Letter advising rejected candidate of new vacancy

After a recruitment process for a particular role has concluded, if then an alternative job vacancy arises that you think may be suitable for a rejected job applicant, use our letter to contact them about it.

Retained details

Where you’ve rejected a job applicant after a first, second or further interview using our Rejection of Candidate after Interview Letter, in some cases you might have sought that person’s consent to retain their CV on file for in case other suitable vacancies arise in the future. This is more likely to be the case in relation to those unsuccessful job applicants who you would have been happy to employ had there not been a more suitable candidate to whom you offered the vacant role. However, if that job applicant had not given you their informed consent to your keeping their details on file for this future recruitment purpose, you should generally have destroyed their personal information (and your interview notes) within a reasonable period after the end of the relevant recruitment exercise, e.g. six months to allow for any discrimination claims, and in accordance with the terms of your GDPR Privacy Notice for Job Applicants. This is because one of the data protection principles in the UK GDPR says that personal data should not be kept for longer than is necessary for the purposes for which they are processed.

Alternative vacancy

Assuming though that you did seek the unsuccessful job applicant’s consent to retain their details on file for, say, twelve months or two years for in case any future suitable vacancies were to arise, and assuming they freely provided their informed consent and then an alternative vacancy comes up, you can use our Letter Advising Rejected Candidate of New Vacancy to let them know about it. Our letter refers to previous correspondence and the individual’s provided consent and then advises them that a new vacancy has now arisen that you think may potentially be suitable for them. It also enables you to enclose further information about the vacant role. Do provide a job description and person specification if those documents are available.

Next steps

Our letter then asks the job applicant to get in touch with you by a set deadline if they’re interested in the vacancy and sets out that, if they do so, they may be invited to attend an interview for it – you may not be able to simply offer the individual the job if you have a policy in place requiring all vacant roles to also be advertised internally. Unless you’re going to give a sufficiently long deadline for the job applicant to contact you, it’s advisable to send the letter by email (as well as by post) for in case they’re currently away from home on annual leave. Finally, our letter goes on to say that if you don’t hear from the job applicant by your deadline, you’ll assume they don’t want to be considered for the vacancy.