Guest post by Noah Sipes, co-founder of Live Oak, a boutique recruiting firm working exclusively in the green industry at the leadership level.
You scheduled him for 10. He showed up at 9:45, which you noticed and forgot about by noon.
The interview went well. Better than well, actually. You walked him out to the parking lot, which you don’t always do, and you told him you’d be in touch within the week. He thanked you. Firm handshake. Good eye contact. The kind of guy who’d clearly done this before and still cared enough to show up sharp.
Week one passed. Something came up, you were slammed, the follow-up slipped.
Week two, you were still sorting through budget and org chart questions. Nothing to do with him.
Week three, you drafted an email and didn’t send it.
Week four, the draft was still sitting there. You told yourself you’d get to it. You didn’t.
He sent a follow-up the next week. Polite. Professional. Then another one a few weeks after that. At some point he called and left a voicemail, which you listened to and told yourself you’d return. He wasn’t hounding you. He was just doing what any reasonable person would do when someone looked them in the eye and said they’d be in touch. Eventually his emails fell far enough down the thread that finding them would’ve required actual effort, and that was that.
No feedback. No closure. Just silence, which is its own kind of answer, except it’s not really an answer at all.
That was eight months ago.
His name came across your desk this morning. New role. Branch manager. A competitor, same market, same service lines. Someone over there called him back.
You sat with that for a second.
He wasn’t perfect, you remember that much. There was something about his experience that felt thin in spots, or maybe it was the comp conversation, or maybe you just weren’t sure. The reasons blur together now. What doesn’t blur is that he drove across town twice, took half a day off work, spent three weeks checking his phone because you said you’d be in touch within the week.
And you never were. Not even to say no.
Feedback Matters
Here’s the thing about feedback, and this is true whether you’re hiring, being hired, selling, being sold to, or just existing in an industry small enough that you’ll eventually sit across from the same people twice. Knowing is always better than not knowing. A no with a reason is a gift, even when it stings. A no without one, fine; people survive it. But silence does something different. It leaves the other person alone with their own interpretation, and nobody is ever generous with themselves in that situation.
He didn’t need you to want him. He needed you to close the loop.
The fix isn’t complicated. Twenty-four hours. Not a decision, not next steps locked in stone, just initial feedback. Something real. What you thought, where you’re leaning, what questions came up after he left. If you’re still working through it, say that. A holding message that says you’re looped in with the rest of the team and will have something concrete by the end of the week is still something. Candidates aren’t asking for a yes. They’re asking to not be left alone with their own assumptions, which, given the circumstances, are never going to land in your favor.
We call it being merchants of reality. Good or bad, early or late, you tell people where things actually stand. It’s how you run a search without it running you, and it’s the single thing that separates a candidate experience people remember from one they warn their network about.
Because here’s what most owners miss. He wasn’t just interviewing for a job that day. He was interviewing your company. How you communicate under no pressure is exactly how you’ll communicate under all of it. The companies that move with some urgency, that close the loop even when the answer isn’t ready, they’re not just better at hiring. They’re harder to compete against. Best candidates talk. And this industry is not that big.
And when it goes the other way, when a company builds a reputation for dragging things out or going quiet, the pool doesn’t disappear overnight. It just gets worse slowly. The best candidates stop entertaining the conversation once they hear the name. Not loudly, they don’t post about it; they just quietly decline. What’s left is whoever doesn’t know yet. That’s the snowball nobody sees coming until they’re wondering why every search feels harder than the last one.
The process fix isn’t complicated either. Know what you actually need before you start looking. The companies with the tightest hiring processes aren’t the ones with the fanciest systems; they’re the ones who walked in knowing exactly what they were hiring for and why. They move fast because they already did the thinking. And regardless of the outcome, they treat every candidate like their time mattered, because in an industry this size, the person who wasn’t right for this role is probably connected to the person who is.
You didn’t, and now he’s gone. Not gone like moved on and forgot about you. Gone like he’s sitting in a branch manager chair at a company that is now going to be harder for you to compete against, because he’s good. You knew that the day he walked in. And someone else figured out the same thing. They just called him back.
Close the Loop
There’s someone in your inbox right now in the same position he was in eight months ago. Waiting. Checking. Giving you more benefit of the doubt than you’ve probably earned.
The role might not be right. The timing might be off. That’s fine; that’s the job.
But the silence isn’t a neutral act. It just feels like one.
The scenario above is fictional, but it’s built from real patterns we see working in this industry every day. The details change. The outcome doesn’t.
