As an employer, when a candidate applies for a job position for your company, they may spend quite some time tailoring their application process to fit your company. Ensuring their CV is specific to your job role, a cover letter specialised to the job description you’ve provided and about your company, and all of this requires research of the company they are applying to work with beforehand. They may view your social media pages (Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter), read reviews about your company and your services and look into the products you have on offer too, they may even do financial research on your company.

A candidate may not just be a potential employee, they could also become a customer for your company. They may tell their friends and family that they’re applying for a job within your company or have secured an interview with yourselves. Their friends may look you up on social media, check your products and they too may become a customer.

The ball is in the candidate’s court in terms of job hunting. Good candidates can secure multiple interviews and with the rise in discussing about work life on social media (particularly on Facebook and LinkedIn), it can cause a ‘grass is greener’ effect if they see somebody else’s company is treating them so much better than how they feel in their own job. It may spur them to move on and begin the hunt for a new opportunity.

It’s vital that the interviewer aims to provide feedback within a reasonable time frame. Whilst you are not expected to be able to provide feedback instantly or even the very next day as candidates understand you will need to evaluate all candidate interviews and are understandably busy processing that. Providing a time frame for when you can get back to the candidate with an answer or feedback forms a respected relationship between yourselves and shows good manners and is absolutely the right thing to do. In turn this creates a good reputation towards the company image and yourself. The employer should aim to manage the expectations of the candidate and create a positive brand for their company so that the candidate leaves with a good impression towards the company even if not successful and if their friends ask how they did in the future, it won’t be met with a negative response of “oh – they never got back to me”. It really will leave a long lasting bad impression if this was the case.

Most people have to look for alternative employment at some stage in their life, wouldn’t it be great if the time spent carefully tailoring and researching was acknowledged with brief honest feedback rather than silence?

Sources:

• http://theundercoverrecruiter.com/provide-interview-feedback/
• http://keepinghrsimple.co.uk/services/recruitment/giving-feedback/
• http://www.changeboard.com/content/3917/the-importance-of-feedback-in-the-recruitment-process/
• http://recadvice.totaljobs.com/how-to-give-rejection-feedback-and-why/
• http://www.intelligentpeople.co.uk/uncategorized/why-its-important-to-give-candidates-feedback-after-an-interview/
• https://corriculo.co.uk/interviewfeedback/