I've been beating this drum for a bit now at my company. My employer is extremely prestigious for it's main field but largely unknown in the software engineering world. It doesn't help that we're literally across the street from a handful of household name level software companies. And yet, a common complaint (I had it myself when I joined) was that people feel put off by the hiring process that we have. To make it worse, I know for a fact that this sentiment is spreading via word of mouth locally.
My point to the folks at my company is that we need to be improving our brand in the eyes of software professionals, not making it worse. To do this we need to present an image that's not just bog standard, mid-sized bureaucracy style hiring.
Have to agree with this. I've turned down offers, or stopped the process, due to a bad interview experience. It's not a good signal, necessarily, but it is the only one that we have, as to what it might be like to work for you. If you can't get this together, what else do you do badly? I recognize from all these comments that companies can be quite nice internally but just suck at interviews, but what else do you have to go on. If my potential future boss finds his phone more interesting than talking to me during the interview for example, why would I accept that job offer, especially in today's market when my phone is literally pinging with interview opportunities as I interview with you?
And I that perhaps a bit more subtly than it appears. This frantic search for warm bodies can make you feel pretty desirable and important, and I think it is easy for that to skew your thinking a bit and to over-interpret small things that happen during interviews. But, that is the reality of human behavior, and you cannot ignore it.
My point to the folks at my company is that we need to be improving our brand in the eyes of software professionals, not making it worse. To do this we need to present an image that's not just bog standard, mid-sized bureaucracy style hiring.