The interview cool-off period — It deserves a relook
At Technogise, we think of the interview cool-off period differently.
In recruitment policy terms, “cool-off period” represents the duration that a candidate is barred from re-applying at a company where she / he was rejected.
Most companies have this cool-off period defined as 6 months. So basically, it means that if you go through a company’s recruitment process and get rejected, then you will not be allowed to go through that company’s recruitment process again for at least the next 6 months.
But, this concept bothered us at Technogise, because we struggled to see a strong enough case for it.
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Firstly, if a candidate is so interested in our organisation that she / he is willing to reapply within a few weeks of getting rejected (rather than waiting for 6 months), then that is a good sign!!!
It tells us that the candidate’s efforts of being a part of our organisation are earnest. It tells us that she / he is not here just for “offer shopping”, but will most likely join us upon getting selected (if that happens).
For any company, such a candidate is valuable. In a market where increasingly, candidates back out of joining even after accepting offers, a candidate who offers a modicum of certainty that she / he will join, is very, very valuable.
Should we really make such candidates wait for half a year before they can go through our recruitment process again? I mean yes, they are interested in us now, but don’t we risk losing their interest if we make them wait for so long just to reapply to us?
Some may think along the lines that “…if the candidate is really interested in us, she / he will wait for 6 months or even a year to be a part of us. If not, then they’re not really interested in us…”. But quite frankly, we find that line of thinking to be arrogant. Maybe, just maybe, we’re flattering ourselves a little too much.
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Secondly, there are those candidates who miss out on getting selected in our company by a whisker. That is, they have a few good skills, good learning potential, as well as the right culture fitment for our company, but lack a couple of “must have skills” that we need in their role. These candidates usually come close to selection in our recruitment process, but get rejected in the final technical round(s).
Such candidates, while justifiably rejected, will not take long to acquire those “must have skills” (they have good learning potential after all) and become suitable for our company. Is it really worth waiting 6 months to re-evaluate them when they are just a couple of skills short? Again, we risk losing out on them.
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Thirdly, there doesn’t seem to be a strong justification for the duration of this cool-off period.
Why 6 months? Why not 3 months, or 1 year? Do organisations assume that on an average, a rejected candidate would take 6 months to prepare for their recruitment process again and acquire enough skills to clear it? If so, is there scientific research and data backing this assumption?
If yes, then companies must share such research with their recruitment teams. If not, then 6 months is basically just a random duration defined as cool-off period. Till date, we haven’t come across any research / data-backed explanation of cool-off periods.
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Finally, if we welcome a candidate’s reapplication, rather than dismissing it because of an unconvincing bureaucratic policy, that candidate will have good things to say about us!!!
From a branding perspective, that’s great, isn’t it? What better branding than a rejected candidate’s appreciation of our recruitment function?
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But let us look at both sides. What could be the temptations for keeping a strict and long cooling off period?
1.) Avoiding the troll candidate — If you are a recruiter who processes many unique candidates in a day, you will be highly inconvenienced if a rejected candidate starts reapplying again-and-again in a short duration, despite multiple rejections. Such rejected candidates are, dare we say, immature trolls who harm your recruitment function because they waste the people effort, billable time and logistics that go into interviews. They reapply again-and-again simply because your company does not have a cool-off period. And it is tempting to implement a strict cool off period for keeping them at bay.
However, wouldn’t it be better to weed out such troll candidates from the recruitment process altogether and blacklist them from consideration ever again? They’ve displayed the kind of immaturity, which renders them unemployable at the company. As recruiters, we must be able to distinguish between the sincere, mature re-applicants and the troll ones.
2.) Avoiding the cultural misfit — If a candidate is rejected because of behaviour or attitude issues, we might want a long cool off period to keep her / him at bay. But here again, because they are cultural misfits, it makes more sense to block their candidature permanently rather than letting them apply again after any cool off period.
3.) Practicality in volume hiring — At Technogise, we do not recruit people in large volumes.
However, if an organisation does hire in large volumes, it already has a huge stockpile of new candidates to speak with everyday. Can it really afford to add re-applicants to that stockpile as well? By having a firm cool off period, at least it doesn’t have to bother about re-applicants for a long time.
BUT, as we’ve mentioned previously in this column, the organisation will also risk losing out on good candidates because of a strict cool off period. Will that be affordable?
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At Technogise, we look at cool off period differently.
If a rejected candidate (who is sincere and mature) asks us how soon she / he can reapply at our company, we flip the question.
We give them the areas they need to improve upon; provide some materials that might be helpful in their quest for improvement; and then ask them how soon they think they will be ready to go through our process.
In this way, we let the candidate decide the cool off duration.
Of course, each candidate will propose a different duration; from a few weeks to a few months (based on their own assessment of how quickly they can learn / grasp things). However, isn’t it better than the “one size fits all” approach of 6 months for everyone?
At least this way, we would respect the fact that each candidate is unique, with their own individual potential and learnability.
