Hi Rajesh, thanks for starting this topic. Its a very useful one.

My take: I feel this is one of the most difficult messages that we have to deliver in our roles. Many of the people I know of, actually avoid doing it altogether. Well it has a flip side to it when you do it that way, because the rejected candidate actually carries back with him/her a negative image of the company. We forget many times that we are the face of the organization to the public (in this context the candidate). The messaging has to be crisp, should essentially cover the truth about the rejection. For example, if the reason for rejection is the candidate's inability to reach upto the expectations of the interviewing panel, I personally feel it should be conveyed to him/her. It gives him an opportunity to him/her to improve in that area. By altogether avoiding him, we only make him/her carry a negativity about the organization which is not worth it considering the humongous initiatives taken by the branding teams (many times its we ourselves in recruitment who do it).

I have seen many candidates who carry a respect for the organization when communicated the truth about the reason for rejection and do come back after the gestation period of 6 months after which he/she becomes eligible to re-apply. That speaks about a good recruiting experience regardless of the outcome. In my last stint where I was managing recruiters under me, I had the concept of sending individual regret mails to the rejected candidates as an evaluation parameter for the recruiters. It was not easy to begin with, but once they got used to the idea and started doing it, they did realize the value they were adding to the excellent recruiting experience which the candidates admitted on many occasions.

I feel to implement such initiatives as part of the recruiting process, it takes a lot of commitment to see it thru despite the initial resistance from recruiters. I am open to discuss if anybody disagrees partially or fully with my take.

Cheers !!!

That was very useful Harish. As you said people carry negative image abt the company, even sometimes candidates think that they are incapable of clearing the interview when they have told that they have got rejected. Many people doesn't take it positively and they put blame on the company. So what i normally do is, i used to tell the candidate that he is kept on hold and we will let you know once the client comes back. Is this method correct, expecting your suggestion.

Regards,

Rajesh

Interesting topic......

According to me,when have rejected any one,please either mail them or call them as they will be too curious to know the result.

Tell them y u rejected as it will help them to know their weak point.but in a polite way............

Hi Rajesh!

You have choosen a very important and useful topic.

Generally what I do is when a candidate is rejected, i don't just directly tell that he is a rejected candidate, because what i feel is may be after few months he is again useful for me in my recruitments.

I just tell that " the feedback from my headquarter is pending and due to some problem in the particular project the recruitment process has been kept on hold. I would definitely like to be in touch with you for the furthur developements".

And this way I never let my candidate go, though he is a technically rejected.
Hope I'm doing correct. Please comment if you disagree with me.

cheers !!!

Hi Kalpana,

Thanks for your response. Yes in a consultants background we may be right, but one thing is may be we are keeping the candidate's hope's still by not telling him the truth. May be still he will be thinking about the company where he got rejected, but when we say he is rejected there is a chance of losing him. So i'm confused on this. Hope we get a solution.

Regards,

Rajesh