Managing Former Employees Who Re-apply for a Job

If you’re a hiring manager at a franchise or chain company - chances are you’ve dealt with the same applicant more than once in one way or another.

Managing former employees who re-apply is common in franchise or chain restaurants with many different locations.  

The challenge is that in some cases, this information may be very important for you to know, so what do you do?

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What are former employees, and why does it matter when hiring?

When we speak of former employees, we are referring to someone who has previously worked within your organization, in some capacity.  
They could have worked at a different location, or in a different role.  Either way, they have a history with your company that you should be privy to for security, and best practice reasons.

For example, you may want to flag candidates and former employees who have been terminated by your company in the past, but re-apply through another location.

In other circumstances, you may want to fast track candidates and former employees who also worked at the same location, and had  great  performance.

You should also know about candidates who apply for your company after already going through the interview process at another of your locations; why did that happen, and what was the story there?

This problem gets exponentially more difficult the larger you are and the more disconnected your systems.
That  is why it’s so important for your ATS system and your HCM system to be integrated.

How do I monitor and regulate my employee re-hiring policy?

Making sure you have a standardized process across hiring managers for: duplicate applicants, re-hires (especially open communication between managers) and practise properly filing each candidate with a correct record and notes is key to streamlining your hiring process.

At Push, we built applicant history directly into our ATS. The history tab is important so that you can understand if an applicant has either applied for or worked with your company in the past. Push automatically detects the same email from all your brands and displays information about their history from the system.

There are two sections to the history tab:

1. Applications: Past applications with your company, even displaying the last status of the applicant.
2. Work History: If the employee has worked at another location within your organization, there will be a table in that section displaying that employee's information like position and location.

Important: Push will still indicate an applicant worked at another location, even if the hiring manager does not have permission to see that location’s employees. It will simply indicate which one we found the record.

Whenever there is a duplicate email, there will be a yellow notification at the top of the page indicating the duplicate. If there is no history it will say, "There are no records to display" in place of the table. We recommend not deleting any previous applications unless the submission was in error so that you can always track applicants who re-apply. Another tip is to tag applicants with labels so you can see their full history.

Think about your company re-hiring policy and how tracking history when it comes to former employees can help your HR team.

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