Congratulations Graduate – Why I Will Never Hire You

I don&#x27;t disagree with <i>all</i> of the advice in this, but the incredibly self-entitled tone it takes is absolutely disgusting to me. Every slide it&#x27;s like he&#x27;s sneering down at you (the candidate), demanding you bow down before him, tell him all the right lies [1], and devote your life and every fiber of your person to pleasing him in just the right ways during and after the interview.<p>Candidates are real people with emotions and a right to dignity. Some of them are going to rock, some are going to be meh, and some will be terrible, but they all deserve a much greater degree of respect than this asshole is giving them. Interviewing, and advice for interviews should be about giving the candidate every opportunity to impress you, not tearing them down and demanding they prove their worth to you.<p>The saddest part is that due to today&#x27;s job market for most people, people are probably clamoring to work for this guy. Explains why he seems to feel like a god.<p>[1]: Seriously dude, fucking <i>no one</i> has wanted to work at your shitty-ass PR and marketing firm their entire lives.

I can only imagine the author of this must work for a marketing agency, because degrading people for ceremonious reasons (like looking away when shaking hands or writing a thank you note) is quite common at such places.<p>While I&#x27;m not a new grad, nor will I ever be one, I can appreciate that dealing with a swarm of new graduate applications can probably be tiring. But guess what? You&#x27;re hiring and you&#x27;ve chosen to go to that pool of talent. You&#x27;re better off keeping your mouth shut than offering up a bunch of condescending &quot;tips.&quot;

Reasons I Will Never Hire Your Company To Do PR:<p>1) I can make ugly Powerpoint presentations full of bad clipart myself. Thanks, though.

A lot of this is really good advice, but I don&#x27;t like the presumed self-aggrandizing attitude behind it. Even if it is affected, it&#x27;s snotty.<p><i>Most</i> recent college graduates are scared, anything we can do to make the world a less scary place for them is a classy move, in my opinion.

So, two thoughts:<p>1) this is the kind of slideshow that works effectively online and without vocals. All the words are on the slideshow in the first place.<p>2) So many of those slides were unnecessarily hard to read, and it would have been much better as a regular article with a bulleted list. Those font choices and that trendy style would seem more at home animated in a kinetic typography setting.

Obnoxious design aside, I do think this is mostly good advice and that fact is something everyone should find worrying.<p>A lot of the qualities listed are nice to have, but are probably unrelated to what a candidate will actually be doing. Some of the things in this list might even prioritize bad candidates. &quot;Convince me you&#x27;ve wanted to work here your whole life?&quot; Unless you&#x27;re Apple or Google, no one has wanted to work at your company for even a few months and most of them probably hadn&#x27;t even heard of you until stumbling across your website or job board posting. What you are asking is for candidates to lie to you. Is that really what makes a good employee? I doubt it.<p>I think practices like these are way so many companies are filled to the brim with incompetent designers and engineers. If, for example, you&#x27;re looking to hire a software developer you should be way more concerned with the kind of code they write than with the quality of their handshake. Both are nice to have but only one is vital.<p>As a semi-recent graduate who has slightly more recently become employed, my advice to new grads out there is to take the advice in this presentation, it&#x27;s pretty accurate. My advice to the person who made this slideshow along with any other hiring managers who are currently nodding their heads in agreement: Unless you&#x27;re hiring car salesmen you need to seriously re-evaluate your practices because you are terrible at your job.

&gt; Make it relevant, concise, and focused.<p>Like this bloated, scattered, impossible to read slideshow?

Whoever did the graphics on this crappy presentation out to be fired right now, and some bright young person hired off the street to replace them.

One of the nice things about hiring for any software development team that develops open source projects is that you can often find great hires amongst the community of developers who are already contributing code and fixes and such to your projects. This way you already know the candidate is passionate about the work and thus don&#x27;t need or expect them to lie to you about &quot;wanting to work there their whole life&quot;.<p>This got me thinking...why don&#x27;t more companies do this? if you run a design or PR firm surely there are some internal experimental&#x2F;lab projects you could open up for outside contributors to join in with. I know that many companies already do this. But I&#x27;m wondering whether this sort of software-world inspired collaboration could be made more prevalent.

I didn&#x27;t know a thank you card after an interview was considered a mandatory thing. Is that true?

Smug bullshit like this that focuses on things that truly aren&#x27;t important is killing our economy. I&#x27;d rather take someone smart who has &quot;broken&quot; some or even all of these rules than someone who knows how to follow these rules and couldn&#x27;t complete a simple task. These are, after all, recent college graduates. Yes, it&#x27;s terrible that they don&#x27;t have the interview experience that they&#x27;ve never had a chance to accrue. Give me a fucking break. No wonder our economy has turned to shit.

&gt;&gt; [I won&#x27;t hire you because] You don&#x27;t have a LinkedIn.<p>I don&#x27;t think we would get along.

One piece of feedback unrelated to the content, visually red text on a white background is very difficult for some people to read..