Acknowledgement of application letter

Once job applications have been received for a vacant post, you need to sift through them to decide who to invite to interview. If this process will take some time, use our acknowledgement of application letter as a holding letter.

The sifting process

Once you have received applications for a vacant post, you need to decide who to invite to interview, assessing the candidates alongside the key criteria in the job description and person specification. If this process may take a while, for example a few weeks, you can send our Acknowledgement of Application Letter to each candidate in the meantime. This will ensure they don’t lose interest because they haven’t heard anything from you. Our letter serves another useful purpose too. One of the optional paragraphs in it states that it’s not your policy to contact those applicants who haven’t been invited to interview, so, if the candidate hasn’t heard from you by a set date, they should assume their application has not been successful on this occasion. This means you don’t have to write to everyone again, which can save on both time and money, particularly if you receive large numbers of applications for your vacancies.