Hi Heike
I have gone through both telephonic and face to face interview with one of leading retailer in Australia. Since then i haven’t received any feedback or unsuccessful E-mail from HR. i have sent many follow up emails and text messages. whenever i call them they disconnect my call and never call back. I’m an Indian origin, may be their company not following diversity. your advice is much appreciated.

My thoughts exactly, Tony!

Then why don’t recruitment staff use it? As an applicant it can get soul destroying after a while as you NEVER know where you are up to with your application. It can take an hour sometimes per application so it is too much to ask from professionals to give closure to an applicant.

Doesn’t necessarily mean that they need feedback as that takes a lot of time.

What I have found quite staggering as an applicant myself, is how much more common these days it seems to be not to contact applicants who are unsuccessful at the interview stage…and I’m not talking bulk recruitment in my case. I’m referring to mid senior level, specialised roles where I have spent an hour in the company of the panel and put a huge amount of effort (and time and money) into the process only to never hear from them again. I feel it’s more likely that this is due to a level of incompetence rather than policy, but those speculating are absolutely right – in these cases I’ve been sufficiently ticked off not to engage with the company as a stakeholder in any other way. As my career progresses, this could well come back and bite one of them some day!!

Generally it seems that at interview stage, the successful applicant is telephoned fairly promptly by the hiring manager, and unsuccessful applicants are telephoned about a week later by someone more junior (in cases where I was contacted at all). Given in my case only about 6 applicants reach interview stage, why it’s so hard to make 6 quick phone calls at the same time eludes me. No one likes doing it, but given you’re the more senior manager you should be competent at this kind of interaction.

Treatment of job applicants is a subject I’m passionate about and the disparity of opinion only highlights that it is an issue our industry needs to deal with better and discuss openly.

i will adopt this process.