Another little stunt being pulled out of the goody bag by volume recruiters is the job filled email.

Hallelujah, Praise the Lord!  At least they are getting back to candidates with something.

And the ‘job filled’ email has been around some time, used mainly for ongoing volume campaigns when the hiring quota has been reached, and there are still candidates in the pipeline at different stages.

It is usually the final nail in the campaign coffin once the referencing stage has been completed. I say that, only because never has an RPO recruitment run that was not littered with bungled process steps and botched communications. But I digress.

Today, I myself was the lucky recipient of a job filled email, and I can tell you, I was stunned.

I had only applied for the job 6 days previously.

At the point of application, it had all been flowing along tickety-boo. Well, sort of.

At the submission stage, I had received a delightfully endearing auto-acknowledgement, though this literary pearl had alerted me to the salient fact that I should not reply if I had wanted to contact the Talent Acquisition Team (yes, my heart did sink into my sphincter when I saw that such a team was manning the operation). Though, sadly, just not manning this inbox.

So how could I contact the Talent Acquisition Team if I had a query? Who knows? Nothing on their Website and no opportunity to create an account, so that I might be able to monitor my progress.

As a candidate, do you not just get that warm glowing feeling when that happens? No, me neither.

Fortunately for me (or not, as it transpired), there was but a brief hiatus, before I learned my fate.

Within 6 days of receipt of my confirmation email – and I might say, the Talent Acquisition Team had been delighted to receive it, I was history. Finito. Kaput.

Amazing really, that a full assessment and selection programme could have been run during the preceding 4 working days, but you never know, they may have utilised the weekend and therefore the whole 6 days? Impressive, if true.

But, when dealing with an RPO, you generally have two starting points: incompetence or chicanery.

On the incompetence side, it is always possible that the advertisement had been left up after the end of an already-concluded process, and some disengaged and grunting systems administrator had not closed the process correctly.

However, if we are talking tomfoolery, it may well be that the job filled missive had been a usefully conjured rabbit to smooth the path, following a hasty and arbitrary sift process.

After all, a ‘regret’ email, – which prompts the question ‘why?’ – might have led to some comeback and the almost intolerable prospect for one of the RPO gang of actually having to read my CV and then cobble together a rationale for the No.

With a ‘job filled’, the can of worms remains firmly closed. You can’t really complain if the race was evidently already over before you put pen to paper. Any follow-up regarding the 6 days and the reliable standby of the administrative or technical error, would doubtless have been dusted down and given an outing.

So incompetent management, or charlatanical manoeuvring?

Well, you never can tell.

But even if the War for Talent is a myth for RPOs, one of them has at least waged its 6-day War on Talent.

unsplash-logoTom Pumford