Why Providing Feedback to Rejected Candidates Improves Your Employer Brand
You post a job opening in your company and have to screen through hundreds of resumes, assess the skills of shortlisted candidates, conduct interviews, and finally hire the ultimate talent to join you. This is a long process for you as a recruiter and also for the candidates who apply.
Alongside the process of choosing the right candidate for the job, you shouldn’t ignore the applicants who couldn’t clear the rounds but still went through all the stages. It is a company’s responsibility to deliver constructive feedback to candidates who weren’t fit for the role.
When talking about feedback, it shouldn’t just be the generic “We are moving ahead with someone else!” spiel, as it would deteriorate candidate experience and your employer brand. The feedback must be genuine and detailed, with things that went wrong, guiding the applicant to work on it for future endeavors.
For numerous reasons, constructive candidate feedback has been ignored by recruitment teams of many companies for a long time. Due to this, applicants feel like they are ghosted and rejected without proper reasoning. It doesn’t just hamper their experience but will also turn out to be a negative word-of-mouth situation for your brand.
So, to help you understand the perks of it, this article discusses how providing feedback to rejected candidates can improve your employer brand.
3 Reasons Why You Should Provide Feedback to Your Rejected Candidates
The key understanding expected of a recruiter is the disappointment candidates experience upon being rejected for a position. When not handled with empathy and professionalism, the employer brand will be at stake.
Applicants who receive constructive and helpful feedback often appreciate the company, even after being rejected. Moreover, a lot of candidates today demand feedback for interviews, assessments, and other such rounds, seeking closure.
To help you better understand this, here are 3 reasons why you should always provide feedback to your candidates:
1. Professional Courtesy
It is a company’s professional courtesy to provide rejected candidates with genuine feedback, as they invested their time, energy, and effort in the role. Even if they didn’t qualify for the recruitment stages, your feedback can help their careers and lives in many ways. For instance, you can guide them on areas they can improve or the skills they can learn before they apply for a similar role with other companies.
Beyond just simple words and phrases, you can also conduct feedback interviews with rejected candidates and let them know what went wrong. Upon adhering to this professional courtesy, you will also be enhancing the overall candidate experience.
2. Improves Employer Brand
The whole point of encouraging your recruitment team to deliver candidate feedback after rejection is to maintain and improve your employer brand. In the era of social media and technology, words do spread fast. And candidates are now inclined to share their recruitment experiences online on platforms like LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Reddit, Google, etc.
So, if you ignore your rejected candidates or provide them no feedback, they might share their bad experience online, which will directly hamper your brand reputation. On the other hand, addressing the rejected candidates with proper & genuine feedback might not ensure a positive review, but ensures there won’t be a negative word across the internet about your company and recruitment policies.
3. Entice Job Seekers to Re-Apply in the Future
As a good employer, you wouldn’t like to lose out on skilled candidates who didn’t cut minor flaws in their current resume or assessment report. You would like for them to upskill and build their abilities to a point where they can be a productive asset for your company in the future. It would happen only if you provide your rejected candidates with constructive performance feedback.
This will foster a good relationship with the candidates, leaving the scope for them to return and reapply for the position within a specified timeline. For instance, if an almost-perfect candidate is lacking just one skill to be a perfect fit for the role, you can guide him/her to acquire it in the next couple of months and reapply for the position. When you do this, you are reflecting the type of work culture you follow, which will also impact your brand impression.
Best Practices You Can Adopt for Giving Feedback to Unsuccessful Applicants
Here are some of the best practices or tips that you can adopt for giving feedback to candidates who were rejected in the interview process:
1. Give Personalized & Timely Feedback
Your recruitment team must be trained to respond swiftly to address candidates’ rejection. Ghosting the rejected candidates is not just rude and unprofessional but also unethical! Therefore, as soon as a candidate is rejected, he/she must be informed by the recruitment team. Alongside that, the feedback must also be personalized for every rejected candidate.
For instance, you can add the name of the applicant and a few elements from the individual’s interview or assessments. This way, the candidate would know that your company was serious about skill assessment and other evaluation parameters that would justify the rejection. Leave suggestions on how the candidate can improve and grow in his/her career.
2. Ensure Your Sincerity is Reflected in Messaging
You need to be extremely careful while drafting the feedback email for your unsuccessful candidates. The rejection response must be genuine, backed with actionable or practical advice. Make sure you are sincere with the feedback messaging, showcasing clearly that your intent is to help the candidates grow in their respective careers.
A standard template-based message doesn’t convey the emotions or showcase the sincerity you mean towards the rejected candidates. Therefore, make sure you specify the reason why you decided to move forward with other candidates, and praise them for the time and effort they have invested in the role.
3. Praise Their Strong Traits
When giving feedback to rejected candidates, don’t just talk about the areas they need to work on. Instead, start off by praising their strengths and what impressed the recruitment evaluator to proceed with their candidature. Motivate them to continue doing their best in those areas, followed by advice on what new skills they could learn or improve.
Apart from strengths, you can also praise the unsuccessful candidates for their achievements and relevant past experiences, which will eventually lead to a better candidate experience. It will help them feel assured that their candidature has been rejected only after a thorough evaluation, ensuring positive acceptance.
Nurture Your Employer Brand and Candidate Engagement with Ducknowl!
If you haven’t yet utilized the idea of giving personalized feedback to rejected candidates, now is the time to ensure your recruitment team makes it a habit. Train and guide your hiring managers to use interview feedback templates for crafting sincere emails for informing candidates about their rejection for the role, followed by skill enhancement suggestions or advice.
At Ducknowl, we make sure your overall hiring process evolves to be smarter and more sophisticated through our comprehensive suite of recruitment tools. Apart from resume screening, skill assessments, and one-way interview tools, we also have candidate engagement solutions that can help you keep candidates updated about every step of the interview process.
As a part of it, we offer our Video Text Message tool with capabilities of making recruitment more personal and user-friendly. You can use it to customize a video feedback message for your rejected candidates, which will empathize better than a robotic text email. Moreover, your candidates will feel special and will carry a positive reputation for your brand.
Request a demo today to know more about our candidate engagement tool!
