That’s even better!
I’ve only had to be the hiring person for one position so far but I swore I would always send out letters. The trouble is, I have to wait until someone is hired and everything is complete before rejecting the other applicants, so it may be weeks of nothing and then a rejection.
This is if letters come straight to me. HR has gotten a lot more automated in the hiring process so if the applications go through them, I assume there are updates along the way.
It’s yet another consequence of downsizing. When I started work in 1980, we had two recruiters and an assistant for a center of 400 people. When I interviewed I got a nice letter, I got help in making reservations, they did the hotel for me, the whole bit. Now you might have that many people for a group of 5,000, if any at all. When there is a layoff, they don’t need recruiters, so they get whacked. Most of the time the responsibility is all on the hiring manager, except for doing the details of an offer. Since a lot of them are not going to look forward to telling someone they didn’t get the job, they’ll put it off. Rude and unprofessional, yes. Half the resumes that come in never get seen by human eyes - they get scanned in, and only get pulled out when a keyword matches. So forget about responses to them.
As for calling to check up, it couldn’t hurt. Making contact with someone at the company before you apply helps. I’d definitely ask for a decision date when I interviewed, which gives you an excellent reason for checking back. I’d think that all things being equal this would give them the impression you really wanted the job, which could help.
The resumes were faxed not emailed. Our email program is set up to fire back a thank you and you will hear from us if we are interested in setting up a personal interview.
I just recently interviewed for a position in another branch of the company I work for, and I sent a thank you letter 2 days afterwards. I’ve done this with all of my past interviews as well. I’ve been told that they are well-received and appreciated.
It’s an unncessary cost. I used to be the hiring manager for my group in my last job. We’d go to a campus job fair and get over 200 resumes. That’s one job fair. We might hit a dozen schools in a typical year. We’re going to pay someone to spend all day creating letters (even if they are boilerplate, someone still has to stuff the envelope and stamp them) for a bunch of people we aren’t interested in. And my group was just one office location in one practice area of a billion dollar consulting firm. Multiply those costs by a hundred.
Generally we did write rejection letters, but only after a candidate has gone through the interview process. It doesn’t make sense to respond to the thousands of garbage resumes that aren’t even worth a second look.
It’s not a consequence of downsizing, it’s a consequence of the Internet and email. When I graduated college in 1996, only nerds and pedophiles used email. People were just starting to get AOL. There was no Monster or Careerbuilder for about another year. To apply for a job, you still had to print out a resume and cover letter on fancy stationary and then mail it to HR. Coopers & Lybrand (before they became part of PricewaterhouseCoopers) actually flew me down to one of their offices after I responded to a classified ad…in an actual print newspaper (I ended up not taking the job). I probably sent out 200 resumes over the span of a few months, had about two dozen interviews and recieved about 3 offers (2 of which totally sucked).
In contrast, I can probably send out 100 resumes in a day if I push. A thousand if I just don’t care about where they go. That means companies on the recieving end are receiving thousands of resumes, 99% of which might be garbage.
Why are you going through HR. You should be avoiding HR at all cost and trying to find the person who does the actual hiring.
OK, make that an extra 5 seconds per applicant to enter the e-mail address from the person’s resume into your e-mail program instead of hitting “reply.”
Oh, that goes without saying. I am asking what the follow-up etiquette is if you haven’t heard anything back after an interview (or about a resume sent in response to a specific job listing). In the past, when I’ve called to follow up on resumes I’ve sent, it’s resulted in someone actually taking a look at the thing if they hadn’t already. But maybe my experience is outdated this point, maybe it’s specific to the narrow field(s) I’ve worked in, or maybe I’ve just been lucky.
I dunno. When you invite someone to apply for a job, I think they’re owed the courtesy of a response. They polished their resumes, got dressed up, hid their tattoos, hired a sitter, maybe took a day off work to come to the fair. You can’t just leave them hanging.
In that case, all recruiting material should very clearly state “only short-listed candidates will be contacted.”
This is a pet peeve of mine. I once applied for a job at the USAID mission in Cairo, went through an extremely rigorous interview (8 people interviewing me) and then was asked to return on a separate day for a difficult written exam. They never bothered to get back to me. I was, and remain, appalled.
On a brighter note, I was once interviewed for another position by an executive director of a non-profit, “Ms. Smith.” Unbeknownst to her, I was slightly acquainted a prominent person who was on the board of the organization, and he was aware that I had an interview.
A few weeks later, he called me to ask how things came out and I told him that I didn’t know for sure, because I hadn’t heard anything, but enough time had passed that I assumed I had not gotten the job. There was shocked silence on the other end of the phone, but he was much too gracious and professional to speak negatively about Ms. Smith to me.
However, within hours I got a panicked phone call from Ms. Smith apologizing for not being in touch … she said she thought she’d sent me a ding letter, it must have gotten lost or something. Quite obviously, the prominent guy had immediately called her up and given her hell for her lack of manners.
It doesn’t happen often, but once in a while, there is justice. 
ETA: The lesson I have learned from these experiences is: as an interview ends, ask when a decision will be made and whether they will contact you if you aren’t selected. Then, when they give you a date for deciding, say something like “okay, so if I haven’t heard anything by September 1, may I give your HR department a call to find out the status of my application?”
Again, I don’t think any of us are saying if you are contacted to attend a personal interview, you should not expect a response one way or the other. As posted above, people fire off resumes when they are job seeking all over the place whether they are qualified or not. Even if the resume does contain a email address it certainly takes more than five seconds to enter that and fire off a letter. Times that by 100 resumes of people that have shown interest even if they are unqualified and it gets to be quite a task.
Not if the system is automated to pull keywords out of applications/resumes before it goes to a human. Each one CAME from an e-mail address which it tags so that the human can respond, it should be just as simple to send an automated reply: “Thank you for applying to XYZ corp. At this time, your application did not meet the criteria for the open positions, Thank you for your interest and have a good day.”
That doesn’t excuse not putting “only short-listed candidates will be contacted” on one’s recruiting materials, with a reasonable degree of prominence.
I agree that most employers are very rude and don’t send out rejection letters, but be aware that some do and take ages to do it. It took me a year to find my current job, and in that time I applied for many other jobs. Some of them took months to get back to me, and I didn’t hear from several until after I’d been working for a couple of months. Some I’d completely forgotten about. Seriously, four and five months later they told me they’d chosen another candidate. So you may hear from them yet . . . well after you’re in your new job.
Create 2-sentence template. Enter e-mail address into address field. Return to template, hit “select all,” then copy & paste text into body of e-mail. Hit “send.”
If you do individual e-mail responses to each applicant, it should take maybe 30 seconds per applicant. If not, you could even just do one mass bcc: e-mail to everyone. If you don’t even feel like spending that much time, just sort into piles of “clearly unqualified” and “potentially qualified,” which is something you are presumably doing anyway, and only send responses to the “potentially qualified” pile.
To the question - no, not in my experience or any of my friends.
Wow, speak of the devil, just got a rejection letter. Might have something to do with the fact that I have inside contacts. It was nice to actually get the notice.
And everyone remotely related to the computer business. Everyone in college who we recruited in 1986 had e-mail. But I’m referring more to the lack of response to people who are actually contacted. It is wrong, but I’m not sure many people who get phone interviewed without positive feedback and an invitation to visit get official responses. That has been pushed from HR to hiring managers, who don’t do this as often, don’t have the form letters, and may even feel a bit guilty about rejecting someone.
I do know that when we were applying for green cards for people in the mid-80s, we had to put ads in the paper which resulted in a flood of resumes, almost of of which were nowhere near the written qualifications or even the real qualifications for the job. Every one of those got a rejection before the layoffs, few did after. I think they had to be recorded and shown to not meet the requirements of the job, which was work enough.
It is true that I doubt even a fully staffed HR department wouldn’t respond to resumes from Monster postings. But if you graduated in 1996, you never experienced the world with enough support.
But resumes that come in are often stored in a database to see if they might be of interest for the next job opening. Some get sent without reference to a particular opening, which is often a good idea. A smart system might send an automatic rejection to a laid off Starbucks employee applying for a Java programming job, but we don’t have that yet.
Companies almost always spend less effort on responding to applicants than applicants to when applying. Less effort than hitting a button on Monster of something is basically no response at all.
I see Magiver got a rejection letter, which is too bad, but he seems to have put a bit of effort into using contacts to look for a job, and so he deserves and got more of a response.
When I grauduated from law school, the federal judges I sent resumes to let me down easy (except for the one that hired me) with nice form letters, almost all personally addressed and typed on high quality paper. Same with the state appellate judges. The positions I applied for with the state AG’s office didn’t even bother to send me a postcard with the word “no” on it.