The interview cancellation dilemma:

It’s a dilemma I’m sure many hiring managers and human resources professionals have faced; they’ve just interviewed the perfect candidate for a vacancy and are keen to offer, but they already have further interviews scheduled. Should they risk losing the perfect candidate by waiting until all interviews have been conducted, or should they just make an offer and either cancel the other interviews or conduct them out of courtesy, even though they have no chance of securing the role?

On some occasions the decision will be guided by the perfect candidate’s availability. If they’re already under offer elsewhere, they may not be prepared to wait until the end of the interview process, especially if they’re spread over a lengthy period. Then it becomes a case of whether the employer is prepared to risk letting them go elsewhere whilst they meet the remaining applicants.

I've recently had this scenario unfold for one of my clients, and due to business demands and risk of losing their preferred candidate they decided to offer the role to him before completing the scheduled round of interviews and called wishing to cancel the final remaining interview.

The candidate whose interview was cancelled was understandably disappointed. He’d already invested time preparing for it and was eager to meet with the client to prove his suitability to the role. Fortunately in this instance, he was understanding of the situation and hadn’t pinned all his hopes on the interview.

Personally however, I don’t feel the situation was handled well and the client ran the risk of damaging their employer brand by having a job applicant come away from the process feeling aggrieved. This particular candidate happened to be the understanding type, but that’s not always going to be the case, and it’s well documented that people like to share negative experiences more than the positive.

If the client needed to make a quick decision on this hire, the sensible option would be to bunch all the interviews together over the course of a day or two. In the real world this is easier said than done, but if a candidate can only commit to interviewing a few days after the others it should be made clear to them from the outset that there is a chance the interview will be cancelled if an appropriate candidate is identified beforehand. Then there can be no surprises and the dilemma of whether to cancel or honour the interview is already decided.

When applying for vacancies - be specific

One of the most common complaints of jobseekers is that they don’t get feedback from job applications. Whilst for recruiters, one of their biggest complaints is the volume of irrelevant applications they receive from job adverts.

The two go hand in hand. The more applications recruiters have to sift through, the less time they can devote to replying to all the unsuccessful or irrelevant applicants. Meanwhile a jobseeker, disheartened by a lack of response, may step up the number of applications they send out, in the hope it will increase their chances of progression to interview.

The danger of deploying a scatter-gun approach to job applications is that it can undermine your prospect of securing the positions you’re actually most interested in. A recruiter, through memory or application tracking software, will generally be aware of multiple applications made by the same individual, and if these are for roles covering different responsibilities across a range of salaries there will, at best, be confusion over where your strengths lie, or at worst they’ll assume you consider yourself a ‘jack of all trades and master of none’. Recruiters rarely get instructed to find these!

A better approach would be to only apply for those roles you’re most interested and suitable for based on the requirements detailed in the job advert. If you’re not then hearing back from the recruiter who is advertising these roles, give them a call to have a chat about your job search and see if they can assist.