Should You Reject Job Candidates by Phone or Email?

Inc.com columnist Alison Green answers questions about workplace and management issues—everything from how to deal with a micromanaging boss to how to talk to someone on your team about body odor.

A reader asks:

Should you always call to let a candidate know that they won’t be getting a job offer?

Here’s the context: I’ve gotten calls and emails letting me know when I wasn’t accepted for a position. And my colleagues and I all agree that we hate getting phone calls. It’s awkward! If you don’t answer the phone, you’re not going to get a voicemail telling you you didn’t get the job, you’ll get a voicemail asking you to call back. Which means you’ll get excited thinking you’re getting a job offer! And then you’re live on the phone with a hiring manager trying to manage an awkward conversation.

I’ve taken to emailing rejected candidates rather than calling, for these reasons. I take it as a kindness, rather than getting their hopes up for nothing.

But recently, a week after I sent the rejection, a candidate sent me a long email expressing her disappointment having gone through a long hiring process only to receive an email and not a phone call. I haven’t responded yet, but I plan to share why I send emails and thank her again for her time. What’s your opinion on the matter?

Green responds:

Deliver rejections by email, not by phone.

If you call people, you’re making them respond gracefully on the spot to what might be really disappointing or even upsetting news (right after getting their hopes up when they see a call from you, too).

Some people prefer calls, of course. But more prefer emails. And delivering rejections by email is so common that even people who would have preferred a call won’t typically be outraged that they didn’t get one.

That said, there are situations where it’s especially important that your emailed rejection is particularly kind and thoughtful. If someone has invested an unusual amount of time in your hiring process (multiple rounds of interviews, exercises, etc.), ideally you’d send more than a perfunctory, generic-sounding rejection. In cases like that, the note should acknowledge the investment they’ve made, and ideally offer something personalized (such as with feedback on their candidacy, a mention of a particular area of strength, or some info on why you ultimately went in a different direction).

But ultimately, the thing about rejections is that there’s no way to reject people that everyone will be happy with. If you reject people by email, some will be annoyed that you didn’t call instead. If you reject people by phone, some people (way more of them) will wonder why you subjected them to an awkward phone call instead of just emailing. If you note they had a lot of strengths, some people will think you’re BS’ing them. But if you don’t do that, some people will feel the note is cold and impersonal. If you send rejections fairly quickly, some people will feel annoyed or even insulted you didn’t spend more time considering them. If you try to wait a respectable amount of time so people don’t feel that way, others will be annoyed that you didn’t tell them sooner.

You’re just not going to please everyone. By their nature, rejections sting, and everyone has a different take on what would most minimize that sting for them personally.

If you prioritized your candidates’ experience above every other consideration (which isn’t practical or realistic), I suspect the method that would please the greatest number of people would be to email a rejection that included an offer to set up a call if the person would like feedback. But there are loads of situations where it won’t make sense to offer feedback (and it would be a huge investment of time if you did), so I wouldn’t recommend that as an across-the-board practice, although you might choose to do it with a specific person on occasion.

So … keep on emailing your rejections. Be kind and respectful and personalize them where it makes sense, but emailing is just fine.

Want to submit a question of your own? Send it to alison@askamanager.org.