As recruiters, we are in the business of communicating. 

The Good. 

Throughout the recruiting process, it is very important to build up a rapport with who you’re working with. There are many benefits to this, with the most obvious being trust.

As talent acquisition professionals we are responsible for guiding candidates through the entire job search process.

This includes qualifying their career aspirations, coordinating interviews, preparing them for the interview, negotiating their compensation, and helping them make the most important decision of all – deciding, pending an offer, if they should take the job or not.  

There is only so much a recruiter can control, but a recruiters ability to influence and ultimately ‘win’ your Candidate boils down to trust.

The Bad.

The phone calls I hate making are the ones where I have to reject a candidate from a job.  

It’s not fun when someone goes through a phone screen, coding challenge, and multiple on-site interviews and your client doesn’t want to move forward. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard candidates tell me that they never hear back from other agencies or their recruiter. They just assumed they never got the job, but they were never officially rejected.

People would rather hear that they are out and did not get the job, than not hear anything at all.

As hard as it is to communicate sometimes, recruiters need to let candidates know why they are out. While it’s a difficult phone call to make, especially if you have a rapport with the person, those phone calls can be used as a learning experience on how to improve for the next interview.

Breaking the news of rejection can be devastating to candidates – instead of crushing their confidence, my suggestion is to use rejection phone calls as confidence builders.  

Communication is absolutely essential in this industry. The people you work with are depending on you for career support. Providing swift and accurate feedback is essential to everyone’s success. 

What you should not do, is leave candidates in the dark.

It is always better to tell someone they are rejected, rather than leave them hanging. That is how you build rapport and trust with your candidates. 

I recently published a piece on texting with candidates, there is some controversy on the subject, however, I feel it is a valuable form of communication for certain types of messaging.

Kevin Kluge is a Sr. Recruiter, Salesforce Specialist, and Recruiting Team Lead at Objective Paradigm. Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn here.