The Applicants as Products
I’ve been doing some informal internet research on job applicants and their experiences with recruiters and HR departments. The complaints were varied and many, but one common theme just kept having its drum beat; “I never got a call back,” “I never got a call back,” and just to spice things up, “I never got a call back.”
I’m well aware that it’s impractical to call back each and every applicant as they may number in the thousands. You’d spend all of your time on the phone with them and have no time to prepare your candidate you’ve chosen for the client. But, there’s an important underlying theme to these complaints.
In a basic economic model, the client is the customer and the applicants are the product. Since the money comes from the client, we tend to favor them with our best customer service skills. Giving a high level of service to the applicants (product), well, only so far as the few chosen ones we are putting up for the job. The rest are too often collateral damage.
But, should they be?
There’s a rule in business that for every good experience a customer has they will tell one person, but for every bad experience they will tell seven. If that’s true, all of the applicants whom entrust us with their résumé who we don’t call back are telling seven friends to not trust recruiters. That’s a problem, especially if we get a job order that matches that person’s skills, but they no longer want to deal with us.
We shouldn’t ignore these people. No, we can’t call each of them back with a personal explanation of why we didn’t choose to pass them along to our client. But we should send some correspondence, if even just an Email, to let them know their status. It may add some extra work to our already hectic weeks, but it will ensure that we don’t lose potential, future candidates.