The sound of silence
Imagine spending hours completing a job application, researching the organisation, carrying out a lengthy pre-interview questionnaire, preparing for interview, travelling to and attending the interview.
Consider, after all that effort, commitment, anxiety, and time, how agonising the wait must be to find out if you were successful or not.
And then reflect on what it is like for a job applicant to realise, only after several days or even weeks, that the recruiter isn’t going to feed back the outcome of the interview.
Sadly, the sound of silence is the reality for many job applicants in the UK today. While organisations have been busy automating recruitment processes to save time and money, many have forgotten about the candidate experience. For many candidates, applying for a job has become a soulless and soul-destroying activity, with very little human interaction during the process.
Part of the issue is that the automation that has made the process more convenient for the recruiter, has also enabled candidates to apply for roles from their phones or laptops. Many organisations have seen sharp increases in numbers of applicants, so may feel that acknowledging applications or giving feedback to unsuccessful candidates is an admin task too far.
But closing the application process is good manners. It shows that the organisation values the time the candidate has spent, and only costs the time to fill in an e-mail address.
If you don’t have time to run a recruitment process that engages with candidates throughout, then perhaps this is a task you should consider outsourcing.
And if you already outsource, perhaps it is time to check what kind of service your candidates can expect to receive.
Tagged as: Better HR, Recruitment
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