Candidate Bill of Rights

Max Cantor

A blog of thoughts on management, tech, aviation, and fitness.


Note, this piece is available on GitHub, maxcan/best-practices/recruiting.md for anyone from the community to suggest changes in a PR

My Commitment

For any candidate for a position with a company or organization I run, I commit to the following:

  1. No candidate will be ghosted. We will track our response times and respond to 95% of in-bound inquiries within 1 business day and 99% within 1 week. For interviews and assesments we will maintain a P95 response time of 3 business days and a P99 response time of 10 business days in reporting results to candidates. Candidates are encouraged to follow up any time we are outside of the P95 thresholds. In cases where a definitive answer cannot be given within the P95 windows, such as the need to speak to other candidates regarding an opening, that will be communicated to the candidate.

  2. Internal feedback from live interviews, both in-person and virtual, will be recorded no more than 48 hours after the interview to ensure that the content is fresh in the interviewer’s mind when storing it.

  3. We will not conduct any interviews or advertising for positions before a process for hiring a candidate has been established. All candidates should be given full transparency on what the process for their is and if not proactively given, it will be explained on request. However, it is entirely possible that that process will evolve during a given recruiting process and best efforts will be made to keep all active candidates informed about process changes.

  4. We will never lie, exaggerate, inflate, or misrepresent in anyway the state of the company or organization to close a candidate. Any interviewer found to be doing this will be warned initially and repeated violations will lead to potential disciplinary action.

  5. We will aim to be as transparent as possible when giving feedback to candidates who did not receive an offer. Internal processes will be established to encourage this.

  6. We will positively welcome any feedback on our recruiting process or company more broadly from candidates. Recruiters and hiring managers will be assessed in part on the quality of feedback shared with candidates.

  7. We will share expected compensation ranges at any stage of the process. Candidates should understand that some offers will be at the smaller end of that range in many cases.

  8. We will judge every candidate on their own merits and will not discriminate on any basis beyond the candidate’s ability to add value to our company.

No company nor hiring manager will ever be perfect, but we will make all efforts to respect our candidates. Any deviation from the above practices should be brought to our attention ASAP.