How your recruitment process annoys candidates
Last month, global recruitment company Robert Walters released the results of a survey conducted with 800 job seekers.
Three significant, although unsurprising, findings of the survey were the following:
1. A large majority of job seekers (79%) were turned off by a lengthy recruitment process with 77% agreeing that the job process from application submitted to offer letter received should take no more than one month .
A lengthy recruitment process is at odds with almost all companies that state that hiring high quality staff is important to them. Why do something that is guaranteed to annoy the best candidates and leave you with the most desperate or patient? As the survey results show, organisations are their own worst enemy because they are mostly ineffective at managing their candidates’ expectations about the recruitment process they are going though.
2. Nearly half of the respondents (45%) had withdrawn from a recruitment process because they didn’t like the person conducting the interview(s) .
Why do interviewers still persist with sloppy habits that make them easy to be disliked by candidates? Classic examples being; keeping the candidate waiting past the appointed interview time, not reading the resume in advance, asking inappropriate or lazy questions and making no attempt to sell the job or the organisation to the candidate.
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3. Overwhelmingly respondents (71% of them) believe they should only have to undertake two job interviews before receiving a job offer.
I don’t think it is so much the number of interviews that the candidates object to but rather the nature of these ‘interviews’. I suspect if you did a more in-depth survey you would find that candidates are mostly annoyed by the fact that each interview mostly replicates the previous ones. The suspected purpose of the extra interview(s) being that it’s really just a ‘tick the box’ exercise to ensure the previous interviewer hasn’t let through a dud.
What could you and your clients learn from these results?
I think the 77% who believe a job offer should made in under a month are being disingenuous.
Many of these people would themselves have to give a month's notice to their current employer to take up a new job, but they obviously don't have a problem keeping their new employer waiting a month!
If someone can't wait a month for the recruitment process to be completed then this alerts me to the possibility that they have no patience, and that this is not a desirable trait in a new recruit.