Hiring Process – Needs Help
I need your help with a communication decision, here is the situation.
You have interviewed six candidates for a senior management role in your 20 person company. Each candidate has had 3, 2-hour sessions of in-person interviews, commuted anywhere from 10 to 30 miles and paid parking for each trip. All of the candidates are great and well qualified and well connected in the community.
You have made your hiring decision and are moving forward with your chosen candidate, here is the question, how do you inform the non-chosen candidates of your decision?
1) You the hiring person call them one on one.
2) You send them an email.
3) You send them a letter.
4) You leave them a voicemail.
Please leave your thoughts as a comment. Thanks.
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By Tim King, November 18, 2006 @ 10:40 pm
The best manager I ever had taught me a valuable lesson: If someone needs to know something, just tell him. Even if it’s uncomfortable information, he’s better off hearing it earlier rather than later, and personally rather than impersonally.
So I’d just pick up the phone and tell him, simply and directly, what he needs to know. I’m not being mean. I’m just telling him something he needs to know. If he responds professionally, I still may have made a valuable contact. (If he responds poorly, then I was right not to hire him.)
“We’ve decided to go with a different candidate, but I want to thank you for all the trouble you went through to interview. And if I happen across an opportunity you might be interested in, is it okay if I contact you?”
Maybe not those exact words. But he needs to know, and if you can’t tell him in person, the phone is the second choice.
-TimK