So you think graduate recruiters should send personal feedback?

1. Graduate recruiters are incredibly busy. Yes, they genuinely are. I’ve been in contact with a lot of them over the last two years and there is a lot of pressure on them to deliver the right graduates every year. Whether it’s planning their marketing campaign, carrying it out (in other words, hotels and trains for about two months), creating their application system, reading through every application, organising their assessment days, carrying them out, keeping track of trainees, facilitating seat rotations, etc etc etc…believe me, that is simply half of their responsibilities.

 2. Students spend literally hours and hours pouring over individual applications for each law firm without any idea whether it will lead to anything. To receive an automated email simply saying ‘thanks but no thanks’ is incredibly frustrating, especially when you have no idea where you fell short.

 3. Law firms often receive thousands of applications for a few places. To give an example, I recently visited a law firm that received 2324 applications for 15 training contracts. Now that requires some serious cutting.

 4. Genuinely useful written feedback would usually take 30 minutes at a minimum. For the graduate recruiter in question above, that equates to 2324 (minus the 15 successful candidates) x 30 minutes = 69,270 minutes. In other words, over 114 days of work.

 I’m going to sit on the fence on this one though!