- Consulting firms that hire engineers provide detailed feedback to unsuccessful applicants.
- Applicants receive information about the number of applicants and the characteristics of their resumes.
- Forward founder Peter Berg said the aim was to improve applicants' experience in a tough job market.
The job-hunting process can be grueling: Applicants are asked to customize each resume and often don't hear back from dozens of companies to which they've spent hours applying.
Peter Berg, founder of Forward, a consulting firm that hires engineers remotely around the world for startups, wants to change that. About a month ago, Berg announced that Forward would provide data and background information to all applicants once the job posting period closed.
The company is now publishing details such as the number of applicants and interviews received, resume characteristics, and quantitative data collected from applications.
Berg told Business Insider that Forward tries its best to avoid wasting candidates' time with lengthy tests or assignments during the application and interview process. As a company that often hires candidates for short-term roles, he said it's important that the experience is a positive one and that they continue to communicate with candidates.
“What's good for the candidate is ultimately good for you,” Berg wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Praying for a better tomorrow.”
The co-founders say they decided to implement the new protocol after seeing a significant increase in applications since they started posting their jobs on LinkedIn: Today, each job gets between 200 and 2,000 applications, and the company typically sends two vetted candidates to employers within a week of the initial posting.
Sending out 2,000 rejection letters with detailed feedback may seem time-consuming, but Berg says it isn't: The company already tracks applicant data as it scores resumes, and the emails take 10 to 15 minutes to compose and are sent to applicants in bulk.
Berg told BI that he thinks it's an easy thing for employers to add and that it could make a “huge” difference to applicants — and for some applicants, it already has.
Berg said since implementing this new method, the company has received about 200 responses from applicants, many of whom have written several paragraphs about how positive and human the experience was.
One woman posted about her experience on LinkedIn, saying Forward sent her the “best” rejection letter. Applicant Melissa Bashur said the rejection letter listed the number of applicants, how many had experience in a particular industry, where the most applicants were, and the average hourly wage.
The document also includes background information on what the company is looking for, how its criteria have changed and how many people it has interviewed. It also summarizes the experience of the person they hired, Bashur said.
Melissa Bashur told BI that this insight has given her a better understanding of the current job market, and it's also helped her know which jobs she should apply for in the future.
“I had heard things were 'getting better,' but the tech industry still seemed oversupplied,” Bashur said. “This helped me shift my focus to a more positive and productive approach and be more selective about the jobs I applied for.”
Berg said the new protocols will help people understand what's going on in the current tough job market, where the tech industry is still struggling with pandemic-era overhiring and declining venture capital funding.
“We have a lot of senior executives looking for roles but they're having difficulty finding people. We're looking for nine, 10 month periods,” the founder said.
He also said that individual contributors who have no recruitment experience tend to be more ignorant about the recruitment process.
“That's why I want to provide feedback,” Berg said, “so that people understand why I wasn't chosen for this.”
