Why Your Top Candidates Are Accepting Other Roles
Posted on 3rd May 2018 by Parker Bridge
“We would like to offer you the role.”
“Thank you but I’ve already accepted an offer with another employer.”
Your heart sinks. All that time and money finding your ideal candidate wasted but what went wrong?
Well, several things could have led you here but there is one common reason why we see employers consistently lose out on the best talent: they’re painfully slow during their recruitment process.
Whilst it pays to be thorough when evaluating your candidates, taking too long to provide a job offer can damage your chances of securing your first choice. Why? Because in a candidate-driven market, the best professionals can choose who they want to work for. Being too slow can harm your reputation and make your business look less enticing.
The great news is that there’s plenty you can do to prevent losing your ideal candidate to your competitors, even if your recruitment process is cemented in concrete and there’s no hope of it ever changing. Here’s how.
Set a ‘Hire by Date’
Deadlines can be great. They keep us accountable and on track to meet our targets. However, many businesses fail to set ‘hire by dates’ for their vacancies despite the fact that they’re easy to set up and highly effective. A ‘hire by date’ can give you a sense of urgency and help secure those top candidates that you would otherwise miss out on.
Develop an Expedite Process
You don’t have to skip vital parts of your hiring steps to implement a ‘hire by date’. In fact, you simply need an expedite process that your Recruiters can use to alert you to the fact that you’re at risk of losing a top candidate. You should also look into upgrading your hiring tech to speed your processes up, such as video interviews through Skype. You can also speed up your offer stage by drafting offer documents for your top candidates during the final round of interviews, rather than waiting till the last hurdle.
Smooth Out Your Candidate Experience
Improving your candidate experience can be a great way to lift your business above your competitors and towards becoming an employer-of-choice. If you can’t make any significant changes to your hiring process to reduce your speed to hire then focusing on your candidate experience will be even more crucial.
As an example, let’s say it’s your company’s policy that all your business partners must interview your candidates for senior-level roles. However, arranging interview times for every partner can be a lengthy process and prolong your interview stage by days if not weeks, which can cause top candidates to accept other job roles before all your round of interviews are finished. If you can, bundling up your partner interviews into a single panel interview is the best way to avoid damaging your candidate experience. If you can’t do that, then communicating with your candidates will be key.
Communicate with Transparency & Honesty
Whether you can reduce your speed to hire or not, open and honest communication will always be key to beating your competitors to hiring the best candidates in the market. An easy way to start doing this is to make it habit to explain every step of your recruitment process as your candidates move through them. This will help to keep your candidates engaged with your business and the job vacancy and informed of what’s happening next.
Falling silent for days and weeks whilst you deliberate with your peers can alienate your candidates. It will also cost you time and money after you find out your ideal candidate has accepted another role because they weren’t engaged enough during the time it took you to make a decision. If, and when, you face delays, communicating the reasons as to why these delays exist and what the next steps are will reduce the negative impact they can have on your candidate experience. And above all else, be transparent and honest with your candidates from start to end.
Seek Feedback
Your recruitment journey is an incredibly complex process. To ensure you’re in a position to identify and address any and all potential issues, you need to seek honest feedback from various different points of view. This includes existing employees, candidates you hired, candidates you didn’t hire and internal or third-party Recruiters you work with.
Closing Thoughts
Whilst you should by no means rush a hiring decision, taking too long to make an offer is risky. You should take enough time to properly evaluate every candidate but if you want to ensure you beat your competitors to the top talent in the market, you also need to ensure you design and foster a smooth recruitment process and candidate experience.
If you want to save time and money with your recruitment and connect with the best professionals in Wellington, then get in touch to see how Parker Bridge can help you.
You can also follow us on LinkedIn for the latest industry news and more.