Topping the list of reasons why you and other candidates exit a recruitment process is that your time was disrespected by the hiring company.
Next, that the recruiting process taking way too long and the salary offer didn’t meet your expectations.
Marketing people know very well that the candidate experience is the “doorway” where every new employee enters their company. They know that it’s a part of their corporate branding and Employee Value Proposition.
Unfortunately, many in HR seem unaware and too lazy to do something about it. Sadly many CEOs don’t care or ignore it. Only when they become candidates themselves do we hear the moaning.
Zero tolerance for bad hiring experiences!
A CareerBuilder survey shows that almost one-third of hiring companies (employers) lose candidates during background screenings, and research from the professional social network Blind found that nearly 30% of candidates abandon potential employers during the interview stage.
According to a survey by assessment provider ThriveMap, almost half the surveyed candidates did not like the pre-hire assessments because they take too long, and there were not sure why they were taking the assessment in the first place.
All of these issues lead to higher candidate abandonment, and they contribute negatively to candidates’ perceptions of an employment brand and the candidate experience.
Data from Talent Board’s Candidate Experience Benchmark Research Report shows that regardless of the stage at which candidates voluntarily exit, they do so for the key reasons mentioned in the opening paragraph of this blog.
Writer Kevin Grossman writes in his article on ere.net that Talent Board surveyed over one million candidates over the past 10 years.
Frankly, salary-related abandonment is to be expected and doesn’t really speak to the quality of a company’s candidate experience or to the efficiency of its recruiting team and processes. But the other two critical issues speak volumes.
Kevin Grossman, Talent Board President
Disrespecting candidates’ time
The most common occurrences include:
- Overly complex or repetitive applications with assessments.
- Screenings, tests, and/or assessments that take too long or that require unreasonable amounts of time and/or effort to complete.
- Recruiters or hiring managers schedule interviews but never show up (ghosting), or reschedule several times, or are disruptive during the interviews themselves.
- Job offers that take weeks or months to materialize.
- Lengthy and arduous onboarding practices (which get worse in heavily regulated industries).
- Employers disrespect candidates’ time is by keeping them in the dark about where they stand during the recruiting process.
End of the day, candidates are generally quite patient with the recruiting process because they understand how busy recruiters and hiring managers are.
But patience is not forever and without limits. With the challenges we all have in finding talent, the power has already shifted to candidates rather than hiring companies.
The Fix: Align KPIs with candidate experience
How can this be a surprise? It’s simple but the initiative must be a top-down approach.
CEOs must align the performance of their HR and Talent Acquisition recruiters with the candidate experience and the specific service-level agreements.
What gets measured gets done.
Management guru Peter Drucker (who actually said “What gets measured gets managed”)
