I’ve spent much of the last year working to improve my organization’s recruiting and hiring processes. One of the main goals was moving our application process completely online. Being a small staff, we have to make optimal use of technology to track the success of our hiring. Like all organizations, we need to maintain a steady flow of appropriate applicants to staff our business. And we need to be able to report and track those metrics.

Finding a reputable, affordable vendor to partner with was both too easy and too hard. Because there are dozens and scores out there! And they all proclaim to be the best at what they do … Fortunately, I have a professional network full of really smart and savvy HR geniuses to help navigate the selection minefield. Their recommendations have been invaluable. Who you know continues to matter almost as much as what you know.

In making a selection, one thing that was really important was the system’s ability to send notifications to the candidates about their status throughout the process. We get hundred of applications each month. Communicating with each applicant is important to us — especially because so many of them are or become customers. How we treat them during the hiring process has larger impact that we have to always keep in mind … More than just the standard “we received your application and will contact you if interested,” we hoped for something that would communicate automatically if the applicant didn’t meet current needs, didn’t score in the benchmarked range for assessments or just wasn’t a fit without making them so upset that they would never want to visit our locations or purchase our products again … It didn’t seem like a lot to ask.

But it turned out that it was. Repeatedly, I heard that the notices desired were not either not available or not recommended because there was too much risk involved in rejecting or upsetting the potential candidate.

Huh? So letting someone who has applied to work for you think you either never looked at their application and/or looked at it didn’t think enough of the person to respond at all is the better option??

C’mon man!!!

Applicants are screaming for feedback about their status. They want to know if they are in or out. They want to know if they are in the running or should move onto other opportunities. We should give it to them. There has to be a way to do that and still be lawful, appropriate and respectful.

If there isn’t, there should be. So I’ll keep looking and working until I find it or create it. The quest for the perfect applicant tracking system is far from over …