Think back to your early days as a job seeker, when your CV was sparse and your hopes were high, and you were applying for countless entry level jobs. There’s a good chance you will have a story like this, where you got through to a face to face interview, and came away feeling confident and then….

Nothing.  

This experience is by no means rare. I don’t need to direct you towards a survey or a Forbes article for you to know that the art of rejection is lacking in most hiring strategies. Ask almost anyone you work with and they will probably have a story that sounds all too familiar.

From an applicant’s point of view, this is far more demoralizing than flat out being told you haven’t got the job.

When you think about your own experience like this, you would likely admit it made you feel as if the company you put time and effort into impressing, placed no value in you as an applicant. You may have even began to change your view of them as a business, and perhaps even started to feel you had dodged a bullet by not being employed by them.

How Your Silence Affects Your Reputation

According to the feedback from the CareerBuilder Survey 42% of job seekers said they would not apply for a role with the company that did not get back to them, and 22% said they would recommend to others not to either! On the flip side, 44% of respondents to this survey said they would recommend others to apply for roles within a company that gave them a positive candidate experience, and this of course includes courteous and informative rejections.

Already, no doubt, you are beginning to understand why it is as important to deal with your unsuccessful candidates in a respectful manner.

As you can imagine, most job seekers expect to hear back from companies regarding their job application. According to the Career Builder survey, 9% applicants would go as far as to dissuade others from purchasing goods or services provided by a company who did not communicate respectfully with them! Think about how quickly bad news spread and draw your own conclusions on the overall impact of not bothering to contact rejected job seekers.

But I have 100 Applications! I don’t have time to respond to everyone!

Of course, it is not always possible to personally respond to every application. In many start ups and small businesses the recruiter will also be juggling other roles within the company, and as a result those things that seem less vital to the businesses success may fall to the wayside.

However, if you are aware of these constraints, there are protocols you can put in place and technology you can use to help alleviate the pressure of communicating with all your applicants, keeping your businesses reputation intact.

If you are struggling to keep all your applicants in line, an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) will help keep you on top of things. It can also make preliminary communication with applicants much easier – early on in the selection process applicants do not necessarily expect individual treatment, but rather, they want reassurance that they have applied correctly as well as some sort of time frame within to expect things to progress to the next step.

Using ATS email templates; you can cue up automated emails containing the appropriate information, to send to applicants. Which email you send them will depend on whether they have been selected to move on to the next stage, or not managed to get through.

It can also be a nice gesture to have an automated email sent in response to each application, perhaps detailing the time frame in which they can expect to hear back. This lets you acknowledge the individual applicant as someone whose time is important to them, and also prevents uncertainty and ensuing loss of interest by applicants.

Let them Down Easy

Of course, the idea of contacting people simply to reject them is not a pleasant one, but if done well it will help boost your company’s reputation as one that respects its employees and non-employees alike. Here are a few pointers on how to successfully inform an unsuccessful candidate and provide them with valuable feedback.

• Keep it positive – focus on what they did well, and sandwich suggestions for improvement in between positive comments
• Keep it brief – short and sweet will minimise the risk of wading into the murky waters of justifying your decision
• Make general statements – ‘we were overwhelmed with suitable candidates and sadly we could not hire everyone’
• Avoid making explanations involving gender or age etc – this could land you in hot water, which, when you’re making an effort to be considerate is probably the last thing you want to happen!

This article was kindly supplied by Haystack Jobs.

In your experience dealing with recruitment, no doubt you will have encountered job hoppers – the applicants who have a long string of employers, all lasting anywhere less than two years. What is your knee-jerk reaction to this? Chances are, you are put off by this display of a lack of commitment, perhaps dismissing the applicant as lacking loyalty, commitment and drive. You may mentally credit them with costing companies money in terms of investment in them as an employee, which would hardly make for an attractive hire choice.

Viewed with Suspicion

Traditionally, job hoppers are viewed with suspicion, or dismissed without a second thought – after all, the last thing any HR Manager wants to do is invest months worth of training into a new employee, only to have them need to be replaced after another 6 months.

This kind of career restlessness could also highlight an inability to ‘stick it out’ when things get tough and any employer knows that the last time you want your employees skipping out is when the proverbial hits the fan.

From this angle, job hoppers appear undesirable and undeserving – the further we delve in, the more we see this. For instance, if there is a wide range of industries involved during their employment history, this could be viewed as indecisiveness on the part of the employee, which, while understandable on occasion, should really be something that most desirable employees have under control. Right?

Well, maybe.

What if these assumptions were skewing your view of what you believe to be ‘a desirable employee’? What if, by skipping over anyone with a ‘fragmented’ resume, you were missing out on the talent, creativity or personality your business would most benefit from.

Times have changed.

Where once people would enter the career ladder as a graduate and climb all the way to the top with that one company, now they tend to have a more ‘snakes and ladders’ approach to career building, helped along by the wavering economy, fluctuating job market and access to mass amounts of information and learning.

The younger generations, entering a far less stable working life than their predecessors, are adapting and adjusting accordingly, because while loyalty is still a highly valued attribute, this does nothing to prevent redundancy or quell someone’s financial needs.

This means that as we move into the future, doubtless we will encounter more and more ‘unreliable’ job hoppers, who in fact have simply been trying to keep their head above water. A New Zealand based survey highlights this shift, with over half of the respondents having been employed in their current job for less than 18 months, and this is reported to be occurring across the board from low wage earners through to those on 250k+ salaries. Clearly, change is in the air.

So what to do?

So how do you ensure you are still making a good hire, when faced with this reality?

Sorry, but there’s no shortcut to getting around this one. The answer, of course, is to take these applicants on a case by case basis. If a flag gets raised over the number of jobs a person has been through in a certain time period, but in all other respects are a desirable candidate; it pays to investigate further.

For example, university students will often go through different jobs at different stages of their degree and have different criteria in terms of job selection i.e. ‘will it fit with my timetable’? This could result in a different job each year of their degree, perhaps even more so if they pick up full time work over the summer break.

Other things to keep in mind include whether someone had to move cities, whether there were several part time roles that overlapped, if they were on contracts for any of this work or any other number of valid reasons for job changes – it pays to ask WHY each job was left, and even to bluntly question them over their changeable history. Listen to their reasoning and question anything you have doubts about.

The Proof is in the Pudding

In case you are still having reservations about changing your approach, perhaps this will dissuade you. Evolv performed a study on over 20,000 employees which showed little to no differentiation between employees who had held many jobs over the past five years and those who had held none.

The study also indicated there was more of a correlation between employee integration i.e. whether new employees were ‘welcomed into the fold’ or not, than to any kind of historic job hopping.

So perhaps instead of worrying about how many jobs your applicant has had over the last however many years, you should just focus more on how they would fit into the company culture and what they can do for you.

This article was kindly supplied by Haystack Jobs.

Every time you recruit, you become a blip on the radar for hundreds if not thousands of job seekers, who all send off their CV in the hope that they will be noticed.

From an HR perspective, this creates a mammoth task, as they are charged with filtering the pool down to the best of the bunch. This process can be time consuming, and it’s tempting to throw your net as wide as possible, leaving applications open for weeks in order to increase your chances of finding the ‘perfect’ catch, but in doing this, you can leave those on the hunt waiting for too long.

Obviously, you cannot shrink your recruiting endeavours into week long projects, but leaving applicants in the dark for undefined amounts of time will result in loss of interest and frustration on the applicant’s part.

Not to mention your ideal candidate is likely a busy person with demands on their time, and treating them like they are just sitting at home waiting for your call will cause you to lose out on your golden opportunity.

Just Keep Talking

So how can we fix this? The key is communication. Much like if you were dealing with long distance clients, once you have engaged with an applicant, you need to keep them informed about when they can expect to hear back from you. This does not have to be time consuming, as Applicant Tracking Systems have been developed to assist with this very thing. An effective and practical method to keep in contact might involve the following contact points:

• Send template acknowledgement emails sent out to each applicant

• An email to all those who get through to first selection process (to tell them they have been shortlisted).

• A phone call to ask some further screening questions might be appropriate – this kind of ‘real world’ contact will reinforce the applicant’s confidence that you will be in touch.

• Sending an email to all those who are not being interviewed would be appropriate, as well as a different email or perhaps a phone call to those who you wish to interview.

• Post-interview, it is vital to send a courteous rejection email to those who were unsuccessful, as it lets you cleanly end contact with the unsuccessful applicant, without opening yourself up to questions or confrontation.

Assuming that you have worked out a time frame prior to implementing this recruitment strategy, you should also provide all applicants with a time frame for when they should expect to hear back from you. You do this to ensure candidates feel like they are in the loop, to show that you value them and appreciate that they are waiting for results.

Don’t leave Applicants in the Dark

A common complaint among job applicants is that the businesses they send their CV’s to remain radio silent and ambiguous, leaving applicants unsure if they’ve even applied to the correct address!

This can also leave applicants with the fear that they have fallen victim to a recruiter simply ‘fishing’ for CV’s to add to their system, which will reflect negatively on your business. According to one study, over three quarters of applicants expect to hear back from a company, regardless of if they have gained the role or not, and almost a third of those would be less likely to use that companies services if they were unhappy with how they were treated in the recruiting process.

No one likes to hear ‘you’re too good for me’

Another reoccurring complaint is that applicants are sick of hearing ‘you’re overqualified for this position’ as a reason for not being hired. This is becoming more relevant as the job market tightens and people are forced to look below what they would be considered qualified for, in order to find work.

Whilst there is some obvious logic to having reservations about hiring someone who on paper looks like they would get bored with the role in a week, it is important to respect and appreciate someone’s desire to ‘downgrade’ (as they may not see it that way) or expand their experience base.

Instead, ensure you ask why they want to pursue something that is so seemingly below them, and if you honestly do not feel they would be satisfied with the role, at least point them in the direction of something more suitable, or give them feedback on how to present themselves for such a role in the future.

We’re all People

Perhaps this is a good time to remind you that behind every CV is a human hoping to be successful in their endeavour to land a job. In between deadlines, quotas and minimum targets it is easy to forget this, but the more you remember, and act accordingly, the more fondly you and your company will be remembered by those who come into contact with it.

This article was kindly supplied by Haystack Jobs.