Think back to your early days as a job seeker, when your CV was sparse and your hopes were high, and you were applying for countless entry level jobs. There’s a good chance you will have a story like this, where you got through to a face to face interview, and came away feeling confident and then….

Nothing.  

This experience is by no means rare. I don’t need to direct you towards a survey or a Forbes article for you to know that the art of rejection is lacking in most hiring strategies. Ask almost anyone you work with and they will probably have a story that sounds all too familiar.

From an applicant’s point of view, this is far more demoralizing than flat out being told you haven’t got the job.

When you think about your own experience like this, you would likely admit it made you feel as if the company you put time and effort into impressing, placed no value in you as an applicant. You may have even began to change your view of them as a business, and perhaps even started to feel you had dodged a bullet by not being employed by them.

How Your Silence Affects Your Reputation

According to the feedback from the CareerBuilder Survey 42% of job seekers said they would not apply for a role with the company that did not get back to them, and 22% said they would recommend to others not to either! On the flip side, 44% of respondents to this survey said they would recommend others to apply for roles within a company that gave them a positive candidate experience, and this of course includes courteous and informative rejections.

Already, no doubt, you are beginning to understand why it is as important to deal with your unsuccessful candidates in a respectful manner.

As you can imagine, most job seekers expect to hear back from companies regarding their job application. According to the Career Builder survey, 9% applicants would go as far as to dissuade others from purchasing goods or services provided by a company who did not communicate respectfully with them! Think about how quickly bad news spread and draw your own conclusions on the overall impact of not bothering to contact rejected job seekers.

But I have 100 Applications! I don’t have time to respond to everyone!

Of course, it is not always possible to personally respond to every application. In many start ups and small businesses the recruiter will also be juggling other roles within the company, and as a result those things that seem less vital to the businesses success may fall to the wayside.

However, if you are aware of these constraints, there are protocols you can put in place and technology you can use to help alleviate the pressure of communicating with all your applicants, keeping your businesses reputation intact.

If you are struggling to keep all your applicants in line, an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) will help keep you on top of things. It can also make preliminary communication with applicants much easier – early on in the selection process applicants do not necessarily expect individual treatment, but rather, they want reassurance that they have applied correctly as well as some sort of time frame within to expect things to progress to the next step.

Using ATS email templates; you can cue up automated emails containing the appropriate information, to send to applicants. Which email you send them will depend on whether they have been selected to move on to the next stage, or not managed to get through.

It can also be a nice gesture to have an automated email sent in response to each application, perhaps detailing the time frame in which they can expect to hear back. This lets you acknowledge the individual applicant as someone whose time is important to them, and also prevents uncertainty and ensuing loss of interest by applicants.

Let them Down Easy

Of course, the idea of contacting people simply to reject them is not a pleasant one, but if done well it will help boost your company’s reputation as one that respects its employees and non-employees alike. Here are a few pointers on how to successfully inform an unsuccessful candidate and provide them with valuable feedback.

• Keep it positive – focus on what they did well, and sandwich suggestions for improvement in between positive comments
• Keep it brief – short and sweet will minimise the risk of wading into the murky waters of justifying your decision
• Make general statements – ‘we were overwhelmed with suitable candidates and sadly we could not hire everyone’
• Avoid making explanations involving gender or age etc – this could land you in hot water, which, when you’re making an effort to be considerate is probably the last thing you want to happen!

This article was kindly supplied by Haystack Jobs.