How acceptable is it to tell a candidate they were the second top choice for position? [closed]

Question

While you were not our top candidate in this role, I was impressed by your skills and I was trying to open up a second position for you. I was ultimately not successful in doing that at his time.

We have been interviewing a few candidates for a development role, and we have a candidate that we believe will bring a lot of value if hired though they are not the best fit for the role we interviewed. I have been personally trying to see if we could open up a position but unfortunately could not convince my manager to approve the role.

Is a message like above appropriate? I would really like this candidate to re-apply with us in the future.

Answer 1

As a candidate I would hope that I lost a position to a better candidate, and would pretty much expect to be told this. Something is really wrong if I lost it to someone who performed worse than I did in the interview.

Also, if I did receive an email telling me that the interviewer was impressed enough to try and create a position for me, it would be a nice ego stroke. If you're really sincere, you could probably follow up with a coffee meeting and add the person to your LinkedIn network to keep in touch.

Answer 2

I'v never worked for an employer that would have told a candidate "you were our second choice." however, it's more typically for reasons other than hurting the candidate's feelings:

• Liability. If a candidate is feeling on the fence about whether or not you may have discriminated against them, you can bet that telling them "we ALMOST hired you" is going to do nothing but fuel their thoughts about suing for some kind of discrimination.
• Fairness. If there is no second position available, it really doesn't matter if a non-selected candidate was 2nd or 8th, there's no job. And whether they were 2nd or 8th, you still may or may not want them in your pipeline. So, just messaging this to number two (and not number 8), or including the rank in your message, doesn't really make sense.
• Implying a rank often incorrectly represents the hiring process. As a hiring manager who has filled several hundred roles, I usually don't think in terms of numbered ranks. I just interview until I find the "right" person. "Right" is based on many things that can't be quantified, so there's really no concept of scoring or ranking. I don't end up with a number one, a number two, a number three, and so on - I end up with someone I want to make an offer to, and a bunch of people I don't. This may not apply for some roles, of course, but these days, there are fewer and fewer jobs based purely on rote skills, and more that are based on decision making, thought process, and other hard to measure concepts.
• Recruiting pipeline strategy. Whether from an HR perspective or a hiring manager perspective, I probably (hopefully!) have a strategy for maintaining a recruiting pipeline. I may want to keep in touch with candidates, regardless of how they "ranked" for a given position. Just recently, I hired someone who was a perfect fit for one role - she had previously applied for another role and didn't even make the second round of candidates. If I was telling people where they "ranked" or only communicating with the second-best for any given search, you can bet I would have unintentionally ruled out a lot of good people, including her.
• Accuracy. Stating someone was "second" for a position would give the impression that they were very good at it - almost good enough. When in fact the truth may be, "you would be better for this other type of job." Again, numbering candidates limits you - because you're only ranking them against that particular position, when as a company, with a recruiting pipeline to keep filled, you're more interested in communicating about overall fitness for the company, and accurately understanding the specific skills they are good at, if it's something different than the current position requires.

If a recruiter really does want to keep someone warm for other positions, it's more typically done via social networking (ie LinkedIn), which is a great platform because it lets recruiters post jobs and get them in front of an audience they're already familiar with, then message individuals they think may be a good fit. Or, it's done via third party recruitment firms, which give a big advantage to both the candidate and the internal recruiter - it's possible and typical for an internal recruiter to explain detail to a third party recruiter that they may not convey to the candidate themselves, in order to help that third party steer the candidate in the future. This removes the liability and feelings-hurt issues discussed above, but still allows for specific feedback. Then, the third party recruiter can help steer the candidate towards positions that are more appropriate, indirectly helping manage the company's pipeline. This is how it played out for the individual I mentioned above - we had a frank conversation with the recruiter she was using about how her skill set was skewed more towards X than Y, and when we posted a job for X, the third party had her all primed and ready to go.

Answer 3

It may be appropriate but it's not efficient. While it's nice, it actually doesn't accomplish anything useful and it can be misinterpreted as being insincere since it's not actionable.

First, you need to be clear of your goals: what do you want to happen and what do you want the candidate to do.

If you want to keep the candidate "warm", you need to come up with some specific steps that will achieve this. Schedule some check in meetings, establish ownership in your company and who owns creating job req, figure out a timeline and some milestones that allow you to track whether this is making any head way or not.

Unless there are some measurable or specific actions, your comments are likely to come across as "all talk and no action".