were we wrong not to interview a volunteer for a paid job?

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

I would really love your opinion on how we handled this hiring process — and on the subsequent fallout.

I work for a public library that has a very large volunteer base and a small paid staff. When we have a job opening, which is rare, volunteers are welcome to apply. We traditionally grant them a phone interview (i.e., they make the first cut) as a courtesy, though that is not official policy. A few volunteers have been hired over the years, most recently about three years ago.

One volunteer, Stephanie, has applied twice (two years apart) and made it to an in-person interview (second round) both times. Enough time had passed after the first rejection that we gave her the second opportunity, and to her credit, she does have an impressive resume of high-level administrative work and did well in the short phone screenings. However, in both in-person interviews, we found that she was rambling and unfocused despite our best efforts, and she expressed hesitations about performing some key parts of the job (working under pressure, multi-tasking). She also made some offhand comments that came off as elitist and lacking compassion, and we really don’t feel she’s a fit for our community-focused, fast-paced environment, nor would any of us particularly look forward to working with her.

The reason we gave for rejecting her both times was the standard “there were candidates whose skills and experience were a better fit,” though we took extra care with the wording due to our ongoing relationship.

Stephanie just applied for a third time (nine months after the last rejection). A volunteer has never applied more than once, so we have no precedent for this. We (hiring committee of three) already knew she was a “no” and did not invite her to a phone interview this time. We felt that continuing to interview her would send the wrong message.

As the hiring manager, I sent her a kind, personalized rejection that she had not made it to the interview round this time, citing the large and competitive applicant pool (true), and reiterated that we value her and her volunteer work. Although she had told the volunteer supervisor there would be no hard feelings if she didn’t get the job, Stephanie did NOT take it well.

Long story short, over the course of four weeks, she has approached our director in public expressing her shock and disappointment at not being interviewed, sent an angry and accusatory email directed at me for being “unfair,” made passive-aggressive comments about our new hire, and accosted the director at work with an angry diatribe about how she “can do the job” and had been owed a courtesy interview. Along the way, she made a racist comment about a previous hire (“I know you hired her because she’s Black, but I think that’s great”), claimed to be more qualified than any of our recent hires, and “threatened” to stop going above and beyond in her volunteer work (okay?).

I’ve never seen anyone lose their cool like this over a hiring decision. At least she has validated for us that we made the right call, I suppose.

We truly want to learn from this and regret that there are hard feelings that might have been avoided. Were we wrong in not granting Stephanie a courtesy interview a third time, as she believes? Should we have been more direct about the reasons when we rejected her the last time (or this time)? And if she were to apply again down the road, as she said she still plans to do, what do we do?

It doesn’t sound like you did anything wrong. You’ve interviewed her twice and knew she wasn’t going to be a competitive candidate, so chose not to lead her on or misuse her time. She’s not owed repeated shots at a job just because she volunteers, and a lot of people in her shoes would prefer not to have their time wasted or their hopes raised if you already knew you wouldn’t hire them.

If you could go back and redo anything, I’d say it would have been better to have a conversation with her where you provided some feedback on why you weren’t going to interview her, in recognition of the fact that she volunteers with you and has shown a long-running interest in being hired. But the fact that you didn’t do that in no way warrants her response! (And it sounds like you did send a personalized note, not just a form rejection.)

Can you have a conversation with her about it now? Given the way she’s been acting since, it sounds like you’ve got to do that to address both her frustration and the fact that she can’t go on being so disruptive about it. Ideally in doing that, you’d give her some feedback about why you don’t think she’s the right fit for the job. “Rambling and unfocused” can be tough to give feedback to a candidate on (although not impossible), but “hesitations about performing key parts of the job” is much easier — as is the part about making comments that aren’t aligned with your community-focused culture. You’re not looking to debate any of this with her, of course, but because she’s a long-time volunteer, it would be respectful to share those concerns with her so that she has a better understanding of why she was passed over.

Depending on how that conversation goes, you might also need to tell her point-blank that she can’t keep accosting people about the decision and to ask whether she wants to continue volunteering, knowing that that behavior can’t continue.