Occupational hazards exist within recruiting. Here are a few:
You will upset people when you do not follow up. This one is deserved. To avoid it, follow up every time, all the time.
You will likely upset people when you do follow up. This one is not so deserved, but you cannot avoid it. Continue to follow up anyway and know that the person you are following up with is just in a bad place. You, fortunately, have a job, and they may not. Don’t take it personally. Do your job, take the hit, and keep moving.
You will upset people when you don’t provide detailed enough feedback. It may or may not be deserved. This is a “know your audience” situation, and if you don’t know your audience, Godspeed.
You will likely upset people for providing too detailed feedback. If your candidate is not upset, the feedback could easily turn into a challenging conversation. If you are an agency recruiter, there is little you can do to get around it, but you might be able to help fight for the candidate one more time if it seems a worthy and winnable case. Fight for your candidate whenever you are able – that is the reason for the detailed feedback in the first place! Use it to build the case for another look. If you are internal to the company, you likely know your odds upfront of winning the conversation with the hiring manager to reconsider. Again, know your audience.
You may upset people for making recommendations on resumes, interview approaches, thank-you notes, ways to communicate – all the things that, because you are in the business, you may know something about. This will typically indicate that you may either need more experience – some in our industry do – or you are working with the wrong candidate. Coachability and an interest in learning from others are key to any change – job change or otherwise. Whether the person takes the input is up to them, but an outright reluctance to accept the advice shows something that can be viewed as a warning sign of things to come.
Our industry is not easy. If whoever brought you into it said that it would be, they lied! Sorry.
This is not a complaint. As I have said hundreds of times before in previous posts, I love what I do and the people we get to help. Every job has its hazards, and I view the ones in our industry as “any negative is FAR outweighed by the positive”.