I’m really disappointed in Nordstrom and their hiring process. It seems like they’re looking for homogeneity within their Corporate Strategy department. Quite frankly you can see it in the makeup of the team as a whole. If you’re not exactly like others on the team and you don’t have the exact same bubbly super extroverted personality they’re not interested in moving you forward. And quite frankly, I think that’s really sad. They might want to rethink their hiring process and how they evaluate personality.
I reached out to the recruiter via email, as the Taleo system they use is a black hole. We then had a phone screener. I then spoke to a member of the team for a first round. The next round consisted of 2 45 minute case studies with two different team members. This is where the process ended. But if I had made it I would have been flown onsite. A week after the case interviews, the recruiter left me a voicemail stating that I had done well on the cases, but that the team had a hard time getting a feel for my personality, so they’ve decided not to move forward. I think that’s really unfortunate.
First of all, if they care about the personality portion so much why dedicate 30 minutes to a case and only 15 minutes to the behavioral portion? Or why have cases at all?
But more importantly, I don’t think there’s anything I did which suggested I don’t have a personality or would be difficult to work with. Yes, I am typically more reserved, but during interviews I always try to build rapport and banter with my interviewers and thought I had done so, at the very least with the first interviewer. The second interviewer was very friendly, but perhaps a bit more difficult to get a read of as far as rapport-I really thought nothing of it because I’ve found that interviewers’ enthusiasm or seemingly lack thereof doesn’t necessarily make a difference. I’ve had interviews where the person on the other end seemed completely uninterested and monotone, but despite that I ended up moving forward.
Throughout the case interviews, I smiled and answered the behavioral component as best as I could including questions such as “what do you do in your free time?” “How did you spend Thanksgiving?”
The recruiter said because they work so closely the fact that they weren’t able to get much of a feel for my personality is problematic. I understand the concept of close knit teams, coming from management consulting where you get so close that you literally eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner with your team the 2 to 3 months you’re traveling on projects. I get it. But I take exception to the fact that they couldn’t get much of an idea of my personality. Additionally, just because someone isn’t necessarily as extroverted as you are, doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be fun to work with or easygoing. The weird thing is they didn’t even ask me anything about teamwork and getting along with others during the interview. Doing so, might have given them a better idea of how I work in a team setting. The team drew faulty assumptions. And unfortunately their assumptions weren’t predicated on complete information i.e., not even bothering to ask about teamwork, etc.
At the end of the day you can’t force a company to hire you, but I think rejecting someone due to personality or cultural fit is really just an excuse for saying this person is different than others on our team and doesn’t have the same personality, so we don’t want to work with them. I think in the case of Nordstrom’s Corporate Strategy division this excuse is being used to promote a culture of exclusivity and homogeneity. I really hate to say this and we are in the year 2017, but there is something called implicit bias. If Nordstrom’s interviewers proceed from the lens that they’re only looking for a specific type of personality and person they could lose out on a lot of good candidates. From that vantage point, I quite simply don’t look like others on the team. If you’re only used to hiring one type of person any person who goes against this mold immediately has a strike against them. I’m not saying Nordstrom is doing this purposefully, but the might want to reevaluate their hiring processes to examine how biases seep in since they’re placing such an emphasis on personality fit. I also wonder if using more senior people to conduct the process would have made a difference. Or at the very least using one senior person and then one junior person to conduct the case might have allowed the team to get a more comprehensive view of the candidate as a whole. I feel as though senior people are probably less inclined to place such an emphasis on personality fit, as opposed to junior people who might be more focused on the extent to which a new hire fits into their “clique.”
