Recruiters serve as the middle man for you, the organization hiring, and job candidates. When an interview is over, it’s ideal for both the candidate and you to provide feedback about comfort level, fit for the job, and anything else there may be potential concerns about. However, this doesn’t always happen, and it can cause problems when the organization doesn’t provide feedback to the recruiter.

This can cause harm to relationships. The candidate may wonder why they didn’t hear anything back about the interview, and they may not want to work with the recruiter anymore. On the other side of the coin, the recruiter doesn’t know whether you hired someone internally, whether they understood the specific job requirements, if they provided someone who wasn’t the right fit.

The candidate deserves to know how they did in the interview and how they can improve as well. They can also move on with their job search if they find out right away that they were not selected for the position. That feedback can help a candidate to improve themselves such that they may actually be right for the organization down the line.

Recruiters can also make changes in how they conduct a search for the next candidate for you when you provide timely and constructive feedback after every interview.

When you provide the recruiter with feedback throughout the hiring process, you help keep the top candidates engaged in your hiring process. If the recruiter can’t get feedback to them in a timely fashion, they’re more likely to accept an offer from another company they are also currently interviewing with.

Additionally, if you don’t communicate with the recruiter about a candidate, there is a higher risk of miscommunication, and it can cause hiring processes to go downhill fast. When you provide complete and correct information to your recruiter, you’ll end up hiring a better candidate. The hiring manager may miss something in a resume, or interviews may head down the wrong path.

When you don’t give feedback, the recruiter doesn’t know whether the candidate was a good fit, and if they were or were not, why or why not. The recruiter may spend more time reviewing resumes and interviewing candidates that they pass along to you to interview when you could just send a quick email saying why a particular candidate wasn’t a good fit.

Your recruiter knows your industry and a certain skill set that is very valuable to you as a hiring organization. However, without your feedback throughout the hiring process, you aren’t taking advantage of what the recruiter can offer you: hiring the best possible candidate.

While you may not be able to give feedback on every candidate you interview due to time and resources constraints, providing open, honest communication about at least some interviews helps the recruiter help you. The recruiter can better identify possible candidates that you actually want; the hiring process is streamlined, and fewer resources are spent on an outcome you both want to happen quickly and successfully: the hiring of the perfect applicant.