The article below popped up on Twitter last week and inspired me to read it, as it strongly echoes my own sentiments on this particular subject.
It's one of the things that people hate most about recruiters - the fact that they just don't hear back from us after submitting their applications. To be fair, it's not possible to send a personally drafted response to every single application. Unless you're dealing with a very very small pool of jobseekers. Like, tiny. Several hundred every day makes it impossible and lets face it, means we'd be drafting placebos at best. Written by a junior admin assistant as no business can afford to pay a recruiter to manage a project of that size. Thus making it insincere to say the least.
However, there is simply no excuse for bad manners and in this day and age, with the modern ATS available to recruiters, there should be no reason at all why any candidate is left hanging over the fate/status of their application. None. A simple tick of a box can ensure a professional communication is issued forth and all parties know where they stand.
And it can also be a great branding opportunity if done in the right way. A chance to showcase your brand and promote your business by carefully phasing your communications so that even the negative gets a positive response from jobseekers. I can provide plenty of examples of responses from jobseekers after receiving a rejection email from PIE, all of them positive about our tone of rejection. No one wants to be rejected. The least a recruiter can do is be nice about it!
Recruitment communication is part of employer branding. However too often recruiters disregard this - many times under the guise of haste. In every recruitment there comes the phase when you have to communicate will the candidate move to the next rounds or is the process over.
Read the original article here