James is a talented young designer. He is looking for a new job where he can utilize his design skills and enjoy working with a great team. He comes across a job post for a designer role at HelloDezign. HelloDezign is a well known design company and works with many innovative brands. James spends several hours working on his resume and cover letter to communicate the high value he would bring to the HelloDezign team. James finally applies for his dream design job at HelloDezign. With his skills and experience, he feels confident to get the job. He starts brushing up his design portfolio and preparing for the interview.


After a few days, James receives an email from HelloDezign.


Hi James,

Thank you so much for taking the time to apply to be a Senior Designer here at HelloDezign. After careful consideration, we have decided not to proceed with your candidacy further. We are incredibly grateful for your interest in us and wish you all the best in your future endeavors!

HelloDezign Team


P.S. we are lucky to receive a high volume of applications but unfortunately this means that we cannot provide personalized feedback on each candidate in this message or upon request.


Nice, polite, professional rejection email. James is obviously disappointed. But, he also wonders…


Is this an email from a real person, or from a magical Applicant Tracking System (ATS)? Did someone really review his application and portfolio, or the ATS reported a low score based on its data science based algorithms?


If HelloDezign is so kind to give his application “careful consideration”, why not provide some feedback on what is lacking in his candidacy?


It is great to know that HelloDezign receives “high volume of applications”. Why not reduce how many applications you accept so that you can disappoint fewer candidates and perhaps provide some meaningful feedback to the candidates that will help them improve or apply for other roles at HelloDezign?


The story above reflects a typical job applicant’s experience today. James is a fictitious character and HelloDezign is a fictitious company. But with the official unemployment rate in the US hovering close to 7% and a much higher percentage of the population actually out of jobs due to economic impacts of Covid-19 pandemic, this is more common today than in past years.


Keeping aside the disappointment James is going through, HelloDezign must have done what’s best in their business interest.

Or is it so? Should an applicant’s journey end just with such a rejection email? If the candidate gets the job, the journey continues and ends with a great outcome. What if the candidate didn’t ultimately get the job after a couple of interviews or like James, she didn’t even get called for the first interview? Does the applicant journey have to end like this?


What if we connect applicant journey from Recruitment with parts of customer journey from Marketing? What if James receives another email from HelloDezign the next morning?

They send him a $25 coupon to use for buying any prints from HelloDezign! Last night's disappointment now turns into curiosity for James. He wonders if it is simply a coincidence that he receives a coupon from HelloDezign right after his job application is rejected by them. Or is there some cool marketing process powering this morning’s communication? Anyway, James is impressed and decides to utilize the coupon. In his preparation to present his portfolio, he worked on improving one of his best designs. He decides to use the coupon to print it and give it to his parents as a holiday gift. He receives the print within a week and hangs it on the wall in his parents’ bedroom. His parents are very happy to see such a great design work by James. And HelloDezign acquires one new happy customer.


With today’s technologies and tools, HelloDezign is able to achieve this easily. HelloDezign in fact continues the relationship with James by sending him design resources, new job postings that match his skills, and occasionally even discount coupons. They do this not because they have the technologies available. HelloDezign does this because they believe in a human-centric approach to everything they do.


As a hiring manager, I have been terrible in providing feedback to candidates whom we had to reject early in the process. I provided feedback to candidates whom I interviewed. But that’s not enough. I take this opportunity to apologize to all applicants who I did not provide any feedback and abruptly ended their applicant journey. Next time, I’ll do better and I hope the organizations I work for will also do better, just like HelloDezign.


Are you doing something special?