A senior executive family member of mine who has worked with the worlds best search firms asks: Why don't recruiters call to tell the status of the search? Even if it's a no go, people want to know so they don't think about it anymore and can focus on other opportunities. Recruiters are perceived as rude.

When you don’t hear from us, we are probably working diligently bringing things together for you and the client. In that process we are often having privileged conversations with clients that we contractually cannot share with candidates. We like to get back to you when we have something concrete to share with you regarding the status of your candidacy.

Sometimes, in that rare occasion that a client won’t get back to us with any feedback or status it is embarrassing for us to admit to you, and in addition, we may decide to take the bullet so the candidate will think we (the recruiters) are rude versus thinking their potential employer is rude. Because they usually are NOT rude, they too are working through internal protocol.....

As you know, the process of hiring a key executive is a long intricate process with a great deal of critical input from lots of key decisionmakers within the client organization. There are going to be periods where the decisionmakers have to mull and digest the strengths and weaknesses or each candidate for the job, and oftentimes the position description is changed/amended once or twice (or many more times!) in that process. As painful as it seems from the outside, we have to give the client the time to work through it all, so that is probably when you are not hearing anything from us because those processes and conversations can be highly confidential.

I suppose we need to do a better job of communicating that particular point with candidates……

I, for one, will certainly try to do better.