies in different bits of the world where the researchers apply for jobs with resumes with the only thing that's different on the resumes, the name. And so you can just see through statistics that there is a huge bias. Yes.

IKA: It happens, and it actually happens every day, and it's not something I'm still shocked about because this is something I hear day to day, like some customers describe about a profile. They tell me, Hey, have you seen? This is a female, she's married, and she's in that certain age. And I'm like, what's the certain age? I'm at a certain age as well. What does that mean for you? And they try to say between the flowers maybe we should have a closer look. Are you pretty sure she's not going to get, and this is happening day to day and

TIM: Really?

IKA: Yeah. And I think it's unfair. It's absolutely unfair because how should I be covering that topic? I'm not going to talk with my candidate about her pregnancy plans. This is all about her and her partner. Even if not only her partner, it's her own topic. So why should I be defending that to the customer? And this is also a big buyer problem we are having because they do think that women are trying to get hired and just drop out for their family phase, but yeah, this happens.

TIM: And I'm interested in how you deal with this as a recruiter, because I can think of myself having run a small analytics agency. I can vividly remember a client we had a couple of years ago who, for whatever reason, one of her biases was she really didn't like big four consulting types. Okay, so she was looking for product analysts and data analysts. And if I had a candidate who had amazingly objective, objectively amazing skills, that this candidate did, and I interviewed them for the things we were looking for, and they did really well. The fact that he had worked at Deloitte previously was just so bad. Now, I went in to bat for this candidate, and I said no, they need to be interviewed. They're as good as anyone else that I've got. You should interview them. I regret that in retrospect, because what happened was they'd already made up their mind. It was already a no, and so all I did was throw the candidate under the bus. Get them into an interview process where, in the end, it wasn't even a real interview. It's, oh yeah, like a, almost like a courtesy call, but a discourtesy call, and I just wasted his time. So how do you deal with this?

IKA: Actually, I was doing pretty much the same in the past years because I thought it was so unfair not to give people the chance they deserve that there was also getting back into the discussion, telling the hiring manager why they should invite my candidate, why they should speak to him or her, but I noticed the same thing you just described; you just bring the candidate to the lions because they cannot win. There's a one in two thousand chance that the hiring manager will change their mind because the candidate is so well behaved, like well behaved, but not what they thought the candidate would be. So I also try to figure out in advance who is the real type of what they look for. I try to ask specific questions of the hiring manager to figure out who to show and who not to show, and unfortunately my own mind and my own idea on fair and correct recruitment sometimes have to take a step back because it's not about me. It's not about my values. Unfortunately, I cannot change everybody's mindset, and I cannot change biases that are 10 to 15 to 20 years old. If somebody is racist, that's something I step back from, and I'm not going to work for those people. So sometimes I absolutely have to decline an offer or something I should be working on because I fear that if somebody is racist, I do not want to place my candidate. No candidate has to be working in that environment, but I try to figure out which kind of candidate will be the right one. If they look for a male person, and then if they describe the team, why they really wish to have a male fit, I'm going to just write to male candidates, because it makes no sense. Even the greatest female ever, the best-fitting female, they wouldn't have a chance. So rather than waste time on candidates, more going into detail with hiring managers and team fit situations.

TIM: Is there anything, any kind of feedback or any scope or any bias, any comment that someone's made over the past few years that struck you as, wow, that's actually quite shocking?

IKA: I had a customer, and everything was working quite well because this was the third role we were filling together. The first two roles were. Exceptional. Everything was fast. It was so lovely. It was an international team. Everybody was cool, and they came back with feedback fast. So I really was keen on working with them together. And within the third role, I suggested two people from Serbia for the same position. I showed two profiles from Serbia. It was just coincidence. I had no idea, but there were Serbian people. It was working. The hiring manager came back with some weird topics regarding Serbian people. And I was trying to wrap my hands around that because I was asking questions like, Can you explain further? Can you elaborate? Can you explain to me what the reason is? Because just somebody being from Serbia doesn't say anything about a person. Yeah, so I noticed that, yeah, that was racist. So I had to step back and stop working together, which was sad because everything worked out so fine, but this wasn't compatible with my values and

TIM: Yes.

IKA: We stopped working together.

TIM: Yeah, one for me that sticks in my mind, actually, I'll share two because I'll share one about myself and my own bias but one from a client I can remember. Last year, we presented a candidate to them, an analyst for a role, and I was speaking to the client, just getting some feedback after they'd met the candidate, and she was talking through her ideas and the pros and cons and what have you. And then she said something, which really, okay. Stuck with me. She said, Look, because the candidate was Russian. Okay. She said, Look, I'm just not convinced that she was anti-Putin. That was what she said. And it's not like they discussed her political views, which is irrelevant anyway. But she just somehow had this in her head that I mattered. And that's what she thought. You know what I mean?

IKA: Oh, and you cannot talk over that. What should you say in your position? You cannot convince the hiring manager that their strange gut feeling, this is a strange gut feeling and it has absolutely no relevance, but you cannot convince somebody that their gut feeling is wrong because this is their own. Oh my. What have you done after? What did you tell the candidate?

TIM: So what ended up happening actually was we got a couple of candidates to the final vote. stage, and they didn't actually end up picking one because they killed the role. It was a different problem.

IKA: Oh. Sometimes you can just shake your head and just go on. Because this is the only thing you can do. Just strive for other customers. Strive for new possibility options.

TIM: Yes. Yeah. So just go to the pub, have a whiskey, and call it a day. I think when that

IKA: Absolutely. Yeah. You can just know and be like, Okay. Yeah. Next day, next

TIM: Yes. Yes. And I'd like to share an example just so that people don't think that I'm saying everyone else's bias and I'm not because I'm just like everyone else, maybe not that particular bias, but other ones. So I can remember hiring a product analyst in a company years ago, and we had hundreds of resumes screening through all these resumes. And at the time we had an indoor soccer team at our local university. And we kept narrowly missing out, losing the final of the competition. We just needed like one more good player. Okay. And so I saw this guy's resume. He was Brazilian. And I can tell you, I'm, I already love Brazilians in general. I'm so biased in favor of Brazilians. It's a joke. And then it got to his hobbies, and it said he was a semi-professional footballer in Brazil. And so I stand up. I'm telling my colleagues. I'll look at this guy, whatever his name was. And he got an interview at least partly because he was a semi-professional footballer, right? So that's obviously ludicrous because what about the 599 other candidates who didn't happen to be footballers? In the end, we didn't hire him, but he absolutely got an interview at least partly because of that, which is, of course, ridiculous.

IKA: It is the halo effect. If you think somebody has some good features just because you like some of the features or somebody is really close to you from the profession or from the way they speak or behave, you tend to. Get them a better insight. You tend to be better to them, and it is also ridiculous and crazy. And I often feel really bad because this happens to me sometimes. If I see a CV and somebody has a background that is not far from my own. I come from hospitality. I tend to think, hey, I can do a lot of different and various stuff. I can get my hands on everything I like because I think this is a really good baseline to start working with. If you come from hospitality, you have a lot of different talents in there, but sometimes people aren't that much of yourself, but you just think they could be because they have something you wish them to have. And I think this is—I wouldn't say worse than the other way around, but it's also something really bad because why is that person specific to name?

TIM: Yes. And it's, yeah, you could apply this to really anything. Couldn't you, based on what university they went to, which, if people were to think back to their university days and think of the class of 300 people they're in, there's a pretty wide spectrum of ability and talent and personality and God knows what other variables? So just using the university, what does that mean?

IKA: It doesn't say anything, and you have no idea because you haven't been there with them; you haven't been in the same class; you have no idea if the person just slept or made some weird comments all day, but was working really hard to be on there. So yeah, absolutely, it says nothing about the person, so we really need to keep our hands on evidence-based practices and focus on real important skills. And I think a lot of those tests aren't that much of a saying, because sometimes, these evidence bias tests, like the model where people are shaped into colors or something like this, are also not really right because they don't say a lot about the person because they can just give in to whatever they want. They are not really viewed through. You can just answer the test as you want.

TIM: There's, you're talking about like the HBDI.

IKA: framework or those kinds Yeah, 16 personalities, everything, which is not evidence-based. I think it fakes that the hiring process is fair and transparent, but it isn't. It's just a different color you give the hiring process, but it's still not evidence-based, okay?

TIM: I sometimes think of that stuff as hiring horoscopes. Is that too harsh?

IKA: It's actually the same. We can speak about horoscopes as well. It says the same about my working ability. If I show you my 16 personalities answer, it's because I'm the one who can shape the answers. You can give me the test, and I can create four different personalities depending on which position I'm applying for. If you apply for a position where you have to work a lot with customers. You give your best customer voice; you give your teamwork spirit. But I would never, or I never met somebody saying about themselves that they cannot work with people when it comes to customer-facing jobs. Everybody will say that it doesn't; you cannot guarantee from such a test set that it's working out.

TIM: Yes. So if it were, and it would be fairly obvious in that scenario, what the company is looking for, you just feed them what they want to hear. Because, as you say, it's nuts. It's a questionnaire. It's not an exam.

IKA: No, also it's not. It's called a personality test, but which personality are you testing? My real personality, or the one who really wants to apply for a position? You wouldn't say something bad in your resume or in your first letter to a company. You just highlight your best parts. It's dating. In the first weeks and meetings, you are showing the best side. You're not coming with all that weird stuff through the door. You just wait until everything is fixed.

TIM: Funny you say that because, yeah, I've used the dating analogy a few times on the show. And so that's almost a nice segue into something else, which is, I personally feel like hiring. And dating maybe would be a lot more efficient if both parties came to the table as transparently as possible, as soon as possible, so here you go. Here are all my skills. And here the company is. Here's what you're going to do: a day in the life of this role. And here's the question: do you agree with that? Or should it, should hiring him be more of a dance? What do you think?

IKA: I think if it's more of a dance, it doesn't. It's not that much different because you can be transparent and still dancing with or to each other because I think the sugar coating that is done is a lot too much. You cannot sugarcoat facts. You need to share what you are going to do on a day-to-day basis. The candidate needs to know the advantages of working there, but also the downsides. Because this is something I'm trying to tell my candidate up front. If there are downsides, and every job has downsides. Not even I am happy every day. As I said, HR sometimes is hate. So you need to highlight the challenges a position holds because you do not want to hire somebody with that sugar-coating feeling, and they start working a day in the job, a week. in the drop, and they notice not everything is that much of a glitter. Not everything is so funny and cool. Everything hurts, and the pain is real. So you need to be straight up front and tell the candidate, These are our pain points. We hire you to fix them. So this is your position. If you are ready for the ride, buckle up, and we are going through this together, but you cannot tell them this will be a soft ride. If it's not going to be because most positions or most specific niche job positions have an issue because they wouldn't be needing somebody to fix that. They wouldn't be hiring if everything went well.

TIM: Yes. And I think also the more experienced a candidate is. The less you're able to pull the wool over their eyes and delude them because they can smell bullshit. eventually

IKA: They can, but in my personal experience, people tend to get too excited about a new opening because they hear this is a great company, which has a good name. It has a good salary amount. The tasks sound great. And people tend to get too excited from the sugarcoating, even when they are not in their first years of work experience. Even after 10 through 15 years, people tend to get so excited. And so happy to start right away because the way HR told them everything is going to be sounded a bit too good, but yet still people like to be happy about stuff. People tend to take all these positive feelings, and I think that this is just something that leads to disappointment and feeling disappointed or feeling disappointed when you start a new job. This is the last feeling you want your candidate to have because the job won't be better for them, and they won't make everything great when they are sad or when they are disappointed. It's just, it makes everything worse. You can start a process from new. I do not understand why companies are not starting by being transparent from the scratch. You can just give away all the information, like salary, tasks, and challenges. Also problems, like what occurred in the past. I love when companies ask, Yeah, why did you leave your current position? Or why do you want to leave? You cannot answer the question back. Like, why did the last person jump out from that position? You're not allowed to ask that, but still there was a challenge. And the last person, or last position holder, was jumping out for a reason. It's not always fun and games, but there was something going on where the person, or where this position is vacant, and you have to be transparent. This is, for me, the first thing that should be covered, but this is not reality.

TIM: and I actually have another anecdote to drive home how helpful this is and why it's very important not to oversell the role. So the first person I ever tried to hire, which was 10 years ago now, was an analyst into a company I was working at, and of community and We overpitched the current state of the quality of the data in this company. We were actually in what I would now call Excel hell, where there's just like a massive spreadsheet everywhere. No real data warehouse, nothing. But we pitched it like, Oh, there's all these data sets. We haven't analyzed all these interesting opportunities, which was true, right? But we glossed over the fact that at least the first three or four months would be a lot of bullshit reporting and somehow automating some crap Excel shit that you have to do for days at a time every month so that the CEO got his one report to judge how the business was going. And so we hired someone; the first person got in and quit. In the first week,

IKA: Yeah, obviously, yeah, because they joined for different facts. They joined because you told them something was going to happen. I actually love it because it seems that person is really straightforward, and it really shows that this is,

TIM: Yes. Ika was a good talent.

IKA: Yes. Yes. No, but the story doesn't stop there. So wait, I'm a slow learner because we went back to market, hired someone, and did it again. They quit on day two. Okay. So I went through the entire cycle twice. Okay. And by the way, these are the first two people I've ever hired in my life. So no matter how bad you start, you can always improve. And so he's quit, and I remember because I was out of the office. So that's right. I got a call. I was out of the office trying to leave the job. I was in an interview for another company because I'm like, I can't work here anymore. Okay. And I remember my boss saying, Oh, what's the worst possible thing that could have happened? So-and-so has also quit. I'm like, Oh, okay, whatever. I went back into the office that day, and there was a young guy standing behind me who had gotten hired for one day to do some filing for the HR team. And he. Happen to say to the lady, they're just like, Oh, I was interning at Morgan Stanley in London. He said, right now, thinking back to biases, I was like, Oh, he's probably at least clever. I don't know anything else. But he sounds like it's clever. I pulled him into a room, had a chat with him for half an hour, and gave him a job as an analyst. He worked in that company for eight years. Okay, roasted the ranks is the most transcribed. Based on longevity, the most successful hire I've ever made, okay? Through a one-minute conversation in an act of complete desperation. So I don't know what the moral of that story is, but at least it's funny. Ika is really fun. Oh my God. Yeah. But I think the moral is if you had been straightforward from the start, you wouldn't have hired two people, which I mean, also, this is something companies talk about with employer branding and about their obvious visible image of the company they're trying to show. They talk a lot about that branding stuff, but yet they still show themselves from the worst side they can because people talk to each other. There are numbers and statistics that show that you share a lot more of the negative sides than the positive sides of a story. You only write a review if you are unhappy and disappointed. You attempt to not post a review on Kununu or every job like Glassdoor, something like that, if you are really happy and keen on everything. This is not going to happen that much, but companies that are trying to be good employers, in terms of employer branding, should start with transparency, which includes information, with everything that leads them to be good employers, but I think it's ridiculous if you watch a company do those steps. Also, when it comes to hiring processes, people talk to each other. If you ghost a candidate for weeks, they will speak to colleagues, to friends, to their dentist. Everybody will know that you ghosted the candidate, like everyone, and they will drop names because they are allowed to. You as a company will have problems after this. So why not be careful and nice from the start?

TIM: And you could argue maybe that actually the baseline or benchmark or standard is pretty low. So if you go out of your way to really beat it and knock it out of the park, people would actually be surprised and very

IKA: Yeah, this is the most fun part, because, as you said, the baseline is so low. You are not; you do not have to run. You can just walk, and you will still be faster and better than the others because the baseline is. Ironically, low, like not ghosting, is a big plus. Coming back with certain information, like keeping the candidate in the loop, is the biggest plus. I often have candidates who reach out to me and tell me, Hey, it's so cool that you kept me in line. It's so cool that you gave me the feedback loop. Even if I do not know something, no information is information. It's worth sharing. Every Friday I'm reaching out to my candidates, and I'm like, Hey. Have a nice weekend. I have no news for you. I'm so sorry, but you shouldn't be going into the weekend with a weird feeling. You shouldn't be thinking that they declined you and I haven't told you yet. You should be aware that there's nothing to say. That's stupid still, but it's not on my desk. It's not on your desk. So you can start fresh into the new week. Hopefully they will have some answers then.

TIM: Speaking of fight feedback. So as a recruiter, a lot of the time you're chasing hiring managers and feedback, and you're then passing that on to the candidate. Why is it sometimes so slow? Why are there sometimes delays? Do you think?

IKA: I have no idea, to be honest. Sometimes I have the feeling that the hiring managers tend not to make it the most important part. But this is the most important part. You will lose the candidates, especially when it comes to active source candidates. You have to be even faster than with passively applied candidates. I think maybe they are not taking responsibility. Maybe I don't know. They think this is not the most important part, but it is. And I often have to remind people that this is what we are all up and about for. This is what I work for. This is what you work for. You're a hiring manager, not a waiting manager.

TIM: I like that. I, in my experience, again, of doing agency work. Yeah. Yeah. All the bullshit going on behind the scenes, all the candidates you've sourced, all the candidates you've screened out, and all the candidates you've tested, to then present them with this one or two that you've already done all this work on. Oh yeah, whatever, send me the CV. They haven't done the work, so then they don't feel the pain and the value of the candidate that has been, yeah, Maybe that's part of it.

IKA: I think you have to take, or you have to get them accountable for everything. So I like to keep my hiring managers in the loop as well. So I like loops. As I said, I like keeping everybody in the loop. So the hiring manager needs to have feedback on my numbers. They need to know I reached out to a certain number of people. They need to know I screened a certain number of people on the phone. So they are aware. that the profiles are present, that they are really the best profiles. It's not just one candidate I magically found on the street. It's a candidate I identified out of all these calls. Because sometimes you have to take five calls. Sometimes you have to take 10 calls just to provide the best-fitting candidate. Because I do not want to present five or ten if they're like okay-ish or mid. Nobody needs that. I will steal the time from the hiring manager as well. They will need to review everything, and they also grade down my credibility. If I tell the candidate is a great fit, if I tell the company, Hey, you should definitely go for a talk with them. This is my credibility, and that works for me. Sometimes they tend to hear my words, so they invite somebody, even when they weren't quite sure if that could be the right fit, because they trust me. And they know they hired me to do the process, and they know they pay me to make all this work be done. So they need to actually speak to my candidates at present. But yeah, you need to get up that accountability with the headroom manager.

TIM: What about then passing on the feedback of the hiring manager to the candidate? Because I imagine sometimes, a lot of the time, it's going to be delivered in a very subjective way that you have to somehow distill all their thoughts into some kind of actual feedback you can pass along to the candidate. And how do you manage that process?

IKA: This is a tough part because, especially, Germany has really strict feedback laws. There can be a hope, or also there can be a hindrance. So when the hiring manager tells you something, which is. Basically not legal anymore, which is too gray and the gray shading. You cannot pass the exact feedback to the candidate. You cannot because sometimes they are out of the process because they are too old. They're out of the process because there are lots of reasons, if they are true or not. I am, who am I to judge? But you cannot really pass the feedback. So the candidate will receive something really generic. Oh, we proceed with the candidate who is better matched, all these blah, blah, blah. And people tend to be really angry about not having more information, but what should I do if I tell the truth? The company will have legal risks.

TIM: Yes.

IKA: I cannot share all this information. If the hiring manager proceeds and gives me some good feedback, like they really want to have a bit more of a strength in this or that field, I can easily pass that to the candidate. I can tell them, and they are really happy if they know, because I can share up front. Hey, we need to have a certain year of experience, and I know this is negotiable, because what? What are four years compared to five years? It doesn't really matter. We can still try it, but if the hiring manager is fixated on that five years, what should we do? I cannot lie and provide you another year of work experience. Yeah, but in every other case, I just have to make up my mind and tell the candidate that somebody else was more of a fit or we moved on with another. However, I think it's bad. And it limits the transparency and the constructivity, but the legal rights are the most important thing when it comes to working with my client. But because in the end, this is my client.

TIM: I was interviewing someone recently from the United States. And. I think it's quite common practice there just to have a blanket rule of never providing feedback to any candidate, ever, for fear of being sued. There's one particular government department that manages all of this, and apparently, if you're a large company, at any one point in time, you'll have a range of people who are trying to get some kind of, yeah. against your organization. Does that, yeah? Germany?

IKA: Yeah, absolutely. And this is one of the reasons a lot of companies do not share feedback at all. They are not telling you any reason because you will be getting sued, and you cannot do anything because even if you do not tell the exact reason, people can manage to say the company thinks I'm too old. They have taught me something else, but they think I'm too old. So they are trying to sue. Germany is Yeah, it's a fun place for people sometimes because you are allowed to try your luck. You can just try to sue companies, and sometimes they even have to pay a certain fee because you could have had the right intention, but it's so bad.

TIM: And would candidates normally bring this up if they've had an interview and then they've been rejected, or is it even at the application stage that they feel like they would?

IKA: I think, to be honest, I think this happens more often in only the application phase. After a real interview, normal people, who are able to reflect on themselves, will notice I did not provide my best in the interview setting. I'm not really the best-fitting candidate for that position because the hiring manager or the recruiter was telling me about certain stuff I have no idea about, and they tend to think it's unfair, and this is not going to happen after having a talk, but if you just apply en masse to 150, 200 companies with one specific CV and one wording, and you get a lot of declines, people tend to be angry; people tend to think about anything, which could be the circumstances that they got rejected, but not about themselves. They are not making up their mind. Hey, maybe that generic CV wasn't working out. Maybe I should improve my CV writing skills. Maybe I should improve selling myself to the customer. No, they just think about why life is so unfair. Everybody has it a lot easier than I do because I'm old. I'm female. I'm this; I'm that. This is insane, and I know it's not fair if you do not receive proper feedback, and I know you cannot improve, but the only thing you can do on your own is reflect and think about, yeah, maybe there was somebody being better, succeeding in the process, because maybe I should be working on myself first, instead of covering that problem for the others.

TIM: And because this links back to the area we started with, maybe it's a way to think about it, that there's all these biases and injustices in the system, most of which you have no control over. Yeah. What you do have control over is your own skills, your own CV, and how you present yourself. And of course, that is at least a variable in the equation of whether or not you get a callback. Therefore, you should focus on that. Is that a fair summary?

IKA: Absolutely, it's all about you. It's all about how you present yourself or how you shape. Because I am my own tool. I do shape myself in the way I want myself to be shaped in. I can go on taking some courses. And they do not have to be expensive. I think even LinkedIn has free courses. You can watch Life auditions; you can just follow some guidelines. You can read yourself into every topic you'd like to cover. So you are the one who is in charge of getting the job or not in the end.

TIM: Yes. And there is an Australian influencer, oh, his name, I'm going to forget, Vin, Vingang. And he's really popular on TikTok and all that kind of stuff. And he's all about communication skills. So I think he was a magician for years. And even just watching some of his content, I learned some tricks of how to reduce some of my ums and ahs and those kinds of things. But there's basically unlimited access to helpful content that's free on the internet to self-improve and make yourself more likely to get a job. So I guess there's no excuse, is there?

IKA: No, and of course, sometimes it's luck because it's not like you can change the rest of the world. You can only change your perception. You can change how you view that. And if you tend to think something is not fair or not, something is not likely; something could happen to me. But this is your own perception. You can decide how you take that approach. And I think the other people will notice. They will know how you approach things. They will know how your mindset works. Because, of course, I got rejected so many times. I cannot count. I got rejected for jobs. Which was absolutely below my level. But that's fine, because I am glad this didn't work out. Sometimes you have to change your own view and stuff and just focus on the bright sides. And just try to improve; try to get your hands on something else, something more, or just try to apply yourself in a better way.

TIM: I guess growth mindset. Is that the term they would use?

IKA: Actually, I'm not a big fan of the term mindset, because it got used by these scammy YouTube guys too much, but absolutely, in the end, that's, yeah, it's about self-reflection. It's about thinking about yourself and how you want to see yourself and then working in the right way.

TIM: Our next guest has a question about hiring; what would you choose to ask them?

IKA: I would like to deep dive into having mistakes, and my question to the next would be, what's the biggest mistake companies make, and how can they try to fix it? Cool.

TIM: But in the meantime, it's been, yeah, such a great conversation. This flowed so easily. I can tell I'm speaking to a podcast host because I think we could do this for hours.

IKA: I could actually, yeah, it was a really fun discussion, and I really liked the stories you shared because they show you have the real experience and we are not just speaking about some blank stuff, but yes. You really experienced it in the past. Cool. We're not academics. We're out there doing it. Yeah. Actually, yeah, that's it. I'm just doing it with my bare hands, and yes. As I said, yeah.

TIM: Wonderful. Again, thanks again for joining us and sharing your insights with our audience.

IKA: Cool. Thank you so much for inviting me, and yeah, I hope to see you soon.