The most common complaint from job seekers is that they never hear anything after their interview – particularly if they have had conversations directly with a hiring manager or business owner. 

Yet getting back to unsuccessful candidates is a common courtesy that many employers and business owners don’t seem to consider necessary anymore. 

Sure, it’s easy to call a candidate, tell them how impressed you were with them at interview and to offer them a job with your organisation. 

On the other hand, it’s not so nice to have to call a candidate, thank them for their time, and then let them down gently and tell them that they have been unsuccessful. But this is still something you must do if nothing else to maintain a professional reputation in the market. 

Rejecting candidates is part of the recruitment process. 

As a leader or business owner it is in your best interests, because it demonstrates you are serious and that you care about what you do. After all, the candidate (who at the time was a potential employee) more than likely took time off work to come to meet with you, and probably did the best they could at interview. So please have the decency to call them and let them down over the phone personally. The candidate will respect you for it and remember that you called them back. 

It is also very much in the candidate’s interest to hear why they didn’t get the job. 

Your feedback will help them to brush up on those areas that may have let them down and allow them to do a better job next time. It will also help them to maintain their self-esteem, knowing they were unsuccessful because a better candidate won on the day, rather than hearing nothing and assuming it was because their interview went so badly that it didn’t warrant a follow-up. 

Please don’t let days (or weeks) go by without providing your candidate with feedback. 

Candidates aren’t mind readers. They genuinely want to be kept in the loop. Some candidates might think that “no news is good news”, while others might think that “silence can only mean one thing”. Don’t keep candidates in a state of uncertainty. You also don’t want them making the wrong assumption. 

Provide them with feedback – whether positive or constructive – regardless of the outcome of their interview. They will be grateful either way and more importantly they will respect your level of professionalism. 

Never reject a candidate you have interviewed via email. 

Please don’t just send a standard email (or text message!) letting them know your decision not to proceed. An email explaining you won’t be meeting them based on an application is one thing. But an email after you have met them in person is something else entirely. 

Call them personally and provide them with any feedback you can. Giving constructive feedback is about more than just telling the candidate what they did wrong. They probably already know that and would benefit more from hearing what they did right as well. 

Here are some tips for when you call: 

• Firstly, ask them if they want feedback. Nine times out of ten they will, but if they don’t, don’t force it on them.
  
• Be honest. Don’t just give them positive feedback because you feel sorry for them not getting the job. Tell them how they could improve for next time. 
  
• Be balanced. Offer a mixture of praise and criticism, as too much criticism creates defensiveness and too much praise sounds insincere. 
  
• Criticise the behaviour, not the person. By inferring others have made similar mistakes, you can keep it general rather than criticising them personally. 
  
• By the same token, don’t avoid the issue. Tell them what they did wrong, in your opinion, and what they can do to get it right next time. 

For those like me who can remember the ‘90’s, we couldn’t send out automated rejection emails. We had to pick up the phone and speak to every candidate who wasn’t successful. Fortunately, at the time there were no social media platforms for ‘irate’ candidates to share their frustrations and blacklist your organisation with everyone they knew. 

Leaving a candidate in the dark or simply being too scared to let a candidate down is pretty rude when you think about it. After going to all the trouble of preparing an application and then sweating through the interview process, often taking time away from their current job to do so, the candidate then hears nothing more for weeks on end, until finally they are forced to conclude that they didn’t get the job. 

There are two main reasons why this happens: 

• Priorities: If a candidate is no longer in the running for a job, calling them back is not as important to a manager or business owner as meeting their other deadlines. 
  
• Procrastination: Being the bearer of bad news is not a pleasant task for anyone and a manager or business owner may just be putting it off until they have a spare moment. Unfortunately, that spare moment often never comes. 

If you’re still not sold on the idea of rejecting a candidate professionally and providing them with feedback, remember this: 

A satisfied candidate might tell a friend about their positive experience (even if they weren’t successful in getting the job). But a disgruntled candidate will tell at least 10 friends how appalled they were with their experience. And there’s no stopping the damage they could bring to your (and your company’s) reputation when they begin their social media tirade. 

Today, with a push of a button, if you’ve created a negative candidate experience (simply by not letting a candidate know they were unsuccessful), the world will know about it straight away and your employer brand could be tarnished.

With this in mind, you might want to implement more quality checks and protocol around the candidate experience – especially when it comes to candidate rejection. 

If you don’t provide feedback to your candidates and just hope that by not hearing from you, they will assume they have been unsuccessful, you and your organisation will start to develop a bad reputation in the industry. 

Hellomonday provides coaching and support to business owners and leaders at all levels; prioritising development initiatives that result in long-term sustained learning and change; and reinforcing habits through curated learning and impactful coaching.