Why failing to send rejection letters hurts your recruitment process

on

We all know of recruiters and companies who don’t send explicit refusals to candidates they choose not to proceed with, and opt to just “ghost” them, sharing no update at all. This behaviour can be explained by:

  • avoidance of “negativity”, trying to not be the bearer of what is perceived as bad news
  • an unstructured recruitment process and therefore lack of relevant insight to justify the decline
  • fear of approaching engineering managers and other decision-makers for clarification
  • low-effort approach and “there’s more fish in the sea” mindset

While explanatory, these reasons do not justify the behaviour, for it is a costly miss-competence. By failing to deliver process updates to engaged candidates, especially explicit refusals for applicants interested in you as an employer, you are inflicting uncertainty on the candidate, disrespecting their effort investment, and ultimately hurting your own employer brand and company reputation. Here, something is definitely better than nothing. Why?

  • The lack of clarity is simply unpleasant for the candidate, even more so if they have other offers or options on hand and have yours prioritised. Consider their perspective — you are looking forward to something, and get nothing. It just does not feel nice, in fact it feels worse than rejection
  • Uncertainty leaves the candidate frustrated. They may be significantly less eager to engage with you (or anything associated with you) in the future, even if the offer itself is of interest to them, or a major step-up
  • Bad word of mouth is more likely to spread than good word of mouth. Delivering an unpleasant experience to one of your candidates is certain to impact not only their perception of you, but potentially also that of their friends, not to mention that many platforms offer candidates space to review employers they engage with (scaling the impact on you as a company even further)
  • By not providing accompanying feedback to your declines, you are potentially missing out on reflecting about what indicates a poor fit, as opposed to what makes a strong match
  • The lack of specific, substantiated feedback can hinder the candidate’s ability to reflect on their weaknesses and identify growth areas. While this doesn’t hurt you directly in the short term, in the long run it may, as you are not planting the seeds for expertise or knowledge sought by you to develop

These factors impact the extent to which candidates perceive you as a professional, thoughtful, and legitimately compelling employer. Like it or not, a negatively perceived finale of the process is sure to leave a lingering sour impression of you with the candidate. Even a bit of effort can help avoid this, as well as strengthen your employer brand, build trust, and foster a better hiring culture. Just let your candidates know they’ve been declined. Better yet, tell them why. The likelihood this will be perceived more negatively than outright ghosting, rounds down to 0.


   This article was a collaborative effort by our technical recruiters: 

Comments

Post a Comment