#179 Kianosh Pourian on Optimizing the Tech Hiring Process

0:00:02 - Mehmet
Welcome back to a new episode of the CTO show with Mehmet. Today I'm very pleased to have with me my friend Kianosh. He is the founder of Higher Aspirations. Kianosh, thank you very much for being with us today. Can you just let us know a little bit more about you and your company, what you do? 

0:00:19 - Kianosh
Well, thank you for having me, mehmet. My name is Kianosh Pourian. I am the founder of Higher Aspirations, so I've been in the tech industry for about 25 years. I started out as a designer, moved to development engineering, worked at Fortune 100 companies like Staples, then I continued on to do some freelancing work. At one point, I started my own custom software development company, which helped different companies build different products, and at one point, we expanded our reach from hardware to I mean from software to hardware development also. In 2017 I sold that and in 2018 I exited out, and I've been in different places as VP of engineering. The reason I say all this is because, as you can see, I have been in different parts of technology and throughout those different parts of technology that have the roles that I've played, I've played different roles in the hiring process. The hiring process, especially in the tech world, is very what sort of I can use. 

0:01:43 - Mehmet
That is kind it needs a lot of help. 

0:01:51 - Kianosh
We're working into subject matter expert area, where people requires, in order to properly guide somebody, you need to bring subject matter experts in there, and that's, for example, that's where I came in as an engineer. We would technically evaluate the candidates that came in. As I started growing my own company, I started creating hiring process for my company. As I was a VP of engineering at some companies, I helped with the hiring process as a hiring manager and played a conduit in between. 

And as a result of that, I have experienced different parts of the hiring process and started to get a better understanding of it and some of the issues that I saw and how to fix them, and that's what inspired me to create higher aspirations. And the work that we do is we're not recruiting agents of any kind, we just go into companies and we help them assess their hiring process and help them improve it. 

One of the hidden expenses in running a business is the amount of time and budget needed for the hiring of employees, whether it's you're replacing somebody that's left or you're trying to grow your company. One of the things that kind of affects companies is the amount of time that it takes to fill a position. The longer it takes, the more time is taken away from the actual work and the more money is spent on there to build it. So what we try to do is we try to make the hiring process efficient empathetic and inclusive. 

That's our slogan, that's our motto, that's what we try to do. We look at that in every aspect of the hiring process as we go through it. 

0:04:04 - Mehmet
Yeah, that's great to know. Great also background being in the tech for a long time as well. Now I would like to dissect this hiring process more. Of course, you have spotted some trends or maybe some common problems, common pain points that led you to become a having this company and becoming a founder. If we can just start where things get wrong, what do you think are the biggest pain points for companies? Maybe, if we can I know it's like maybe common, but focusing on maybe startups and tech companies, what are the pain points that they usually face? 

0:04:57 - Kianosh
Well, as I mentioned, it is a hidden issue with most companies, and the reason I say it's a hidden issue is because everybody looks at hiring as a simplistic approach. 

0:05:11 - Mehmet
There's an opening. 

0:05:15 - Kianosh
The simplest approach has been okay, there's an opening, let's get a job description out there. Let's get a flow of resumes in, let's interview, let's fill the position. That's a very 10,000 foot view and very simplistic view of it. However, if not done properly, it can take a long time, it can put a huge toll on the people involved in the hiring process and, as a result of that, you'll see you won't see it outright issues, but you'll see symptoms of an issue that the hiring process is broken or needs some help. For example, when a job description is put out there, you'll get a flow of resumes coming in. If the higher percentage of your resumes are the type of resumes that don't fit the job description or don't seem to match what you're looking for. A lot of times companies don't know to look at the actual job description and see the flaws within the job description. That's creating this flow of unusable and for lack of better word inappropriate submissions into the process. 

You know what I mean. I'm looking for a front-end engineer to hire, for example. I ain't them. If it's a senior position, I need them to know certain things at certain levels. If the job description doesn't encompass that, you're going to get front-end engineers from different aspects applying for the job, and it's going to become a heavy burden on whoever is evaluating the resumes in order to filter the right ones in and take the wrong ones out. That's one symptom that we saw. The other one is transparency and communication being a huge issue. 

You'll see on LinkedIn, on Reddit, a lot of people candidates, companies complaining about whether the candidates are ghosting them or the companies are ghosting the candidates. This is a simple communication issue that can be solved by having a communication plan within your hiring process. You have different stages of hiring and each stage of hiring should have its own communication plan to go along with it. If I'm at the first stage of the hiring process, my resume is evaluated and it matches the job description great, I should get an email that says, hey, you're moving on to the next stage. If I don't fit it, then I should get an email that says I do not fit the position and we will not be moving forward to it. 

A lot of companies, because of the flow of amount of resumes that come in, choose not to communicate that aspect one way or the other, which, in my opinion, in the world of automation and application tracking systems that we have, there's no excuse not to make that communication and communicate back to candidates that way. Those are some of the things that we see as we go through. A good example of a symptom of poor communication is if you look at the HR representative or the hiring manager, which is the point of contact between the company and the candidate. If you look at their email inboxes, you may see a plethora of emails from the candidate saying hey, I'm checking in to see where my status is on my application. In our humble opinion, there should be very few of those, if close to none. You should have communicated to the candidate where they stand, whether they're moving forward or not, and what to expect as they're moving forward. 

0:10:07 - Mehmet
And do you see this coming like both companies do internal hiring I mean they have their own talent acquisitions team and also does it apply if they are utilizing, maybe, other company services to do this? Like, is it coming between both? 

0:10:28 - Kianosh
Yes, yes, and those companies that have internal recruiters and external recruiters. So, for example, one of the things that we recommend to our clients is that, by building a proper hiring process, when you bring external recruiters in which they become an extension of your hiring team, they should know your hiring process and to have that to properly set up the infrastructure, the process in general, and be able to communicate that to an external recruiter to say, at this stage, we expect you to do this, that and all that stuff. That is very important. One of the first things that we recommend to our clients when they have a job opening is to assemble the hiring team. In our opinion, the hiring team consists of an HR person, representative, a hiring manager. 

If there's an internal recruiter or an external recruiter, that's included in the hiring team, and then there's about two to three peer interviewers. Those are the people that will be actually working with a person that will be hired. That's your hiring team, and what we do is we create a racy matrix for the hiring team that says this is your responsibility at this time and this is how we want you to work in this hiring process. When I was at a Fortune 100 company, I interviewed quite a few candidates. 

I never knew what our hiring process was. I never knew which part of the hiring process I fit in. The only thing I knew is when my manager would come in, either email me or literally drop off a resume and say you know, review this. You're going to interview this person on this day, at this time. After doing that, I never knew what happened, what my feedback was, what the result of it was. It was very broad, in my opinion. Now companies are doing a little bit better by bringing people in, but still there's some challenges in there that we think should be addressed and fixed. 

0:13:07 - Mehmet
Okay. So yeah, what I'm hearing, I hear it. Usually the feedback comes from candidates more it's good to hear also what happens inside the company as well, because if you look out you find the number of, of course, which is normal Number of candidates apply to a job. It's much more than the number of jobs available in the market, which is very common. Now one thing I want to ask you and your opinion and what you are doing about it. So one of the feedbacks we always hear about the hiring process is sometimes other than not having a clarity on the process itself. But sometimes you know it's a lengthy process. So you have a screening and then you have first meeting or first call with a hiring manager and then what are you seeing in that area and how you advise your clients to streamline that side? 

0:14:13 - Kianosh
So one of the things we don't go to a company first of all with a predisposed set of rules or how to do things. We have some standards that we follow, but we don't have a template that we go to a company and say this is how you should do it. One of the first things that we do is we interview the company. We evaluate the company, we assess their hiring process. We get an understanding of what the company is all about, what their mission is, what their culture is all about. Then what we do after assessing their hiring process, we give them feedback, which is here is what you are doing. Great, here are the areas that you need to improve. Now the follow up to that is we can help you create a hiring process that will meet your needs, and each of these hiring process that we create is a unique hiring process for that company that matches their mission and their culture and their people. So we highly recommend that people take a look at their hiring process in general. Now with that also comes how to evaluate a candidate and what their interview process should be all about. 

Some companies think the lengthier it is the better, the more people involved, the better. We don't agree with that. We think you can find you can evaluate a candidate in two or three interviews. You don't need much more than that. Now again, if it's a certain position at a company, that requires if it's a more senior position, maybe a little bit more people, but I wouldn't go. I've seen some companies send back emails to people that say okay here's our hiring process. 

It includes seven different steps home projects, one way video interviews, screening, behavioral screening, all these different things. I think some of these are just basically more of a fluff. It's really the best approach of evaluating candidates is one-on-one, conversational type interview, and when I say conversational type, I move away from interrogatory type of interviews where you ask a question and they answer. It should be more of a. I've looked at your interview. I was specifically interested in this one position that you did two years ago. You mentioned that you improved, you provided efficiency in the QA process. Can you talk to me a little bit more about let's talk about it about that, because we have issues with our QA process and I would love to know what your experience is like. Those are the type of questions that get people excited to talk about what the work that they've done and you can easily evaluate that person whether they know what they're talking about or not. Silly questions like why do you want to work for our company Are just. Clearly, when I go into interviews and that's the first question I'm asked clearly it tells me one or two things. One, they haven't read my resume. Two, they're not sure how to interview because that type of question why do you want to work for our company is not a question. 

You ask the candidate, in my humble opinion, why somebody wants to work for a company. It's the interviewer's responsibility to sell their company to the candidate and tell them why they should work for the company. He has the candidate. The cursory research that I would do on a company as I go to their website mission statements there, all that stuff that's great. I can talk a little bit about that, even if I know you with the company. They can give me some insights. That's great. But until you actually work at a place, you really don't know what's so attractive about that place to be able to co-gently talk about it. But as an interviewer who has worked for the company X amount of years, they should be able to say these are all the things that I love about my company. That's why I think you, as a qualified candidate, should come work for us. I lost the question. 

0:19:30 - Mehmet
No, you answered it. Actually. I want to add something here. What I believe is so there is a miseducation for people about how they should approach. I mean, if they are candidates Now I know you help companies who are hiring I want to be on the other side. I'm not on the other side. I think that you need to do as you mentioned. You know, it's like it's a long-term relationship. Maybe Maybe you're going to go out there for five, six, seven years. We never know. So I believe the candidate needs to be also ready to ask and question and if he gets such questions from the company, it will have a red flag. Hey, ok, what are these guys trying to do? 

As you said, like unfortunately, I would say, and maybe you would be able to change this with the work you are doing. You know, and you know I can do it just by spreading knowledge, like. You know, like if you have a talent, really you don't need to show yourself also desperate. And you know, if they ask this question, oh, you know, after five years I would be. You know I'm seeing myself as the upper, you know right. So you mentioned something about communication, Kianosh, which is very interesting. Now, like I wonder how you know if I am in the place of a talent acquisition guy you know, who receives thousands maybe of messages, emails, link it in all these per day how really this can be optimized. Like, do you think it should be? Let me so. This is what we'll lead the question to. 

Do you think, and especially in the tech industry and startups, do you think the approach should be going head hunting versus just opening job posts? I know that there are some legal aspects of it. I can understand this, but don't you think, because we just have to put this job post, so we're going to get thousands of people, versus like, why we don't you know shortlist the people who we want to interview? I don't know. What do you think about this? 

0:21:59 - Kianosh
How you source your candidates. We're agnostic to that, honestly, because how you bring in the candidates is up to you and you know you're right. There is a difference between passively posting your job description out there and hoping the right candidates apply for, versus actively going up there and looking at LinkedIn, stack Overflow for tech, all the GitHub, all these different avenues where you can look and see a person that may or may not be working, looking for a new position, but their experience matches what you're looking for and actively pursuing them. That is up to the company. But going back to one of the things that you mentioned about communication, that's very important. Like I said, for each stage of the hiring process, we recommend that there should be a communication plan. Now there's two groups in that communication plan. That is important to be involved in it. One group is obviously the candidate. How are you going to communicate information back and forth to them, whether they're moving forward, whether they're not all that stuff? The second group and the most important group and this is where a lot of companies fail is the internal hiring team. Me as an internal hiring person, regardless of what position I am in that hiring team, I should know, or have the ability to know where we are in the hiring process. So, for example, as we're going further and further in the hiring process, not everybody has access to the ATS like the hiring manager and the HR person does. So what do we do there? 

One of our recommendations is that if you have a wiki of some kind internal wiki, internal confluence, anything like that there should be a page devoted to this job, specific job opening, who the hiring team is. Where are we in the higher process for the job opening? How many candidates have we seen? Let's look at a list of the resumes. Everything that I, as a person who's on the hiring team, needs to know should be in there. We go even further and we recommend hey, joe, as you're going in and you are interviewing somebody, please take notes, and we put these notes up on these wiki pages for other members of the hiring team to take a look at, so they'll know what questions you've asked, so they don't repeat the same questions, and also what kind of answers they've gotten back to see if they read the answer and they want. Hey, I would love to know a little bit more about this answer that they gave here. I'm going to follow up on this during my interview. 

So those are the things that we think everybody should know. Me as an interviewer, I should know that candidate A that I liked. Maybe my fellow guy that interviewed him didn't care for him too much, that's fine, let's talk about it, let's see how it is. So those are some of the things that we recommend as we're going through the communication, and along this line is another plan that kind of complements communication is documentation, wiki page, the ATS. All that stuff comes very important. I've seen a lot of companies post a job, go through the interviewing process, couldn't find anybody, so they repost the job again. Those are some of the things that the hiring team should know about. Hey, we went through 20 candidates, we didn't find anybody. Who's going to post it again? Let's try it again. So these are some of the things that we recommend as we're going through and take it away from the simplistic approach that a lot of companies have and put more of a structure around it so that people know where they are and how they can move forward. 

0:26:51 - Mehmet
OK, so you advise also them on maybe some technologies that they need to acquire. Do you do that? 

0:26:57 - Kianosh
No, actually we're very agnostic as far as technologies are concerned. We show them how the technology fits in their hiring process and where they should. 

So we don't, for example, we don't go in there and say you need to have Confluence because we need this. If you don't have Confluence or Wiki page. You have some sort of filing system somewhere, hard drive somewhere where we can put a folder that says senior front end engineer. Put a date on it and that's what we're hiring, or put a document that says this is the hiring team. Put another folder that says here's all the resumes we're getting. We're again, we're agnostic to the technology, but we're very opinionated when it comes to communication and documentation and where it should reside for the hiring team to be able to see. The other thing is also I think you may you have a lot of CTOs listening to this I think I believe the CTOs should know their hiring process from start to finish. Yeah, there's plenty of times that I've given presentations on this topic and in a large group of people I have asked a simple question by a show of hand how many of you CTOs know your hiring process? Well, you get a good 50% raising their hands right. 

And then I further question them, those of you that raise your hands. You know your hiring process from start to finish. Some hands go down. If you were put in the hiring process and said, go, how many of you would be able to do it without any help? More hands go down. 

So those are some of the things that I think CTOs and people at a higher level should know know what their hiring process is, how long. They also should have. When it comes to technology, some of the tools used will give you a lot of data in return, so those are important also to have data behind it. A CTO should know what the average time it takes to fill a position right, and if it's somewhere between, let's say, three to six months to fill a position, is that normal or not? In my opinion, that's a long time to fill a position. Why is it taking so long? 

There's other data you can take a look at, for example, the quality of resumes that come in. If the data tells you that the quality of resumes are coming in is very low, then the question that the leaders should be asking is why is it such? What is our job descriptions and how are we? What are we putting out there. That is not giving us good talent out there. So the data gives you a lot of information that you can always go back to and see Again. If the leader goes, looks at the HR or the hiring manager whose point of contact, looks at the email box and sees a lot of follow-up inquiries. Let's talk about that. Why do we have so many follow-ups? Why do these people not know where they stand in the hiring process? 

0:30:46 - Mehmet
Why do these? 

0:30:46 - Kianosh
candidates not know that when they're moving forward, their next interview is going to be next week with so-and-so. 

0:30:55 - Mehmet
Yeah, yeah, when I asked you about the technology actually Kuroshe, I didn't mean that you mentioned a technology name by name, but I mean maybe very high level. Yeah, and, by the way, I like the I would call it because myself I use it as well vendor agnostic. Right. So when I go to a place and I see there are some maybe repetitive tasks, maybe, I see they are missing some solution. So when I go there and let's say it's just as simple as a file sharing solution, right. So when I go there, I don't give them the name of the solution but I say, guys, I think you are missing this functionality and I think you need to deploy a file sharing system. 

Or maybe sometime I go and see they don't have a CRM and I say, guys, I see that you don't have a mechanism that you keep the communication and track the deal, so I think you need to deploy a CRM. Of course, I don't tell them you need to take this, but I like this approach as well. Now the question I want to ask you like do you see any differences when it you know any, I would say relativity between the size of the organization and the complexity of the hiring process, or is it something flat? You see it like same across the board. 

0:32:28 - Kianosh
To be honest, it differs, but larger companies tend to make their hiring process a little bit too complex and I don't want to put a blanket statement on there, but there are I have seen some companies who, like you, take a look at their hiring process. Your question why? Why do we need so many steps? Why does it have to be a panel interview with six people in that panel? To me that seems redundant, overuse. So again, the simplest thing about hiring is just getting to know that person, getting best way to get to know the person. You've been to parties, you've talked in a group of people. You can get to know people within a five to seven people group that you're talking to, but you'll get to know that person much better when you're talking one-on-one. You can ask personal questions, right, so the more people are put in there, I think it kind of diminishes. 

The other thing is also again, this goes back to some one of the things that you mentioned teaching people how to ask questions or what questions to ask. And even so, one of the recommendations that we have is, before you put the job description up there, there's a level of pre-planning that needs to be done. First step assemble your hiring team. Once that assembled, you set the rules and responsibilities and all that Chas, then you need to start when you establish your interview process. You can at that point, or even down the line you can say okay, joe, you're going to be interviewing this person and let's find out how technically savvy they are and let's look at what type of culture they're looking for. And, in order to find out what kind of culture they're more comfortable with, let's ask the questions right. 

Let's ask this question of how do you like code reviews done? How do you prefer? Do you prefer pair programming or not? We do pair programming. Do you pair programming or not? So you can get an understanding of the person and how they work by doing that. 

One of the things that we've done in the past, or recommended in the past in this kind of radical, is that when you're evaluating somebody behaviorally, culturally, technically, all those things try to emulate day-to-day activities as much as you can. So, for example, when we used to do in-person interviews more prevalently than we're doing it now, when we used to do in-person interviews, one of the things that I would recommend to hiring managers is, instead of putting somebody in a conference room, they're all having some that little glass of water waiting for the next person to come in. Why don't you just take them, you hiring manager, take them into your office like you're having a conversation with an actual employee of yours. Just have that conversation in a relaxed environment. This is what it's gonna look like. You sit with me and we do that. As you pass it off to the next person, whether they have an office or not, fine, they can go sit in a cafe somewhere, or you can have that person, walk them around, show them. I interviewed for the Boston Globe one time and they were very generous and they gave me a tour. The manager gave me a tour. Here's what we do. Here's all the different parts, and it was very exciting and it actually got me very pumped up about being part of that company. So little things like that help you progress the process a little further and make people more comfortable. That emulating the day to day. 

One of the things that I implemented in my company when I was growing it was that we would bring the candidate in and we would have a mock stand up with them. So we would say, hey, and we would actually assign them something. We would assign them a computer. We wouldn't given them assignment of a day to day work that we do. We would assign them a challenge of some kind, Like here's a code, why don't you go fix it for us? It has this problem. 

And as they were working on it, we would have people go with them, kind of talk to them, ask some questions or allow them to ask them some questions. So basically, we did the day to day and the code was actually reviewed and then at the end of the day. They would have to explain their code to us, what their thought process was, and we didn't expect a solution at the end of it. We just what we wanted to see is, A how they worked and, B how they interacted with us. We learned quite a bit from people just in that day. I know everybody's during interviews are on their best behavior, but as far as technical assessment was concerned, we learned quite a bit in how they like to work, how they look at code reviews, how they respond to code reviews. 

If we would have somebody when there were code reviewing. They would blatantly say something that was right as the label. It is wrong, and to see how they would respond in time, Right how the candidate would respond. So that way we would kind of get an understanding of okay, if, if they disagree with something, how are they communicating their disagreement? So those were some of the things that we would do in order to evaluate somebody. 

0:39:15 - Mehmet
Beautiful. I like it. Actually, I wish that everyone does the same. Now, this doesn't matter if it's a technical role or maybe even a sales marketing role. I think you know it's quite common. Only, maybe the jargon would be different. So maybe with a programmer you talk about quotes and fixing, while maybe in sales it's about how you approach customers. But yeah, I think if they do it this way, oh man, I wish that this is applied everywhere, because everyone's life would be much easier. As we are close to the end, just your thoughts, and I'm not mentioning this because it's a hot topic. But do you think technologies like AI can streamline this process also down the road? Because you mentioned one thing you said maybe if someone takes a note and then pass it to the other guy, right? So do you think AI can be helpful here? 

0:40:17 - Kianosh
Well, if you think about it, we've had an extension of AI a little bit in some of these behavioral tests that we have out there, like predictive index and things like that, where you answer a few questions and it kind of puts you in a certain category of some kind that tells you okay, you like to interact with people in a social manner, or you like to interact with people more written, or things like that. So it's been around and I think AI and the infancy that it is right now is at best, is going to give you those same results. There also, I mentioned some companies have one-way interviews which, if we kind of say AI is an extension of that which you're basically not talking to a person, you're talking to a machine of some kind. I don't think it's very popular right now, but maybe down the line in the evaluation part of it, in the data that we put in again, you mentioned the example of somebody having notes and things like that. So maybe at some point the whole note taking, the whole documentation process, goes through an AI evaluation which at the end spits out the top three candidates and tells you hey, these are based on the answers that they've given you, that you've documented. 

We think these three people are the best and here's why Maybe AI can do that part of it, but I feel like interviewing and hiring is much of a personal process that requires human interaction. That I don't know. I can't wrap my head around AI doing some of that work, taking some of that burden off. Maybe I don't know as much about AI as I thought I would know. 

0:42:51 - Mehmet
Yeah, that's fair enough, Kenosha. I have a very famous last question. Is there anything you wished? I asked you and how you answered it. 

0:43:05 - Kianosh
Well, I guess one of the questions would be how? Why people need our service? Yes, which is. I think it's with the pandemic happening and the great resignation that resulted from that. Hiring has changed quite a bit in the last two or three years. I mean just the remote work aspect of it right now is still in flux. You see job postings out there. They say remote, but then you read further down and it says you have to be on site two or three days a week. Well, that's not remote. Our definitions of hybrid remote on site differs from one job description to another. So to have uniformity would be great. 

To have the ability to kind of think beforehand, pre-plan beforehand, of how you're going to do your hiring, what you're going to do moving forward, is important. And I think the reevaluation of your hiring process, not to see what you're doing wrong but to see what you can do better. You and I we've been in the business long enough to know that we don't know everything and that every day I'm surprised that somebody coming in showing me something that I did not know. And don't look at us coming in as a criticism of your current process, but more of show us where we can improve Because right now, I think in the market now there's a lot of people looking, the companies are getting inundated and getting a lot of resumes coming in and they feel overwhelmed. We sincerely believe if you just take a step back, reevaluate the hiring process, take a look at it and look where you can improve it, you will take away a lot of the stress and the burden that comes with the overflow that's coming your way. Take advantage of technology to communicate back, to communicate with your team, all those things. It's just a matter of taking a self-inflicted, self-inflicted look into your own process and do that and if you need our help, give us a call. We would love to help out. 

But if you get a chance to look at your process introspectively, it would be great to improve Because, honestly I've been on Reddit and LinkedIn You'll see there's a lot of people who are frustrated with the hiring process and it's affecting them mentally. Depression and anxiety is increasing quite a bit and a lot of it has to do with not knowing where they stand. A simple email of nobody likes a rejection email, but at least having that closure of okay, I'm not considered here, I need to move on, goes a long way to help with the mental health issues that are happening nowadays, as opposed to not communicating, not seeing them know and dragging them around for like two or three weeks until finally giving them an answer is not helpful to anybody. So, if I can recommend out there, please reevaluate the hiring process, because it's hurting the people out there who are looking for a job mentally and it's having them If we don't see it now. 

We will see it in the future, the effect that it has on people, yeah, where they can find more. 

0:47:25 - Mehmet
you know about you and your company. 

0:47:29 - Kianosh
My company, hire Aspirations, is hire-aspirationscom. We're on LinkedIn. We have our own site. If you find us, please reach out. We're happy to answer any questions you have. 

0:47:44 - Mehmet
Sure, I will make sure to put that in the episode description. Just on a final note on what you mentioned, and here, if you allow me to put my final two sentences, I agree with you, Kianosh, because back in the days I was, you know, a candidate for many companies. Right, and 100% agree with you. You know I prefer 100 times to get a rejection email at that time rather than keep chasing and you know I don't want to say other word, but you know, like running after the hiring manager or the HR guy or whoever he is or she is, I respected always the companies that used to send email. You know, maybe one week after I submitted the resume saying, hey, okay, we appreciate, you know your efforts. You send us your resume, you're not qualified? Okay, bummer, it's out of my head, let's go and move to something else. I appreciate these companies. 

Now, on the other part, like once, if you get the phase one and then you know they disappear, in my opinion this is a red flag. It's a huge red flag because that means these guys internally, if they are doing this with you as a candidate who knows how they deal internally, you never know, right. So this is why I agree with you on this and on the mental health issues, because, unfortunately, I've seen I'm more active on LinkedIn and I've seen, you know, really heartbreaking posts from people who you can feel how you know stressed they are, you know how sad they are. Yeah, and we are all humans, guys like you know, like even if you are a hiring manager, even you are working for the number one company, not only for 100 company. You know this guy who applied to you or she applied to you. They deserve from you transparency. I would call it transparency at least. So this is my, my, my two cents on this. And because we target in the show startups and businesses and CTOs, my ask, if you allow me, please be more transparent. Transparency. Actually, it will give for you, you know, the respect of the people and this is what you need because once you build your respect as a company and as a person, believe me, you will bring, you will become a magnet. People will say, hey, these guys are honest guys, they are transparent, they know what they are doing. So this is my final thing. Well, thank you very much, kenosha. 

I really enjoyed our conversation today and for everyone, if you have a question or feedback about this episode or the show in general. Don't hesitate to reach out to me. You know how to find me now email link it in, and Twitter, mainly link it in. And if you are interested to be like Kenosha today, as a guest, don't hesitate please. The door is open for everyone. You have something to say, you have some new concept, you have some new idea, you are a new startup founder. It's, the door is open for everyone. You have an interesting story. That doesn't have to be related to technology. I know the CTO show, but because we cover multiple topics and we want to spread knowledge as much as possible and inspire people, and you know, as I say always, thank you very much for tuning in and we will meet again in a new episode. Thank you, bye-bye, thank you. 

Transcribed by https://hello.podium.page/?via=mehmet