Reject the application, not the relationship - LCP’s Karina Lee on delivering candidate rejection well.

the answer to a ‘good no’ lies in knowing where automation helps and where a personal conversation matters.

During a recent Reach ATS webinar, “What Candidates Remember About Your Hiring Process”, Karina Lee, Senior In-House Recruiter at LCP, reflected on how rejected candidates form by far an organisation’s largest applicant cohort, and warned that a poor rejection experience can have a lasting effect on employer brand reputation.

“If you [then] have a poor application and recruitment experience, then your view of that organisation… can and will change quickly,” says Karina.

As application numbers grow, Karina tackles the question every recruiter faces: how do hiring teams say no in the right way?

With over 20 years’ recruitment experience, Karina has led the small in-house recruitment team at LCP for almost a decade. Drawing on that experience during the Reach ATS webinar, she argues that rejection can still be a positive experience, and that the answer to a ‘good no’ lies in knowing where automation helps and where a personal conversation matters.

Describing a vacancy at LCP that attracted over 80 applicants, Karina explained that individually replying to each applicant would have put considerable pressure on her small team. “I absolutely believe there’s a place for the auto-reject email, as long as it’s a nice, friendly, well-crafted email that goes out of the system,” she says.

LCP’s rejection approach changes once someone has attended an interview. Karina believes the level of effort candidates have invested at this hiring stage deserves constructive feedback. The LCP hiring team makes every effort to speak to interviewed candidates before an automated rejection email is sent.

Karina also believes that effort put into candidate rejection can pay off long after the rejection email lands, recalling at least two candidates who, after an initial unsuccessful application, returned later and were hired. “They clearly must have gone away with a positive impression because they felt they were able to apply again.”

Treating rejection as the start of a future relationship rather than the end of the process also helps protect the employer brand that careers pages work hard to build. Karina urges recruiters to look beyond their own carefully crafted pages and consider their wider online presence: “if your candidate is researching you, what are they finding?”

The full webinar goes beyond the ‘good no’ and also covers matching brand expectation to a candidate’s lived experience, the recruitment candidate charter LCP has introduced, and the importance of a consistent standard of candidate experience even when hiring workflows vary by role.

Karina also shares two quick wins for employers: claiming their free Glassdoor page and using feedback from new joiners to assess both candidate experience and recruitment agency performance.

Reflecting on this, the most recent Recruitment Reimagined webinar, Sales Director and Owner at Reach ATS, Deb Cox said, “We run these conversations because the most useful insight comes from the people who do the work every day.

“Karina’s point is one every talent leader can act on: automation done well and human contact at the right moments work hand in hand. Both shape how candidates see an employer.

“Sometimes it’s those small moments – a kind receptionist, a chance to speak to those you might end up working with, or a well-crafted rejection email – that make all the difference.

“That’s why flexibility is at the heart of what we do at Reach ATS: recruiters should be able to decide what is automated and where the personal touches should be.”

The webinar, part of Reach ATS’ Recruitment Reimagined series, is available on demand now on the Reach ATS website.



Ends.
Reach ATS is purpose-built, fully customisable recruitment software. It automates and streamlines HR workflows to keep hiring under control.
With AI-powered features and an intuitive, user-friendly interface, the smart software speeds up time to hire, reduces cost per hire, and improves the candidate journey.

Key features include:
• AI-powered shortlisting
• Automated candidate communications
• Self-serve interview scheduling
• Dedicated portals for HR, Hiring Managers and Candidates
• Advanced reporting for rich data insights.

Lane Clark and Peacock (LCP):
https://www.lcp.com/en

Media Contact:
Emma Sharman, Head of Marketing Strategy
[email protected]
01527 574408