Are you struggling to reduce your candidate drop off rate? The reason for high Candidate drop-off rate is mostly because of the mistakes made in pre-hiring. In this article, I will go through the different pre-hiring mistakes one should avoid while hiring new candidates.
Let’s dive into the mistakes –
Long application process
I respect any company’s application process. The problem with a company having a long application process is that they’ll be missing on a lot of candidates, especially the quality ones.
Nobody likes to go through a long application process.
Solution – Try to make the application process as minimal as possible. I know there might be some tests whose results are very important to an organisation. But one can always add that test later in the hiring process.
This way companies won’t be losing potential candidates.
Less or no support for candidates
Have you seen any job listing on Job portals?
You’ll rarely find any way to contact the recruiter. Even if you’ll find a way to contact it would be probably through a complex form which requires the candidate to provide his/her resume too.
Things are little better at career pages hosted individually by the company. We live in 2018. It’s the age of AI-powered chatbots. Implementing a simple chatbot can help solve this problem. Alternatively, a simple form or a support email ID can also be useful.
Lack of information
Do you still have a boring career page on your website?
Boring career pages doesn’t help in 2018. Not only do these pages lack information but it also lacks important elements. Elements like “Life at X company” Videos, Images, Testimonials etc. Unless you hire candidates by visting colleges, a career page is super important for attracting quality talent.
While you might think, interested people will apply regardless of the images/videos being present or not, but the truth is that these elements do have an impact on the end goal.
Not keeping the candidate updated
In most hiring processes, candidates are uninformed about a lot of activities/updates. Even if they are notified usually it’s quite late.
This way candidates are kept in the dark. The problem is that, in recent years, the market has completely changed. So in most cases, developers have more than one offer in hand. Hence, even if there’s a small delay, you can completely lose the candidate.
Solution – It’s very important to keep the candidate informed at every step of the process. This can be through an Email or an SMS. This is very important for a good candidate experience. The experience will reflect heavily on the brand of the company.
Improper job description
Creating the right job description is quite important. Many time people either go on putting a lot of criterions or very few in the job description. Both ways, you won’t be able to attract the right candidate.
Hence, it’s very important that recruiters spend enough time creating a proper job description. Read this awesome article on creating a Job description. Feel free to take advise from your colleagues and friends too.
Rushing the hire
There are times when companies need urgent hires. I totally understand such a situation. The problem is that the urgent hire shouldn’t lead to a bad hire.
According to Google Hire – The average hire time is around 63 days. Usually, you would want to start the hiring process 4-6 weeks prior to closing a position. The earlier you start the better. Also, the time can increase or decrease depending on the complexity of the role, a company is hiring for.
Resisting technology
Many companies try to resist implementing new technology. We are in 2018, where technology is changing rapidly. There is no other option other than adopting the new technologies. It’s as simple as using an HR chatbot to screen candidates.
In recruitment itself, things have changed greatly. You can now automate the application process, interview process, onboarding & much more. I know it’s difficult to adapt to new technology.
Conclusion
Hope you were able to learn something new from the article. I think if you can avoid these mistakes, you can considerably improve your hiring process. Feel free to share your views in the comments section below.