Looking to hire? Here’s some great ways to get on the shitlist of potential employees and, at the same time, eliminate good candidates:

• Bring a candidate in for several hours of interviews with multiple parties and then refuse to return the candidate’s calls to find out the status of your search.
• Insist on asking for a salary history instead of determining what a candidate with the skills you need is worth to YOUR organization.
• Ask for a candidate’s salary requirements, call them in for interviews, and then low-ball them on the salary offer despite knowing IN ADVANCE what the candidate’s salary requirements were. If you expect a salary history, then respect the salary requirements that you asked for! If you aren’t going to offer something in that range, don’t waste a person’s time preparing for an interview.
• Equate letting an employee choose their wall color with having a worker-friendly company.
• Don’t bother to set up an automated response system to assure the applicant that you received their materials; let them wonder if the stuff they spent hours crafting made it through spam filters. Extra points if you are a web development company; surely you should know how to set up a response message.
• Ask a graphic designer to submit a résumé in Word. Don’t list Word as a “web design application” and expect any competent web designer to apply for a job with you. Word is a WORD PROCESSOR, people, NOT a design tool.
• Midway through the interview process, decide to put the search on hold, or change the parameters of the job. This is a great way to waste dozens, if not hundreds of hours, of other people’s time spent in crafting cover letters, customizing a portfolio, preparing for interviews, and losing work time to meet you.
• Post a job opening, interview candidates, begin discussing salary and benes and THEN talk to your accountant, who tells you it is premature to add a position to your firm. This adds to the public perception that creative people truly are airheads when it comes to the practical world.
• Require a candidate for a PART-TIME JOB to fill out a 20-page personality profile. I’m sure you have a psychologist on staff to interpret those results.
• Related to the preceding item, insist on running a credit check on a candidate for a PART-TIME JOB. You know, our credit score can be affected by numerous inquiries, and what is the purpose? You’re doing a criminal background check; do you really need to know my financial profile to work a register for 20 hours a week?