How Human Resources Can Hurt Your Brand - Tazmark New ...

Some common HR practices are a slippery road for your brand.

Job seekers are increasingly left in the dark about their application if they do not end up hired. Especially in a weak economy, where finding a job can be a long and painful process, this can lead to frustration. In some cases, this frustration might be channeled back to the companies a job seeker applied to. The way a company treats job applicants, especially those who do not get the job, can increase or avoid negative impacts on brand and reputation.

One of the probably costliest and most long-term oriented tasks of your business is building and maintaining your brand. Your brand is a promise to your customers. It takes years of commitment, excellence and creativity to earn the trust and favor of a significant share of the market. Yet, you are not the only party that can nurture or seriously hurt your brand. As soon as you open your doors for business, there are numerous stakeholders that can make or break your success.

It is understood that your customers and employees are stakeholders who need to be treated with respect. Any rising issues must be resolved quickly and to their satisfaction to ensure smooth business. Without any doubt, your shareholders are another top priority, even if only family members have a financial interest in your business. Your suppliers, the community in which your company operates, the environment and any organizations such as the government, unions or consumer protection groups are also concerned with what you are doing and in how you are doing it.

In all this pressure, many businesses completely forget or even refuse to acknowledge a further stakeholder group: job applicants. In recent years, it has become a more common practice for various companies to ignore job applicants that do not end up hired. This growing issue recently led to the advent of new business models which try to improve the ratio of responses if applications were send through their service. If job candidates are bothered enough to pay money in order to avoid being ignored, then the problem is large enough to deserve consideration of the business community.

From the perspective of the firm, this may not be of great concern at first thought. The person will not work at the company and therefore will not affect business. It is easy to settle with the belief that the large number of applications simply overwhelms the human resources team and leaves them no time to contact all applicants. Very often, especially in smaller companies, time to handle job applicants is particularly limited since there is no involvement of designated HR staff at all. The hiring departments themselves handle the whole process besides their regular day-to-day tasks.

From the applicants? point of view, job applications, status requests, and callbacks seem to vanish in a giant black hole and the applicants are left in the dark if they are still under consideration or if someone else got the job. I recently surveyed a small group of University of Arizona students that applied for positions all over the United States. Some graduates had no or only few bad experiences but 57 percent of the surveyed job seekers stated that more than half of the companies they applied to did not get back to them at all. Especially in the current economy, job search was perceived as a very emotional process. The interaction with firms and their response to applications was often the basis for the graduates? overall picture of a company.

Potential hidden impacts of not following up

Now, what does a wondering job applicant without real ties to your company have to do with your marketing efforts and especially with your branding? The answer is: More than you might think. Let me illustrate a number of possible situations that can hurt your brand and your business.

It should be understood that the following scenarios are not typical for every applicant. The probability of these circumstances occurring greatly depends on the number of ignored applications and rejections of an applicant as well as the personal circumstances that result from it.

Just as customers talk with other customers about a firm?s products or services so do some job applicants. In a way, they are customers as well. They have a demand or need for employment and an employer can supply a solution to this need. Some job applicants who do not hear back from a company they applied to will begin talking about it. This might not be the case for applicants that quickly find another job but for applicants that get frustrated because they cannot get an offer within a certain timeframe. Especially for those who get ignored by many companies, the job search can become a very emotional process. They begin to wonder if they do not hear back because of something they did wrong or if others had similar experiences with the same company. With this kind of chatter in the job seeker community, some companies can develop a reputation for not following up with their job applicants.

There are several possible negative outcomes for the hiring company. Most of these now rejected candidates will likely advance their career over time. They gain more experience in another company, may get a higher degree or earn relevant certificates. Eventually they might be the perfect fit for another position at a later time but it is possible that they will not apply to the same company again because of their prior experience. They also can talk to other perfect candidates who also may seek their next job somewhere else because they trust the person in their network rather than a company they know nothing about. As a result, the company ends up with second choice candidates.

The negative impacts of applicants talking about their frustration, does not stop here. Bad word of mouth is contagious and can quickly spread to previously uninvolved parts of a business. Once people get into discussions about how the human resource department of a company does not follow up on applications, the whisper down the lane can develop into how the company does not follow up on any requests or applications. Now the integrity of the whole company is challenged as customers and suppliers hear these rumors. This does not only come with the risk to lose a small number of customers. It can damage the brand that was built with so much care and funding.

A company never knows how many other firms have failed to contact a certain candidate before. The more bad experiences an applicant had already the larger their resentment of the next will become. Eventually, previously ignored applicants will move on to work for another employer but they might not forget their struggles. In their new job, they and others that have been exposed to the mentioned negative buzz may become important first level stakeholders. This is especially critical if they become potential buyers in a B2B setting. Past experience can now have an effect on contracts they are involved in, especially if they have decision power. The same is true for external reputation or legislature impacts if these hope-dashed applicants get involved with secondary stakeholders such as consumer protection groups or environmental organizations.

Good Service is delivering bad news, too

The question that hovers over the current job market is: Why do so many companies fail to send out a short email that states something similar to this:

?We had many qualified candidates. We decided on another candidate this time. Good luck for your future career goals.?

Any hiring department in any company has the possibility to provide this kind of closure. A message like this does not even have to be very personalized. It can be a bulk email to all rejected candidates. These applicants may still not like the content but at least they know where they are and can move on.

It is important for companies to realize that job applicants, even if they eventually will not be hired, are an important group with hidden but potentially significant ties to a company?s future success. ?Job applicants are stakeholders, too. They should be treated with the same respect a firm would treat any other party that has a legitimate interest in its venture.

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Source: http://www.tazmark.com/2011/10/how-human-resources-can-hurt-your-brand/

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