"Financial services firms are ghosting candidates and it's not acceptable"
Something has changed in financial services. In the past few years it's become ok to interview people, sometimes many times over, and then to just leave them hanging.
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It happened to a friend of mine. He was moving to London from overseas, and he went through five rounds of interviews. The employer said they were interested, and after four rounds he started seriously thinking about what it would take to move countries. He started to getting a plan together which had several time critical elements, but after the fifth round of interviews, he simply never heard anything from the firm again.
This never used to happen, but recruiters tell me that this kind of ghosting has become increasingly common. They also say that the firm my friend was interviewing with was a repeat offender. It's very poor behaviour, both on a business and a human level.
It also seems that some firms are more guilty of this than others. At the firm I work for, this absolutely does not happen. A few years ago, we gave HR very strict guidelines on the feedback process for candidates who we interview. Not only do we have to respond to all candidates within a few weeks, but we always state a specific competency that didn't meet expectations.
This is a minimum level of respect. Firms that don't adhere to it need to be called out.
John Jones is a pseudonym
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