Turning down job-applicants - the benefit of doing better than average.

Have you ever applied for a job and did not get it? Then welcome to the club, because I certainly did. In the refusals I received during my career, I never had the feeling, that any human being really had made an effort to turn my application down in a proper way.

I was more convinced, that someone had pushed a button in an anonymous HR-system somewhere and sent me and 500 other applicants for the job the exact same prefabricated text-block message, which explained in a very stiff and unpersonal way, that the 500 other poor souls and I unfortunately were not the "chosen one".

This experience is shared by thousands of jobapplicants worldwide every single day. The mechanism described above is from a company perspective also understandable, as many companies have loads and loads of applications and hence use software to help them deal with the vast amount of data and information that needs to be processed.

But is this approach really sustainable in times where qualified applicants are lacking at all ends and the few who are there have free choice in between several job-offerings?

I do not believe so, and have hence changed the way I try to treat applicants for jobs I have to offer:

No interview - but a promise of transparency

Job applicants do rarely know, how strong or big the competition is concerning a certain job offering. So the least I can do is being transparent: I can share the number of applications I have received, I can inform about some of the key criteria which was relevant for being invited for an interview and I can even tell how many made it to the job-interviews, when sending a "no" to the majority of applicants.

Seen from someone applying and hoping for a job it is less frustrating to get a "no", if e.g. the competition was really high, or -if the competition was not high- it is nice to know, that there was an ability or experience that weighed strong when electing candidates for interviews, which the applicant in question did not have.

It avoids frustration and the feeling of being a failure, as it gives (on a very low-practical level) an answer to the question, why the candidate did not proceed to the interviews. Also, we must not forget, that most candidates have invested time to make and send a written application - the least we can do is to give a little bit of effort back to them and keep them encouraged to carry on to look for their dream job.

Yes, you get the job-interview, but someone else makes the race

In the case I invite candidates for a job interview, they all get the promise to receive honest and open feedback on

• their written application and
• on the performed interview

if they wish.

The reason is the same as above: It is frustrating to receive a "no" when you felt you were so close to getting the job. What often lacks is some feedback, which helps to identify WHY you did not get the job.

There might by loads of reasons: You might have disqualified yourself because you did not prepare properly for a meeting, an interviewer might have been ennerved by you looking at your watch every 2 minutes, your pitch for a salary might have been miles away of what the company would envisage to offer etc...

The list of potential reasons is endless, but what is the chance that you as an applicant will do better next time, if you do not get the positive and negative feedback loop? I would say close to zero. And again, as people make an effort to apply and show up for an interview, it is not too much to ask to spend some time for giving personal feedback.

Why should we invest a bit of time in candidates we have declined?

What is the benefit of this you might ask? Well, if it is not enough for you to feel, that you have done a good deed, then I can reassure you, that there are other measureable benefits to it:

Since I have changed my way of recruiting, even candidates I had declined started to follow me and pitch potential new candidates for new open positions I could offer. For each position I have posted in recent years, a couple of highly qualified candidates came after direct reference from declined candidates - simply because they had received a fair treatment and an acknowledgement of their efforts when they applied for a job at an earlier occasion.

Moreover, you can use these feedback sessions to actively identify shortcomings of the company in the recruiting-process or about your own deficiencies during the interview, which you can improve for your next interviews.

So there are plenty of good reasons to do better than average...

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Your feedback and thoughts are - as always - welcome.