Imagine you’ve found the perfect candidate. You just finished your final interview with them last week, having started the process with them almost six weeks ago. They’ve met various managers, given an impressive presentation and passed an aptitude test with flying colours. You’re excited for them to hit the ground running, but just as you call to relay the good news, you find out that they’ve already accepted another offer.
Now, you have to start the entire process all over again, take someone else through another six-week hiring process, make sure everyone’s happy with them, hope they take the offer and presumably have them get started a month later if they have to give notice. That’s a long time to have a vacant role in your business. Not to mention the fact that you missed out on your top choice. What happened?
Quite simply, the recruitment and hiring process was far too long and gave your top choice ample time to reconsider their options and take another offer. This problem is all too common. In fact, a study of UK businesses showed that more than half of HR directors had lost out on a qualified candidate due to a long hiring process. Employers can often fall into the trap of looking at the interview process from one angle: their own. They think about all the ways they can get a candidate to categorically prove that they’re the right person for the job to avoid the dreaded bad hire. However, in doing this, they often forget to consider how that affects the candidate.
The best talent will not only be considering your offer. Whether they were active or passive jobseekers when you first nabbed them, six weeks ago, they have more than likely been considering their other options on a daily basis and have looked into and maybe even interviewed for other roles. And even if they didn’t go looking, if you headhunted them and managed to get them to consider moving jobs, chances are someone else has too.
If that other company has a recruitment process that only takes two weeks, they’re already ahead of you. In a talent-starved market, companies can’t afford to lose quality candidates simply because they didn’t get there in time. If someone is your top choice, you need to speed up the process and make them an offer before someone else does.
Your top candidate doesn’t have to have another offer on the table for them to turn down the role. Employers and candidates work on different schedules and candidates generally understand this and can be patient. However, it’s important for employers to have the same considerations. If you leave weeks between communication about the interview or continuously drag a candidate in to meet another senior manager just to be considered, you will start to make that candidate feel disrespected.
After all, most candidates who apply for jobs show respect by working their schedule to show up to an interview on time, well dressed and ready to show you why they deserve the job. This will most likely take place during working hours so they need to be flexible with their own job to do this. If, as a hiring manager, you appear to have no consideration for these requests on the candidate’s time before an offer has even been made, the candidate is likely to be put off the job altogether and may simply opt to stay put.
If the hiring process is especially lengthy, time-consuming, lacking in communication or requires a lot of extra work on the candidate’s part, it may raise a red flag for them in terms of the job itself. A candidate is much more likely to have second thoughts about taking a role if they’re having a negative hiring process and that especially pertains to a lack of communication throughout the process or the length of the process itself.
In fact, a 2018 survey from Career Builder showed that 68% of employees believe their experience as a candidate reflects how the company treats its people. Therefore, a slow interview process could be an instant turn off for innovative, quick-thinking candidates who like to implement processes and projects that can vastly improve a business. Why? Because if they see it takes between six and eight weeks to make a decision about hiring one person, they are likely to believe they won’t actually be able to make a difference due to so much red tape.
Losing one talented candidate due to a long hiring process is bad enough, but losing several others that you never even got a chance to discover is much worse. People talk about their job search experience. They talk about the interviews they’ve gone to and they talk about their experience throughout the hiring process, whether it’s positive or negative. This will have a major effect on your employer branding.
So, in the same way that your current employees are your strongest advocates, the candidates you lost due to a lengthy hiring process can be your biggest pain point in the war for talent. Many candidates won’t even apply for jobs if they know the hiring process is too long. After all, many don’t have to look far to find a far easier process.
Whether it’s scheduling some of the interview process closer together, putting a number of decision makers in the room for one interview or simply cutting a few unnecessary middle steps altogether, shortening your hiring process could be vital part of securing the best talent.
Find out more about building an effective employer branding strategy and how RECRUITERS can help your business improve its hiring processes.
Colette Averdijk is a principal recruitment consultant at RECRUITERS
Hour glass photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
