You submitted a resume, got a call from the recruiter, nailed the interview, the recruiter promised to get back to you regarding the next steps. Now the waiting game begins, you don’t hear from anyone for several days, you send an email to check in, you still don’t hear anything for another several days, you send another email to check in. Before you know it, it has been a month and nothing is happening. You freak out and try to figure out if you did something wrong to cause this lack of interest. Some of us get lucky and eventually do hear something from the company; for the rest of us, it’s as if the interview never happened and the company will never be heard from again.

Why does this happen? Well, I think it is caused mainly by the short-term focus of the recruiting professionals. First of all, I emphasize with the recruiters. We get 50-100 resumes a day on the low end and there are always other priorities, like a more qualified candidate, or an in-person interview, or an interview report that needs to be turned in. We have a tendency of treating qualified candidates like kings and queens while treating others like second-class citizens because all we think about is filling open jobs that are in front of us. We tend to forget that Joe Smith, while may be not be the perfect fit for the current job, may be a great fit for other roles down the road. We also forget that Joe Smith may have friends who are great candidates. And for all the contract recruiters, let’s also remember Joe Smith may become a client one day. So while I understand that it is not possible to get back to the candidates immediately but it shouldn’t be hard to write a quick email to update the status of their applications, even if the position is in limbo. If the delay is due to your fear of having difficult conversations such as rejecting a candidate, well my only advice is that it is part of your job.

Now for the candidates, please do not contact your recruiter constantly. Please know that the recruiters are usually looking out for you. We do try our best to get you in front of the hiring managers (otherwise, why would we reach out to you in the first place?) but there will be instances where the interview process is delayed, or when the hiring manager is sick, or when there are better candidates in the pipeline. There will also be times that regardless of our opinions, the hiring manager wants to go in a different direction. Your constant emails and calls will not and cannot change this and will only get you on the dreaded “do not call” list, and trust me, every recruiter has one. What’s even worse is that recruiters do talk to each other about candidates. And if your job search strategy is long term focused, you definitely don’t want that to happen.

The bottom line is that we should all just act professionally. The reality is that everyone, at some point of his/her career, will need to talk to a recruiter. That means recruiters, you will end up on the other side of the table too. It is perfectly reasonable to expect a follow up email from a candidate within a few days, and at that point the recruiter should provide the current status of the process. If this is not the right role right now, remember recruiting is not about finding a short term solution, but about finding the long term match.