Power Plumbing

Maretta Smith

Candidate Experience Advocate

Maretta Smith, MBA, PHR, is a Human Resources Manager based in Houston, Texas, with more than 15 years of HR experience across multi-family, education, the private sector and now construction. She is a wife and mother to Leah and London and has spent her career building hiring and onboarding programs that treat candidates like people.

He came to the interview in his work boots.

He had driven straight from a jobsite, taken an unpaid half day and had not told his employer he was interviewing, because if this did not work out, he could not afford to lose the job he had. Twenty minutes in, it hit me that he was evaluating us as carefully as we were evaluating him. He had questions about our trucks, our schedule and whether his supervisor would pick up the phone at six in the morning. He was deciding whether to trust us with his living.

In HR, we spend enormous energy on one question: is this candidate right for our company? We spend far less on the question across the table. Are we right for them?

Every posting, phone call, interview and delay tells them something about who we are. Candidate experience is not a recruiting function. It is the only part of our culture they can see before they say yes.

Recruiting turns transactional fast. On our side, it is a pipeline. On the candidate’s side, it is one appointment that could change everything, a job paying a few dollars an hour more and that difference is the difference in their household.

“In our HR department, no candidate goes more than five business days without hearing from a human being, even when the update is that we have none yet.”

In the trades, add what we do not always see. He applied from his phone during lunch, sitting in his truck. He cannot take our two o’clock call because he is under a slab. He may have three offers by Friday. If our process assumes he can hop on a video call midday, we will not lose him to a better company, we will lose him to a faster one.

Most of what makes a candidate feel respected is not complicated. Be ready. Start on time. Tell them what happens next. Listen to the answer. And be honest about the hard parts: the on-call rotation, the drive time, what the pay actually is. Overselling a role feels generous in the interview and gets expensive at day ninety. People forget our questions. They remember how we made them feel.

Silence Is a Message, Too

Candidates should always know where they stand and what comes next. If a decision is taking longer than expected, say so. If we are not moving forward, close the loop, kindly, but close it. Silence does not read as “we are busy.” It reads as “you did not matter.”

The numbers are not flattering. In Greenhouse’s 2024 State of Job-Hunting report, 61 percent of job seekers said they had been ghosted after an interview, up nine points in eight months. Asked what would most improve hiring, they did not say better pay or a faster process. They said stronger communication from recruiters.

When a candidate gets left hanging, it is rarely because someone did not care. It is because nobody owned the follow-up. Hiring managers get pulled onto jobs. Approvals sit on someone’s desk. Candidates understand that. What they cannot forgive is not knowing. So the fix cannot be “communicate better.” That is a wish. It has to be a standard somebody owns.

In our HR department, no candidate goes more than five business days without hearing from a human being, even when the update is that we have none yet.

Three saved email templates handle most of it. A ninety-second phone call handles the rest. And the silence does not stop mattering once they accept, call them the week before Day One and have the truck, tools, badge and access ready before they walk in. Few things deflate a new hire faster than finding nobody expected them.

In our industry, speed is not just courtesy. A 2026 study commissioned through Plumbing Manufacturers International projects a shortage of roughly 550,000 plumbing workers by 2027. We are not choosing among candidates. We are competing for them. A five-day wait on an approval is a hire we lost.

Bringing Humanity Back to Hiring

Technology will keep making recruiting faster and I am not against any of it. But speed was never the point. Speed is what gets us to the conversation. The conversation is the job. Behind every application is somebody hoping for a yes in a world full of nos. We will not hire most of them. But we can treat each one like a person who knocked on our door.

When people walk away from our process, especially the ones we did not hire, I want them to say one thing. I was treated well.

In an industry this short on people, that is not sentiment. It is strategy. The apprentice we turn down this year is the foreman we will want in five and he will remember how this went. But even if that were not true, it would still be the right way to treat people.