You’ve Been Turned Down for a Job. How Would You Prefer to Receive Feedback?

It’s always been our organization's policy to call candidates and inform them if they’re no longer under consideration after they’ve interviewed for a position. 

I was recently reading through comments to a LinkedIn post where a number of candidates said if they were being turned down, they would rather receive an email instead of a phone call — especially if no feedback were being offered. 

So, on LinkedIN we asked the question: If you were to receive this type of message, which would you prefer — a phone call or an email?

Here are the results of our poll:

Of the 684 people who voted, 431 (or 63%) said they would prefer to receive the news via email, with the other 253 (or 37%) preferring a phone call.

Wondering if there was a preference per generation, we broke the numbers down further. Since the poll was performed on LinkedIN, we didn’t have access to each voter’s age. However, we decided to categorize the results by years of work experience. Here’s what we found:

Less than 10 years of work experience:

Email - 71%

Phone - 29%

11 - 20 years of work experience:

Email - 69%

Phone - 31%

20+ years of work experience:

Email - 52%

Phone - 48%

It would appear that preferences of communication are changing with the passing of time and advent of new technologies. I wish we’d done a poll like this five years ago, so that we could see how much those preferences have changed. But my guess is that many more people would’ve preferred to receive a phone call.