A common complaint that I receive from employers is that applicants ghost them or drop out of contention for the job after applying. Why did they apply if they were not interested?
Trying to get to the core issue, one of my first questions back to the employers is: “How often do you check and respond to the applications?”
“I check my account and respond to applicants every Friday. It is more efficient if I just look at them all at the same time” is typical of an answer that I get.
Sometimes people claim to check it “all the time”. But when I check the website logs they often leave it days or even weeks without responding to applicants.
But just think about it for a moment. Every day that you don’t respond to a candidate who is actively looking for a job they may have:
- Lost interest for this job after initial excitement
- Progressed with other job opportunities
- Found other jobs with better pay, closer to where they live, with better work conditions.
- Felt that the lack of attention to their application is disrespectful. Rightfully so.
I rarely hear that comment of being “ghosted” by those employers who proactively respond to applicants in a prompt, inviting and professional manner.
Rarely is a job seeker going to apply to just one job. The average job seeker on JobsinJapan.com applies to over 10 jobs, and while some are just applying the “spray and pray” strategy, many of them will be excited about your job specifically. Remember that your top five candidates are probably also your competitor’s top candidates so act quickly.
There is no Perfect Candidate
Recruiters say their greatest stresses are sourcing qualified candidates (35%) and clients being too slow to make an offer (30%). When you realize that 47% of candidates for new jobs declined the offer because they accepted a job elsewhere, you’ll see why acting fast is so important. It is such a terrible waste, on many levels, when that great candidate rejects your offer because he or she accepted a job somewhere else causing you to go all the way back to beginning of the hiring process.
With our RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) Service, we see this all the time. After choosing some candidates for a live interview, we are often told to set up the interview for later the next week to save time and have all the candidates come for interviews on the same day. That might be as many as 10 days later. If you’re looking for a job, 10 days is a long time to find other jobs where they might have interviewed and received an offer within the week.
What is even more frustrating is after a fairly successful interview, or second interview, where the candidate is 90% a perfect match for the position, the hiring manager wants to wait to see what other candidates may apply. What happened while the hiring manager was delaying a decision was, you guessed it: she found another job.
So we’re actually worse off than square one as we wasted time and effort, and some good potential candidates are no longer available.
I can appreciate wanting to be careful when making a hiring decision, but there are very real consequences to not being decisive.
