7 Reasons Why Recruiters are Ignoring You Even After Interviews
When senior executives are met with complete silence half-way through the interview process, they start to feel nervous.
Several questions arise - would the confidentiality be upheld by the search firm? Will the news leak that they are looking out? Any breach of confidentiality will have an adverse impact on their current job.
It is particularly a difficult situation because, in a short span of time you revealed so much about your professional life and career aspirations, but now, you have no clue what’s happening.
Here are top 7 reasons why recruiters are ignoring you even after interviews:
1) Lack of time
This is one of the top reasons why recruiters ignore you. Every executive search professional or recruiter manages anywhere between 100 – 400 candidates across multiple positions at any given point of time.
This puts tremendous pressure on the search consultant and drastically reduces the time at hand to keep every candidate updated about each step.
In this event, recruiters prioritize communication with preferred or highly probable candidates.
Note: Preferred candidates almost always gets a response.
2) Client changed the search criteria
Clients keep changing their mind. What they wanted in the beginning of the search may not be what they want at mid-point.
If there has been moderate to significant amount of change in the hiring criteria, your profile could no longer be suitable.
3) Entry of an internal candidate
At times, even as an external search is on-going, an internal candidate could enter the race. This puts the external candidates at a disadvantage.
Internal candidates would often have a track-record with the same organization and comes with strong internal recommendations.
4) Temporary hold on the position
A typical executive search takes anywhere between 2-4 months. Quite a lot can change during this time. The role could have been put on hold temporarily.
Recruiters or clients wouldn’t want to send this message to the market for various reasons. Resorting to radio silence would be the preferred action for most recruiters in this scenario.
5) Role cancellation
The role could altogether get cancelled after the Search began. It’s not your fault.
It could be due to changing business scenario, the person who planned to leave decided to stay, slashed budget, changed external environment on which client has no control, etc.
6) Rejecting is difficult
Being the bearer of bad news is difficult. A recent survey pointed out that 80% of candidates would ask for reasons to recruiters as to why they were rejected.
And when provided with a reason, an overwhelming majority defended their candidature with claims to prove otherwise.
After the initial conversation, recruiters transition merely into the role of a co-ordinator and there is little they could do to influence the outcome.
7) You are a back-up candidate
At times, the interviewing panel would like two candidates, but one will have slight edge over the other. The second candidate, in this case would be contacted if the first one rejects the offer.
As opposed to normal recruitment, Search firms evaluate near-perfect 3-5 candidates and there could always be a second choice. In this case, the delay from the first candidate’s side could mean silence from the recruiter to you.
Conclusion
The reality is, if you are one of the top three candidates running for the role, you would be “kept warm” through frequent communications from the Search consultant. Most serious C-Suite roles gets filled within 3-5 months’ time, followed by the notice period.
