Most hiring companies make the fundamental mistake of managing their pipeline poorly. The inability to reject candidates, and to provide a reason leads to many problems with the recruiting process. One solution is to appoint a person specifically tasked to handle this problem. I suggested one solution in the my article, “The Candidate Advocate.”
Poor candidate management creates a negative impression of your company in the marketplace. If you handle someone’s candidacy poorly, they are less likely to apply to your company again, or buy its products or services. A job applicant requires as good, or better customer service than you would provide a valued client. Any contact you have with a potential customer should be turned to your advantage whenever possible.
Wachovia Bank posts 600 to 800 jobs per week, and averages 10,000 job applicants, declining almost 90% of those.1 This puts Wachovia in the precarious situation of potentially creating 9,000 bad impressions.
Wachovia, however, has introduced a system to deliver rapid feedback to applicants, along with a suggestion that may be helpful in their job search. In her article, “Too Many Candidates?” Leslie Stevens argues that the bank uses this system to create a good impression of their recruiters.
I would go one step further and say that they create a good impression of the bank, overall. This puts Wachovia in the enviable position of making lemons from lemonade. They use rejected job applicants as a way to access new clients for their bank.
Contact Jason Sanders
1 Leslie Stevens, “Too Many Candidates?” ERE.net, September 1, 2008.
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