Have been waiting up? Carry on!

You were called for an interview. The HR executive assured you of communicating your evaluation within a week, but it has been a month since then. Should you follow up yourself? Would you sound desperate?

Wait! Why have not “they” followed up as promised?

This trend is often discerned in recruitment today and most of you must have gone through this several times. By follow-up here, I connote recruiters’ post interview follow through with the candidates to which even the top employers are often impervious. 

I am not sure how frequently this oblivion goes on everywhere else, but at least in Pakistan we do not frequently come across anything closer to employer follow up. Unfortunately, if not all, a healthy percentage of the recruiters fall into “hey I am the recruiter who does not ever follow up” category!

The question is, are we not habitual of always being followed up on how we did on evaluations or tests? Whenever we apply for a loan, the representatives follow up if we qualify or fail in availing the facility; similarly after every medical test, we expect our physician to follow up on our health. The examples may sound trivial but the same goes for interview follow-ups.

When I set out to probe into “no follow up” practice, I received interesting responses from a couple of HR and recruitment personnel: feast your eyes!

“Staff’s day is jammed packed. Follow up becomes an added responsibility”.

“It would not be economically wise to follow up especially on as many as 50 candidates who had been interviewed in a single time. It is one heck of a task!

             “Interview follow up should not be a big deal. It is just a simple courtesy which you receive, and if not, you find it rude”.

             “It always makes me sad to hear this. The candidates are obviously appalled by this silence especially when they have gone through several rounds of interviews. It leaves them frustrated and the recruiters earn a bad name at the same time! This is the reason we try our best to follow through!”

             “We do not want politeness to become an added expense. However, it does not in any case reflect we are unprofessional”!

Candidates expect to see the outcome of their efforts and most of them do not mind if they are politely told, “We are sorry, you lacked XYZ”. All that matters is to let them know if they are hired or excused for proceeding further. Recruiters make this mistake of thinking that candidates do not note this simple ignorance, when in reality, they do. In their minds, they can easily start blacklisting the recruiters who do not succeed in fulfilling this simple professional curtsey.

A pinch of humble advice to the Recruiters!

Candidates look up to honesty, even if they did not do very well. If the candidates' skills do not match with the desired position, tell them. If they do not turn out to be compatible, communicate their weaknesses for the position applied for, they might start working on the shortcomings right away. If contacting on phone sounds tiresome, you can always send a modest email. (For further convenience, you could have sent a pigeon with a post it note tied around its neck, but this medium is obsolete, pity!). Use any mean, it should fulfill the purpose of following up.

And for the candidates, the best way to deal with this silence is to keep looking for other opportunities without dwelling on the non-response attitude. Know that there might have been other reasons for which the employers didn’t contact you back besides the reason of non-compatibility.

Here I raise a cup (*of coffee) to the hope that next time, a recruiter will make me write on how well they followed up and failed to earn a name in my “non professional recruiters” black list.