Why Are My Candidates Dropping Out Of The Hiring Process? - Lance Winsaft

This may be a problem that is plaguing your recruiting efforts. If you are experiencing an influx of candidates that begin your interview process but then drop out mid-way or toward the end, this is an extremely frustrating thing to happen. Spending time with people up front to have them only drop out later down the road can seem like a major waste of time and can put a huge drain on any recruiter or hiring manager’s energy when it comes to hiring talent. 

A COMPETITIVE MARKET

The market is extremely competitive right now and there is a lot of competition for really solid candidates in the market. The best candidates in the market are also currently working, so this adds another level of competition. Most of the candidates that we are representing are currently working and entertaining multiple offers, as well as counter offers from their current employer. This landscape is making it extremely difficult for companies to hire the right talent and often times results in a lot of time spent upfront that doesn’t turn into anything. This can seem like a waste of time, but it’s also part of how things are right now. The good news is that there are steps that you can take with your hiring process to hedge your bets and to improve this fall off rate.

FIND THE INEFFICIENCIES IN YOUR PROCESS

First and foremost, if you are experiencing a high volume of candidates dropping out of your hiring process, it’s likely there are several inefficiencies built into your process that are turning candidates off. And if you’re not turning candidates off, then you’re just not doing a good job of turning them on. It’s even more important in this market to turn a candidate on than to simply not turn them off. Unfortunately, most companies’ hiring processes turns candidates off, some leave candidates neutral, and very few are turning candidates on. Those who are able to excite candidates about their company and get them really engaged in the opportunity and have the process be smooth and effective are the ones who are getting the best talent.

INCREASING YOUR ACQUISITION RATE

So what are some of the things that you can do to increase your acquisition rate here? The first place to start is to look at what some of the common mistakes are. First and foremost, if you’re having candidates dropping out of your hiring process, it’s likely one major culprit is that you are unorganized when it comes to scheduling interviews and providing feedback. You are either unorganized or you are too slow here, or a combination of both. Candidates are getting communication and are likely being headhunted by multiple companies, so you’ve got to have an organized process and you’ve got to move fast. Remember that your interview process is the first experience that a candidate has with your company and is going to give them a lot of insight into how your company works. You want human resources and recruiting to be acting consistent with your core values and your company’s employer brand. So it’s critical that this process is extremely organized, detail oriented and provides a concierge service.

WINING AND DINING YOUR CANDIDATES

You want candidates to experience being truly valued and taken care of as they go through your interview process. It’s critical that they feel important and even feel special. This type of “wining and dining” goes a long way. That’s not to say you need to take candidates out to eat or anything like that, but providing a level of detail that gives them a concierge service is going to go a very long way and much of your competition is not doing that.

HAVING A FAST MOVING PROCESS

The other thing is that your process needs to move quickly. Often times human resources has a hard time getting feedback from hiring managers or other people involved in the hiring process. If this is an issue within your company, you need to call a meeting right away and get all the hiring managers on the same page when it comes to feedback. Many of our clients have issues when it comes to getting feedback from hiring managers and this is something that we see a lot of human resources professionals tolerate. The toleration of lazy or slow hiring managers who are too busy to get back to you is going to be one of the biggest issues you will have when it comes to acquiring talent. You need to get hiring managers on the same page, and you need to whip them into shape, so that they are on your team and they are clear about the importance of detailed feedback. Along those lines, hiring managers need to be trained on how to interview and how to represent the company to potential candidates. Oftentimes, human resources does a good job of keeping things organized, but then the hiring managers, who are not trained in interviewing and have never been trained in interviewing, blow it when it comes to doing the interviews and turn candidates off. You’ve got to have your hiring managers and your leadership team trained to be effective interviewers who represent your company effectively.

INTERVIEWS GO BOTH WAYS

Dealing with what we’ve talked about so far in this blog is going to go an extremely long way to you stopping the bleeding of having candidates dropping out of your hiring process. It’s important that your hiring process also communicates things about the culture and about the company itself. You can’t have an interview be all one-sided about you asking candidates about their experience and whatnot. In a competitive market, candidates are feeling different companies out and so the interview truly is going both ways. You’ve got to give your candidates an opportunity to learn about you and learn about what you do. You want them to really get a sense for your culture and what it’s like to work for you, what makes you different, etc. This is critical and is the best opportunity for you to really turn a candidate on to your company and your organization and the position. Again, hiring managers need to be up to speed when it comes to this part of the hiring process, and it needs to be a structured part of your interview process.

KEEPING A PULSE ALONG THE WAY

It’s important along the way in your interview process as well, to be checking in with candidates about where they are in the hiring process with any other companies. This will also allow you to gauge how much effort and speed needs to go into an individual person, depending on your level of interest in them. Keeping a pulse on this is going to be critical and also goes a long way to you building a relationship with that candidate, which is also going to keep them in your process.

CONCLUSION

These are a few tips that will go a long way to keeping candidates in your hiring process. There are many other things that you can do and there are a lot of ways that this blog could be broken down to go into detail on how to implement some of these things. If you’re interested in more of that, you should contact us about some of our coaching workshops. 

Best of luck!

PROS AND CONS OF JOB BOARDS FOR RECRUITING

NAVIGATING JOB BOARD OPTIONS

Today we’re talking about using job boards for recruiting and what posting on a job board is worth.

With so many choices available, there are pros and cons to using job boards and I want to go over some of those here in this post.

If you’re looking to hire talent, there are a lot of options to find potential candidates for open positions within your company.

It may seem overwhelming with so many job board options, artificial intelligence software, recruiters, staffing agencies, and more.

ARE JOB BOARDS WORTH IT?

The question is are companies like Monster, Careerbuilder, Zip Recruiter, Indeed, and other job boards worth spending the money on.

It’s very likely if you are looking to fill open positions at your company that you’re in one of a few different positions.

If you don’t have enough outbound recruiting man power you’re likely trying to find ways to passively attract talent to your company.

Job boards like mentioned above can seem like a good option.

Looking into options, you will notice they can be very expensive and it may be challenging to know which option to choose.

PICKING AND CHOOSING FOR YOUR NEEDS

The most important thing to understand is that job boards are good for certain positions only.

Job boards should be used primarily for low level entry level positions.

Ideally, roles that are administrative or don’t require a lot of specialized education or skills are best for job boards.

Job boards lose their effectiveness the more specialized you get with a position, especially with more senior roles.

Once you start to get to the manager, director, VP or above, job boards are going to become increasingly less effective.

QUANTITY OVER QUALITY

One way or another, with job boards, you’re going to have to allot time to sift through an abundance of resumes.

Using job boards for recruiting will get you a high quantity of resumes, but the quality of those resumes and candidates is going to be very low.

You will likely reject eight or nine out of every 10 resumes that come through for your position.

You or someone on your staff will need to sift through these initial resumes and weed out the ones that are simply junk.

Many job boards today allow candidates to apply to multiple positions at once.

Therefore candidates are not necessarily looking at job descriptions or job requirements.

Often candidates are just blasting their resume out to as many positions as possible hoping that something will stick.

This shotgun affect makes it a headache for anyone who has to sift through hundreds of resumes to find only a few potentials.

For certain roles this can be good, but for many roles it isn’t worth it.

You may not have the staff or the time to go through all these resumes, therefore this may not be a good option for you.

SIFTING THROUGH THE MESS

The other thing to consider is that for the most part, people who are applying on job boards are not currently working.

Candidates without jobs who are actively looking may not be where the best talent tends to lie.

You may want to consider talent that is not actively and aggressively looking for a new position, or maybe not looking at all.

People working effectively for your competition may have the time to find a new position.

With this in mind, you’re likely not going to be tapping into the passive job market.

So you are limiting yourself greatly to the pool of talent that are the active talent.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some good people out there applying on job boards, but they are the exception to the rule.

IS THE COST WORTH THE PAYOFF?

The other tricky aspect with job boards is that you never can know which is the best one for your market.

Unless you are in an extremely specialized field like healthcare, engineering or software development, you won’t know which job board is best.

In these cases, it’s likely you will need memberships with multiple job boards which can get expensive.

The costs for membership and the time to speak to and sift through the high volume of resumes can be costly.

You’re likely better off hiring an internal headhunter or an external headhunting agency like us to do that work on your behalf.

HIRING A RECRUITER

One thing to keep in mind is to never hire a recruiting company that is going to post on job boards on your behalf.

Those are lazy recruiters and if you’re going to hire a recruiter they should be tapping into the passive market mentioned above.

A recruiter is likely going to be slightly more expensive, but you’re going to get much more bang for your buck.

Also your life is going to be a whole lot easier and your experience hiring will be much more streamlined.

IN CONCLUSION

Job boards can work, but they take a lot of work to manage and can end up being very expensive.

I recommend doing a cost-benefit analysis.

You really want to look and see what you’re going to get with a recruiter versus what you would get with the job boards.

You’ll certainly attract better candidates going with the recruiter.

In any case, find and do what works best for you and your business.

HIRING REMOTE, PARTIAL REMOTE, AND TELECOMMUTE WORKERS - Lance Winsaft

Today we’re talking about the pros and cons of hiring remote workers or employing remote or telecommute workers.

It’s important to keep in mind that all businesses are different and this may not work for everyone.

Some businesses are prone to work very well with remote workers while others are not designed to have remote teams.

It’s important to pay attention to this because if your business is a good candidate for remote workers, you can greatly benefit.

If your business is not conducive to hiring remote workers this article may not be relevant to you.

If you want to consider this, you’ll need to see what changes you can make to take advantage of remote workers.

REMOTE WORKERS ARE TRENDING

There is currently a large trend for candidates that are interested in the ability to work remote or partially remote.

Many people nowadays are putting much more emphasis on their work-life balance.

Being able to work remote offers people the flexibility to have their work-life schedule be more balanced.

Many people also work better remote then they do in an office environment.

The office environment can often have many distractions with other coworkers or other things going on.

This of course depends on your office culture, office environment and the type of people that you hire.

Many extremely talented people who are at the top of their field are only interested in working with this flexibility.

THINGS TO CONSIDER WHEN HIRING REMOTE

Being open to hiring remote workers opens you up to a segment of the market that you may be missing out on.

If you are thinking of hiring remote workers, you have to consider how that will fit into your existing culture.

If your existing culture is one where everyone is in the office and then you hire someone remote, this could cause friction.

You could produce dissension in the ranks of your employees who might feel left out or jealous if the new person gets to work remote but they don’t.

TRANSITIONING TO HAVING REMOTE WORKERS

If you’re considering taking this on, you want to take inventory on whether your current employees can work remote.

Perhaps you make working remote more like a benefit to be attained if someone reaches certain KPI’s or metrics.

Many sales people are extremely effective working remote.

WHICH POSITIONS WORK BEST REMOTELY

If someone travels a lot and they’re mostly on site with clients, there really is no need to have them in office.

 You can benefit greatly from a rockstar sales person being somewhere else in the country.

Customer service folks and account management people also function very well in a remote capacity.

Believe it or not, accounting folks and financial people can also work very well remote.

You might want to think about having your internal financial people working remote as well.

WHO IS THE RIGHT FIT FOR REMOTE WORK

When hiring remote you should know if they are the kind of personality that’s productive in a remote function.

There are many people who if left to their own devices will not get the work done that needs to get done.

If you have those kind of people working remote you will see a slump in productivity.

Your people should know that their ability to work remote goes hand-in-hand with the results they are on the hook to produce.

In other words working remote should be slated more like a privilege or a benefit that is earned rather than a “right.”

Another trick to hiring a solid remote employee is hiring someone who has been successful working remote in the past.

THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

There’s also incorporate partial telecommuting where your team is in the office 3-4 days and remote 1-2 days a week.

This model can provide the best of both worlds for you and your employees.

Then you can accomplish the things you need with the team together and have the balance of working remote some days.

This is a very common model that’s being adopted by many companies and is being extremely successful.

This model works if all of your employees are local as you’ll need them in the office together certain days of the week.

RECRUITING REMOTE WORKERS

If you are going to go after remote workers it may be challenging from a recruiting perspective.

Recruiting firms like us are extremely solid resources for being able to tap into other markets for remote work.

Remember, the challenge will be instead of just recruiting in your city you’re going to be recruiting nationwide.

You may even be just recruiting in certain times zones.

Your pool of people to reach out to is going to increase dramatically.

You will need to have a strategy for how to tap into those markets and find the best talent.

Keep in mind that it will likely take a lot of volume, so leaning on a recruiter can be a very valuable resource for tapping into that market.

CONCLUSION

Look at remote and telecommute working as a way to tap into a segment of the market with more great talent.

This is a segment of the market that is growing as more and more people are looking for that work-life balance.

More and more people are looking for the ability to have flexibility around their work schedules.

Many of these types of people can be extremely high producers and will produce better with this type of flexibility.

As managers it’s important for us to focus on hiring the right personalities that can work well autonomously.

This can be more productive for managers also, not having to control and micromanage everybody.

You owe it to yourself to explore this a bit further and see if it’s something that can work for your business.