Disappointments of Our Age

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Why is it that so few recruiting organisations (or their agents) find it so hard to provide applicants with more specific feedback on why they are unsuccessful with their job applications?

Net results:

  • Unsuccessful applicants are often at a loss to know what they are missing on their CV, how they might present themselves better next time and how to modify their application criteria to target more suitable jobs in the future - it becomes an inefficient and wasteful guessing game from which the candidate learns very little.

  • The unsuccessful candidate goes away from the rejection experience having negative thoughts about the employing organisation which they relay to others (maybe many others). Those applicants and the people they tell about their experience may be current and future customers of the employer who may choose to subsequently put their business elsewhere.

  • The lack of feedback from the employer (or their agents) might cause unsuccessful applicants to regard the employer's claims to be a "responsible, values driven, employer of choice" as speaking with a forked tongue! Reputational damage tends to spread like wildfire.

Lame Justifications:

  • Its too expensive and cumbersome to provide detailed feedback (an historic argument which technology advances have made largely redundant)

  • We do give some feedback i.e. "sorry you were unsuccessful, there where better qualified candidates" - much too general to be of any value to the unsuccessful candidate!

  • Its not our job to do this; we expect our recruitment or search agent to do this (but they rarely ever do)!

Solutions for the Age:

Come on employers you can do much better than this to the benefit of potential job candidates and your own reputation. If you can afford to deploy technology (Machine Learning/AI etc) to sift CV's and application forms, you can also afford to ask the same technology to generate more specific feedback reports to unsuccessful candidates from which they can learn (and go away talking positively about you).

Thoughts, reactions and/or disagreements about this are very welcome.