Nobody likes rejection. Here’s how to soften the blow, per a new Temple study.
The study found detailed rejections were better for getting people to come back to an online forum. The same can be said for rejections in the workplace, the researcher says.
Not all rejections are the same.
How they’re communicated matters, according to a recent study by Sunil Wattal, associate dean of research and doctoral programs at Temple University’s Fox School of Business.
Wattal found that users of an online forum, Stack Overflow, were more likely to return after their submissions were rejected if they had received a detailed reason for their rejection.
Stack Overflow has been known for “treating its contributors harshly” because of its “rigorous quality control,” the study said, but in 2013, its rejection notice language changed to be more explanatory. Wattal compared the before and after and found that new users were more likely to return when they knew more about why their submission was rejected.
Wattal’s findings were recently published in the study “Not Good Enough, but Try Again! The Impact of Improved Rejection Communications on Contributor Retention and Performance in Open Knowledge Collaboration.” The coauthor of the study is Aleksi Aaltonen of the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken.
While Wattal’s study focused on rejection in one online platform, he says the findings could apply in many other settings. The Inquirer spoke with him about the implications for rejection in the workplace. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What was your main finding?
We found overall that the platform was better off — that Stack Overflow is better off — because it increased the quantity of the postings but did not decrease the quality. So there was no significant impact on the quality of posting. The net effect is the platform gained more content without really losing any quality.
So you found that people returned more often if they were told why they were being rejected.
Yes, the likelihood of returning was much higher if they were told more clearly why they were being rejected.
Obviously nobody likes rejection, but sometimes, if they feel that they know the reason why it was rejected and they get a sense that they were being treated fairly, I think that kind of softens the blow in a way.
What can your findings tell us about communicating rejection in the workplace, such as not getting hired or getting laid off?
You see rejection in all kinds of different applications — in business, in society. Rejections are everywhere.
E-commerce sites like Amazon, Etsy, eBay, every now and then, they encounter a product which doesn’t comply with either the ethical standards or for some other reason, and they have to take down some of those listings. Or even in companies, somebody thinks they come with a great idea, and their boss just says, No, this is not great.
Even in those cases, I think it really helps if you give them an explanation of why their idea was rejected, and it encourages them to come back in the future and still be engaged with either the organization or the website.
In customer service, sometimes people have to hear a “no,” that their complaint isn’t legitimate, or they’re not getting that refund. In those cases, communicating well and giving a more informative explanation of why they’re being denied is always a good idea.
In your study with Stack Overflow, that platform wants users to keep coming back to the website to contribute to the online forum, so there’s a vested interest in sending a rejection notice that would get people to return. In business, what kind of incentive does an employer have to explain a rejection?
In the case of, say, for example, job postings, maybe that applicant was not a good fit with that particular posting, but they could still be valuable to the company in a different role.
It’s not a good idea, basically, to burn bridges, and it doesn’t cost a whole lot to be nice or to give a decent explanation. In terms of the cost-benefit analysis even, it’s always a good idea to give a more informative explanation just to maintain the relationship.
Does it matter whether it’s a human that’s delivering a rejection notice, versus a computer or automated response, in terms of the outcome?
There’s a lot of work going on right now about exactly these things, like: How do people feel about interacting with computers when computers make decisions that affect their lives in some way? I’m not sure exactly if anybody has studied rejections by computers, but I would expect that there would be some difference in the way people take rejection from humans versus computers.
Some companies use applicant tracking systems for hiring, which screen applicants and filter candidates out. And we know that some applicants never hear back about their application. Can your study tell us anything about the effect of ghosting?
Especially in some cases where companies receive tens of thousands of applications [for just a few open roles], probably, from a very myopic perspective, they don’t care about a lot of them. But again, from an overall brand perspective, it doesn’t take a whole lot to send out that rejection in a timely way, in a way that seems fair, to explain why it was rejected — maybe there were other better applicants, or it was not the right fit. People want to know so that they can maybe improve in the future.