Some managers are prone to get snippy when you challenge them, while at the same time refusing to understand the full scope of what they’re asking for and how much work and disruption it involves.

The employee in this story faced this situation and gave her manager a solution that would cut her workload down to the essentials.

Read on to see what happened  after the manager snapped at her and demanded the full scope.

You want to review every single candidate? You got it, babe!

This is the BEST time that my warnings went unheeded and made the client regret ever asking.

I worked in recruitment for nine years, and a few years back I had a new client (hiring manager) and she didn’t like abiding by the rules set up for the recruitment team.

For one thing, we review the applicants, interview the best qualified candidates, and then submitted them to the hiring manager for consideration.

What’s hard to understand? Was she assuming every candidate was a gem?

WELL!

This hiring manager couldn’t understand why we only sent over three candidates in a week (honestly, she’s lucky as some positions did not garner that many applicants).

I explained that we submit three candidates for every one position available – this ensures that the hiring manager’s time was considered when scheduling next step interviews.

Sounds like she just wants to control things and isn’t thinking about productivity.

Hiring Manager: That is absurd! I want to review all of the candidates so I can TELL you whom to prescreen and THEN you schedule their interview with me based on my availability.

This is why shortlists exist. Weed people out early on.

Me: But, ma’am, you have almost one hundred applicants that met your minimum qualifications.

I don’t think you really want to devote that much time to reviewing all of these resumes, and honestly, some of them were not great.

She’s being rude.

Hiring Manager: Are you not listening? Send them all over to me and I’ll take care of it.

You have to pick your battles — and also save your blood pressure.

Me: … yes, ma’am. You got it. I’ll send those over right away.

Good to have this stuff in writing.

I wrote an email to the hiring manager immediately after the call, restating the topics discussed by phone and asked, again, if she was certain she wanted all of the candidates sent to her.

She confirmed.

I did as requested, selecting nearly one hundred candidates in the system and moved them to Hiring Manager Review.

Now things are about to get ugly — for the hiring manager.

Now, what this did was send individual emails for each candidate as an update to the hiring manager and it would ping her email every three days that they weren’t reviewed. 🙂

It’s unfortunate her boss had to get pulled into this, but what can you do?

Two days later, my boss calls and says he got an irritating phone call from this Hiring Manager who said she NEVER requested this, to which they responded with the information detailed in my email.

She – was – speechless.

Now do your victory dance.

He let her know that I would go back into the system and back up the candidate process so it would be taken out of her to-do list and I would continue to send over candidates that were the best fit for the role as described in our processes.

Yay! That definitely sweetens the pot.

I never received pushback from that hiring manager ever again 🙂

Let’s see what people in the comments had to say.

This commenter sounds lovely to work with. I love the gratitude.

A lot of people shared similar frustration. Unfortunately some managers gaslight people for a living.

It mystifies me, too. It shows they don’t understand or appreciate value.

Fantastic tip. Use the results to tweak the posting.

Very good question. I have no guesses.

Sometimes they get what they asked for.

And it’s delightful for the person who tried to warn them.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.