[maria_weber23]

> it can also be emotionally draining to reject candidate after candidate.

How so? I mean I can certainly see why interviewing is not for everyone, but this really never crossed my mind. It's not like you know the candidate. Also you want to keep a good standard in your company, don't you? So why would this ever matter to you.

[curryst]

Doing the right thing doesn't always make it easy. I've rejected candidates that I thought were awesome people, just not at the right level of expertise for the role. I really appreciate the enthusiasm that people just entering the industry have, but at some point you can't overcome the lack of experience with enthusiasm. Likewise when you do Zoom interviews with people who don't have awesome jobs currently, and think about what they could do with their lives if they made the kind of money the job pays.

It's emotionally draining because there might be a dozen reasons you want to hire someone, and you have to mentally debate whether any of those reasons can outweigh their faults enough to let you say yes. But they can't, so you have to smash that person's hopes and say no.

It's also emotionally draining to try to confront unconscious bias. You have to tediously step through each link of your decision to say no and make sure that it's consistent with how you treat other people. It's important to do, but it does take some mental effort.

And at a certain point, when you've rejected 5, 7, 10 candidates for the role, it starts to feel hopeless. Are we ever going to find someone to fill the role? And yet you can't let that hopelessness bleed into the interview, so you have to take 5 minutes before the interview to get into "pep mode" so you don't let the interviewee realize how bleak you feel about their prospects of passing, and then to make sure you don't your hopelessness seep into how you review the candidate.

It really is emotionally draining. Especially if you're doing it once or twice a week, because there isn't enough time to forget about your last experience.

[PragmaticPulp]

> It's not like you know the candidate.

You don't have to know someone to have empathy for them.

Rejection can be tough for people. Especially those who get excited about the job.

[MikeTheGreat]

I imagine this differs from person to person, and that some people would find rejecting people (especially person after person) to be draining.

You're trying to hire because you want to find someone to help you and you're hoping this next person will be the one to be that help. The person looking for a job obviously wants to find a job that will work well for them, and especially during this pandemic it's entirely possible that the stakes are higher for them than normal (do they currently have a job? Are they moving out of fear of their job going away? etc).

I think that it's entirely possible that someone would find it stressful to reject a stream of applicants - repeatedly telling a series of people, to their faces, knowing that they're people and not just faceless applicants, that it's not going to work out might very well be stressful to some people.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I think that's just the key reason why interviewing isn't for everyone. It's hard for me to emotionally step back from a candidate without zoning out entirely and delivering a bad interview experience.