Picture this: You are one step away from hiring a candidate.
You did all the right things including sourcing from credible job portals, filtering relevant prospects, crafting an impactful interview experience and making a competitive offer. Except, the candidate abruptly stopped communicating with you after receiving the offer letter.
This is a classic case of ghosting - the infuriating phenomenon of someone abandoning all communications. Especially as most communication has moved online, people will find it easier to ignore than to say no.
Say Goodbye to Ghosting
Streamline Your Hiring Process
Right from the beginning, the candidate should know the multiple stages and how long each would take. Automating your screening process makes for a more enjoyable candidate experience. It inspires confidence in the candidate that they are joining a company that prioritises productivity.
Using tools like Equip automated assessments, you can simply share the assessment link with the candidates and they can attempt it at their convenience. No scheduling issues, no in-person screenshares!
Avoid Passive Job Seekers
Sometimes it is not you, it is them. There are plenty of passive job seekers in the market. They could be testing the waters to stay abreast with the current trends in skills, pay and innovation. Although hiring passive job seekers has its advantages, they are more likely to vanish without a trace. These candidates could only be shopping around without giving a second thought to incoming job offers. Identify such candidates in the initial stages and weed them out at the right time.
Create an Engaging Interview Experience
The interview should be a precursor to how challenging the role can be. It should give a reason to the candidates to look forward to working with your company. Candidates who thrive on solving new problems can be attracted through this strategy. Skip the clichéd interview questions. Customise the interview specific to what your work environment offers for the target position.
Get the Team Lead Involved
Even though recruiters manage the overall process, candidates will spend most of the time working with their reporting managers and teams. Getting senior leadership involved during the interviewing stages will give candidates a flavour of what their day-to-day activities would be like. Also, this makes it less likely for candidates to ignore emails the Team Leads are cc-ed on because they can identify with the Team Lead more.
Mind-blowing how good Patrick Collison is as CEO. When Stripe was >500 people he'd rearrange his schedule to personally meet with engineering candidates to convince them to interview; and again to close them. In many companies >150, CEOs deem themselves too important to do that.— Slava Akhmechet (@spakhm) April 23, 2022
Take a leaf out of the leaders' book who have been demonstrating this strategy in their companies.
Your offer may be similar to the others they have at hand. But, if you convince them that they will be better off with you in a few years' time, they will choose you.
Roll out the Offer Letter at the Right Time
Remember how we emphasized making the candidate aware of how long each stage would take? It is not only limited to the ongoing process but also the outcomes associated with it. Avoiding a longer wait period for the offer letter is a given but be wary of not extending it too soon either. Sometimes it pays to play ‘hard-to-get’.