It is important to recognise the significance of how you handle the rejection of unsuccessful candidates in the interview process. If handled poorly, you may well be doing significant damage to your employer brand in your market place. People will talk and a bad experience will spread like wildfire amongst a peer group.
Feedback should be swift, constructive, sensitive and professionally managed in order to ensure you limit the potential for damage to your business reputation. Nobody likes to be rejected, and a short, concise but well-written letter to the unsuccessful candidates can help to enhance the employee brand and give a very favourable impression of your organisation. We tend to focus a great deal of our attention, and rightly so, on the people we want to hire and can often disregard those who could go on to become the superstars of tomorrow.
It can also be said that we have all interviewed people that perhaps weren't right for our need there and then, but we would have loved to be in a position to hire them. Handling this rejection process professionally can potentially keep a door open for a future hire. Explain clearly the reasons for not making the appointment theirs and then and agree a regular basis of contact moving forward. You never know when you might be in a position to reconsider hiring this person.
Another thing to consider is to stay in touch with good employees who may have moved on. Staff turnover is an inevitable feature of the working world in which we now live. How often have we seen an employee move on to pastures new with the view that the grass is greener on the other side, only to see them back knocking on the door in the months or years to come? Staying in contact with such employees and also handling their original resignation in a polished, respectful and professional manner, no matter how aggrieved you may feel at the time, can again leave a door ajar to bring a valued member of staff back in to the business in the future. If handled in the right way, once again word will spread amongst potential employees of the values in your organisation, enhancing your reputation as a great place to work.
