Articles From the Team

Are you a client recruiting? Your silence during the process speaks volumes

A frustration of mine (and I am sure every recruiter) is when a client goes AWOL and provides you with no contact during a recruitment campaign - no feedback or communication. As well as being upsetting/rude – you asked me to do work on your behalf (!) it has a negative effect on those candidates you are trying to entice to come and work for you. 

So what does a lack of communication do to the recruitment process?

No matter when it happens it can have a devastating effect. I have always said that recruitment needs momentum. Once we have communicated an opportunity to the market, if that opportunity doesn’t move forward at a decent pace it goes stale. What once was a great looking opportunity is now one that people are no longer interested in. Dealing with busy professional lawyers who are time short, their attention is quickly taken up by something else. If you do not engage with them, something else will.

It also sends a message that this role/ their career is not your top agenda – and given that they aren’t desperate for a job (read my other blogs..) they are then quickly put off the idea of wanting to work for you. Why should they? If you care so little about informing them as to why there has been a hold up in the process, why should they remain interested?

In recruitment no news is always taken as bad news. If a client liked you and wanted to make you a job offer/ take you to the next stage they would be in touch within a day or two. (Fair enough assumption and in most cases this is the situation). So when no information is provided, I usually take this as a negative as do the lawyers I represent.

This leads on to what I call ‘candidate self preservation’. No one wants to be told ‘sorry, we have gone with someone else’ and therefore to stop themselves feeling too bad about losing out, they start to think about all the reasons why they didn’t want the role in the first place. Some people will never get back from this, others do – whatever the scenario, the client is asking a lot from their recruiter to get this back on track – and you can bet that if your client has got themselves into this situation in the first place, they don’t recognise the effort required to get things back on track.

When it comes to a lack of communication I could go on and on – can you tell how passionate I am about this! Another major reason for this is that I always think of the interviewee – who has put time and effort into learning about a company, taken time off for interview, had a sleepless night before the interview, woken up early to get to the interview/ made their excuses at work as to why they were late in, raised their expectations about moving jobs, started to think about life away from their current company and into yours and finally every call post interview, their heart jumps a little thinking this is ‘feedback’ time.

This might all sound an over emotional response but in my opinion a lack of feedback/ contact or communication shows a complete disregard for other people. And given that I really care about people and their careers, it doesn’t make me want to sell an opportunity to work with someone who acts in this way.

I plead with every recruiting client – please don’t be this type of client. Nothing good ever comes of it.

For more information contact Mark Levine at BCL Legal.