Why Recruiters might not respond

Trying to answer the question on why recruiters might not respond back.

I have been a Hiring Manager for 14 years, had a entrepreneurial journey in Recruitment Industry for almost 2 years and now a Job Seeker for a month, moving back to the Corporate Life. So taking a liberty to attempt answering this question.

To start with, I do not advocate the lack of an update from a #recruiter however trying to put the facts to understand the challenging life of #recruiters.

• KPIs set by the organization – All recruiters have to adhere to #kpis that include number of resume submissions. Especially those coming from non-boutique firms have extremely high number of resumes sourcing requirements. This doesn’t leave them time to respond back to rejected candidatures. If such organizations keep reserved time for candidate updates, it should help.
• Multiple Recruitment Platforms and lack of a consolidated applicant tracking system – Candidates move to different platforms to search for an opportunity and the recruiter needs to do the same to cover these candidates. In addition there are resumes flowing through emails, social media platforms, WhatsApp messages, referrals etc.. Believe me its not easy to cover all applications unless they all feed into a common system from which the updates can be delivered. There are systems but not all platforms can be covered.
• Dependency on Hiring Managers – Recruiters cannot take decisions by themselves and have to depend on hiring managers for decisions. Even the recruiters that are disciplined enough to give updates to their candidates fail here incase they do not have updates from the decision makers. Such recruiters might once in a while send you a note that they are still waiting for updates and soon such list grows and they might not be able to handle.

What we as Candidates can do to help ..?

• Avoid applying to jobs by just looking at the job titles. Get into the details and if you think that your profile matches at least 60% with the Job description, feel free to apply.
• Avoid interview no-shows or schedule changes. Every time change from a candidate’s side requires at least 30 minutes of a recruiter’s time since they now need to go back to the Interview Panel get their slots, confirm back with you etc. An recruiter’s organization can use a scheduling tool to help with this back and forth though.
• The other tips of not dropping offer etc is out of the scope of this article..