[paradox95]

What kind of reply would you want? Would a simple "no thanks" be enough?

I have been in the situation before where replying to everyone with anything meaningful is simply not feasible. Maybe for a recruiter whose full-time job is that but not for a hiring manager who also has to balance their regular duties as well.

I have spent much more time on the applicant side of things than the hirer side so I understand the goal. It can be frustrating to not get anything. If it is a job you really want you may be inclined to hold everything else off until you hear something just on the hope that maybe they haven't gotten to your resume yet. So a little closure would be nice.

So maybe a better question for you is what are you trying to accomplish by getting hiring managers to reply to all candidates? Give them closure or provide feedback? If the former than maybe a simple "no thanks" will do.

By the way, I am speaking clearly to the scenario where a candidate sends in a resume and doesn't hear anything back. In my opinion, even if the hiring manager or recruiter does a phone call the candidate deserves a clear "no" email at a minimum.

[dvtv75]

A no is always good. In my last 100 or so applications, I've had about three responses (one of them was interviewing).

[T-Winsnes]

Any reply would be good. Even if it's a pre-canned copy/paste. It answers the questions that comes up if you don't hear anything: "did my email not send properly?", "did they miss me?", "are they ignoring me on purpose?" etc.

It takes almost no effort, and shows that you care about the people around you. If someone came up to you and asked you in person, would you ignore them and keep walking?

[bostik]

We respond to all candidates, in all stages.

Now to be honest - we use greenhouse, and their tooling for recruitment workflow is not bad. A decision to accept/reject will always trigger an email. Of course we've templated our own custom responses, but editing the outgoing email before sending is also easy enough.

As for interview feedback, I personally write my interview notes in such a way that if the candidate asks for more detailed feedback, the notes can be pasted pretty much as-is. When the hiring workflow and candidate communication are intricately linked, things are less likely to fall between the cracks. Everyone feels better.

[nateps]

Lever (YC S12) is a modern Talent Acquisition Suite, and we hear from our customers that writing rejection emails is really difficult, especially when you want to leave a good impression. Here are some tips we wrote up: https://www.lever.co/blog/how-to-write-human-rejection-lette...

[shin_lao]

Tip 3 is really a bad advice. It's not a good idea to say why you rejected the candidate, you have no idea how it could be taken, especially if you are facing a litigious person.

Best to write some "you were not an exact match for our needs" reply.

[nateps]

Agree this is definitely true in many cases, especially with applicants. Where it can be OK to give candidates feedback tends to be when you have gotten to later in the process with them and built more of a relationship. The article was meant more for the general case. I totally agree a lot of judgement is needed.

Thanks for you feedback on this!

[deedubaya]

I think a "no thanks" is enough.

Would you give every applicant a "no thanks" if it was a simple click of a button? Would that be valuable to you?

[Twisell]

Yup because I once applied to a big company and to this day I still don't now if a human was actually involved in any part of the process... Given the company and given the job it's quit possible that the HR people just filtered out the result using standardized fields and never gave an eye at the CV & resume I took 5 hour to write.

Months later I learn that they fire half of their HR externals contractors (maybe for the best).

So in the end yes, a simple "I read, not interested" would be great.

And if applicable a variation that could be "not for this job, but maybe try another one" or even "you need more experience" would actually be even more useful.

PS: What I learn though is that for big company hiring process is broken. My best chance of being recruited is to build a great project and communicate about it at my current job (but that's not easy if you are at the bottom of the stack and writing code under copyright...), but now I'm even less tempted to even apply to theses big Co.

[beachy]

Disclaimer: we write recruitment software.

Virtually every recruitment tool in existence already does this. Any company that doesn't send a"sorry" email to applicants is either not using any technology at the point of screening (unusual for anyone of any size) or has a screwed up recruitment process (common in large companies).

You'll need to find other secret sauce.

Your goal could be to find a way to encourage managers/recruiters to provide more genuine feedback.

How about tiered responses, and tools to track and prompt when the tiers are not being used correctly?