Recruiting (4)
Recruiting
You only have one job as a Recruiter!
As recruiters, we really only have one job. That job is to get a candidate to tell us “Yes” or “No.” Yes, I’m interested, please tell me more, or No, I’m not interested in the job you have, but here’s what I would be interested in if you ever have it available. When you break recruiting down to this simple premise, it doesn’t really seem that hard. The problem most recruiters run into is that they believe a non-answer is “No.” But it’s not. A non-answer is nothing. It’s neither yes nor no. It’s you better keep trying until I give you a real answer! The best recruiters I’ve ever worked with keenly understood this concept. The average recruiter gives up trying to contact a candidate after two tries. I sent Candidate A a text message and an email, and she didn’t reply, so that must mean they are not interested! What we’ve found is that top recruiters will go as many as 9 attempts to contact candidates they truly want to get to Yes or No. NINE! At nine attempts, the Yes or No rate jumps to around 90%. Now, imagine you have a list of 25 potential candidates. You force rank them for most desirable to least desirable. You do your “average” outreach of two attempts, and you get 3 out of the 25 to reply to you. The ranking of the three that replied is numbers 7, 15, and 24. You screen and send them on to your hiring manager with the belief, “we only hire the best talent!” Actually, you are trying to hire 7, 15, and 24 because you gave up on numbers 1-6, who were your best possible candidates, but they didn’t respond! The best recruiters in the world won’t stop until they’ve gotten around 70% of their top candidates to tell them they are either interested or not interested. Why, as recruiters, do we stop trying to contact candidates? We stop because we believe it’s rude. It’s rude to keep trying to contact someone who “clearly” isn’t interested if they didn’t reply back after two messages. This obviously is wrong, but it’s a giant psychological barrier for average and below-average recruiters. Now, before my European recruiting friends lose their minds, there are also cultural barriers as well. In Europe, especially, almost no recruiters go past one or two outreaches to candidates, as culturally the norm is we’ll try you once, and if you don’t respond, you must not be interested. By the way, I tease my European recruiting friends about this as well because I think this concept is very dated. My experience has been that for every candidate that we contact up to nine times who thinks we are stalking them, and there is another candidate who thanks us profusely for continuing our efforts. Out of one hundred candidates, the vast majority don’t have any issues and will eventually tell us, Yes, or No, a couple will tell us to stop stalking them, and a couple will thank us and apologize for not getting back sooner. This really all comes down to our belief within our recruiting departments do we really hire the best talent, or do we just hire the talent that responds to us. If you hire the best, you must truly go after the best and actually see if they are interested or not. If you just take only those who respond on your first or second outreach, you really aren’t hiring the best talent.
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Recruiting
10 Recruiting Metrics to Watch
Recruiting metrics are a vital measurement of the effectiveness of a talent acquisition program. They speak to the performance of individual recruiters as well as that of the entire recruiting group. They guide the development of recruiting strategies and help talent acquisition professionals learn where they get the best results from their marketing spend. While large staffing teams track dozens of metrics, no recruiting group, no matter how small, can afford not to measure the most basic of them. Time to fill, cost of hire, source of hire, candidate diversity, and applicants per opening / per hire are among the most essential metrics and the ones most commonly used by recruiting teams. Ask any group of recruiters and you’ll quickly get a dozen more metrics, all of them valid, useful and critical. Several years ago, Jibe, a recruiting technology company since acquired by iCIMS, surveyed recruiters about the metrics they most used. In addition to the ones we mentioned, the others that made the top 10 list were: candidate experience, retention, offer acceptance rate, quality of hire and vacancies vs. positions filled. As much as these metrics might seem like a rock-solid, objective measurement, the reality is that they are each subject to some interpretation. At many companies, the cost of hire metric is what is spent advertising the position and any travel expenses as well as background checks and other direct costs. The more sophisticated measurements include recruiter salary and office overhead, the loss of productivity attributable to the vacant position and other indirect expenses. A decade ago, the Society for Human Resource Management developed a set of specifications for calculating cost per hire so thorough it runs three dozen pages and is an ANSI standard. How ever your team calculates the various metrics, as long as you do it consistently, they’re as essential to the recruiting function as financial reports are to investors. Common Recruiting Metrics Here’s a brief look at the other nine most commonly tracked metrics and the percentage of recruiters using each, according to the Jibe survey: Source of hire (57%) – Knowing where your hires are coming helps you make better decisions on where to spend your recruiting budget. Time to hire (50%) – Not only does this provide insight to the overall efficiency of the hiring process, it lets you know, which positions take longer so you know where to place an emphasis in building our talent pipeline. Applicants per opening / hire (42%) – These two measures work with the source of hire metric to evaluate the effectiveness of individual job postings and sites and recruitment marketing campaigns. Candidate experience (41%) – More than ever, the impression applicants have of your recruiting process – from the job posting through the interview process – is essential. A bad experience can damage the company’s brand and negatively impact the quality of candidates who apply. Measuring this is done by surveying candidates. Retention (38%) – This may not be an obvious performance indicator for the recruiting group, but it offers insights into the quality of the selection process, the accuracy of the job description and visibility into other aspects of hiring. Most often retention is measure for the first several months and up to a year after hire. Offer acceptance per hire (37%) – When the percent of candidates accepting an offer is low or is declining, it’s a signal that there may be a problem with the comp package. When examined in conjunction with the time to fill, it may show that the candidates you want to hire are accepting other offers because the hiring decision is taking too long. Quality of hire (36%) – LinkedIn last year found this the most important metric., used by 48%. The reason should be obvious: the best and most talented hires have a disproportionate positive impact on productivity. It’s also the most difficult to measure, taking months or even longer before it’s clear how good a new hire actually is. However, it’s worth making the effort, because great hires make hiring managers happy and demonstrate the value of your recruiting process. Vacancies vs. positions filled (36%) – This is a measure of the productivity of the talent acquisition team. The sooner positions are filled, the lower the percentage. Fewer vacancies mean lower costs for the company and better productivity overall. Diversity (25%) – The LinkedIn survey found 34% of recruiting professionals today track the diversity of candidates and hires and 56% declare the metric will very useful in the coming years. In addition to the strong social value of a diverse workforce, studies show the positive impact diverse teams have on innovation and revenue. This list is just a sample of the wide variety of metrics recruiting teams used to measure their performance. If the Jibe survey were to be conducted today, there’s no doubt many of these measures would still make the top 10. As the LinkedIn survey demonstrated, the percentages of talent acquisition teams that monitor them would change. LinkedIn’s Future of Recruiting report says the two most significant metrics in today’s world are quality of hire and sourcing channel effectiveness, a measure like source of hire. Knowing where the top talent was sourced, doesn’t just improve the recruiting process, as LinkedIn notes, “It speaks to the long-term business impact of new employees — and your recruiters.” ### John Zappe, Reporting ###
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Recruiting
Dealing with Today's Recruitment Challenges
What are employers thinking when it comes to the recruitment challenges of today’s crazy job market? A lot of companies are scrambling to fill positions and so they have started to resort to desperate measures, now offering free tuition (Wal-Mart, Target etc) to big signing bonuses of $1k-$2k-$3k or more. Eric Smith, CEO of applicant tracking system TalentCare told me this on my podcast recently. “We tell people today that you need three things with one thing underlying in order to compete. One is you have to know what’s competitive in terms of compensation that changes quickly. Sometimes it’s going up, but pretty soon when things level off and go back down. So if you don’t have a mechanism to understand what local compensation for this role, that location is, you need to get one fast. The second thing that we say is that you really need to invest in your brand in today’s markets. Retention comes with having a clear story, but having that brand laid out is critical to attracting applicants.” Boost Your Recruiting Speed He also said employers need to look at the underlying data. “It gives you the ability to make recruiting process much, much better, right? So people don’t always think of recruiting as a process, but data can inform how you can make that better. So, as an example, I ask people all the time, do you have a report that tells you every time a new applicant comes in, it looks like good applicant qualified. meets all the criteria. Do you have a report that tells you whether your hiring manager or recruiter reached out to that person within two hours by texting you guys, if you don’t have that report, then you can’t possibly know if you’re meeting best practice, that’s best practice in today’s market. So recruiting processes is something that people overlook.” T-mobiles Director of Talent Acquisition Sheri Ratliff told me over Zoom that they are trying new channels. “We’re getting very creative with the marketing, with the places we are finding talent. That includes looking at new talent communities specific to underrepresented talent with just sites and marketplaces that we haven’t gone before… even apprenticeships. Those are things that we probably wouldn’t have considered or not moved as quickly on, but we are now because we know there’s talent that does want to work. We just need to find them.” Get Creative with Recruitment Marketing Gina Alioto from Symphony Talent points to recruitment marketing. She told me on my podcast that “we know that technology, particularly recruitment marketing platforms and CRM is a significant investment for organizations, and it’s not only the cost of the platform itself, but also all of the time and resources that it takes to implement. And then on top of that, if it’s not the right system or not implemented the right way, the costs of having to go back and change all of that plus missed opportunities, all the while are huge.” “No matter where you are in your journey, we’re all experiencing change to some degree. And we also know that top of mind for all of your listeners right now probably is that there are over 10 million jobs open, which means there are about 1 million more jobs open than active job seekers. So for everyone it’s very challenging, more than ever to find, attract and retain talent right now. And technology is going to help you do that better. In fact, 74% of organizations, the spend for HR tech increasing, but technology can also significantly complicate already complex situations. And adoption seems to be a barrier to achieving all that the technology has to offer. Um, in fact, 82% of organizations are struggling with adoption challenges”, Alioto added. Tough Challenges Ahead By most estimates the labor shortage isn’t likely to abate anytime soon. In iHire’s latest talent retention report we see a peek at why; 1.) Voluntary employee turnover is up 6.5% year over year. 31.4% of employees left a job voluntarily in the past year, compared to 24.9% who said the same in iHire’s 2020 Talent Retention Report. While 6.5% is not a staggering jump, resignations are occurring at a greater rate than terminations or layoffs – 20.2% of survey participants left a job involuntarily in the past year. 2.) Workers are changing careers. 21.1% of respondents said they’ve made a major career change in the past year (i.e., they left a job to pursue a completely different industry or career path versus simply changing their place of employment). This trend is likely propelled by employees in industries most impacted by COVID-19 who are reevaluating their career goals and eyeing sectors promising greater stability. 3.) Salary is the top motivator for leaving (and staying). 70.9% of survey participants said they would leave a job due to unsatisfactory pay, while 77.9% said a pay raise would convince them to stay with their employer if they received a better job offer. For this report’s third consecutive year, salary is the No. 1 factor in leaving or staying at a job. Suffice to say these are challenging times to be a recruitment marketer. Employers must remain vigilant to the latest trends, speed their hiring funnels and cultivate every channel they can find for talent.
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Recruiting
So You Want to Be a Recruitment Coordinator
In the world of talent acquisition, recruiters are the ones getting all the attention, but the heart of a busy department are the recruitment coordinators. Recruitment coordinators, sometimes called staffing coordinators, are the ones keeping the proverbial trains running on time. They juggle so many tasks that the top requirements you see on a recruitment coordinator job description are organizational skills and good time management. Not far behind are excellent communication skills, multitasking and teamwork. Not that long ago, most of what a recruitment coordinator did was clerical and administrative. They screened job applicants, scheduled candidate interviews and arranged their travel, and tracked open job requisitions. As newer, AI-enabled applicant tracking systems and candidate relationship management tools took on some of the routine clerical tasks, especially such time-consuming ones as scheduling, screening and candidate tracking, the job of a recruitment coordinator broadened. While today’s recruitment coordinators still have responsibility to ensure administrative functions are being handled, the role is likely now incorporate planning of recruitment strategies and campaigns. Recruitment Coordinator Tasks At companies hiring dozens or more workers a month, a recruitment coordinator may work with HR business partners and hiring managers directly to anticipate openings and update job descriptions to stay ahead of developing skills and talent needs. They may be charged with analyzing recruitment data to track the department’s progress toward meeting its goals. As part of that responsibility, a recruitment coordinator may be expected to identify and report on the key performance indicators (KPIs). Ensuring government required reports, such as the annual EEO-1 survey to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and compliance with company and government hiring laws and policies may be delegated to a recruitment coordinator. Historically, the job of recruitment coordinator was a stepping-stone to an HR generalist or recruiting job. It still is. Recruitment coordinators routinely are called upon to help source and recruit candidates, especially passive candidates and assist in building talent pipelines. Frequently, they manage those pipelines, staying in touch with the candidates there by newsletter and email. Particularly at smaller companies, a recruitment coordinator may find themself making job offers, handling the onboarding paperwork of new hires and sometimes even conducting new employee orientation. It’s not unusual for a recruitment coordinator to also be an event organizer. For a company large enough to hold its own job fairs, it’s often recruitment coordinators who plan, arrange and oversee the event. They are as likely to do the recruiting at job fairs and on campus as schedule them. Because of the breadth of responsibilities, most recruitment coordinators have at least an undergraduate degree. According to the job board Zippia, 73% of recruiting coordinators have a bachelor’s degree; 10% have a masters. ZipRecruiter says a degree in HR, psychology, business administration or related field is preferred. Recruitment Coordinator Salaries The salary range for the job is broad. Payscale puts the median at $50,246 with a high of about $67,000. At the lower end, around $37,000, the job is largely, but not exclusively, clerical. So far in this article we’ve discussed corporate recruitment coordinators. That’s where most of the jobs are. However, a few sports teams and many college athletic departments have recruitment coordinators. A college athletic recruitment coordinator shares many of the same responsibilities as a coordinator in a corporate job. But instead of recruiting employees, the job involves working with college athletic prospects, helping to identify promising young players, arranging their campus visits – and their parents’ visits – monitoring recruitment practices to comply with the school’s policies and NCAA rules and budgeting. SportsCareerFinder says a college athletic recruitment coordinator is “among the hardest working members of the staff and commits very long hours to the job. Responsibilities range from on field coaching to evaluation of talent.” It can also be particularly lucrative. At the largest schools with top teams, the job is exclusively about recruiting and carries a six-figure salary. Written by John Zappe
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Recruiting
Digital Strategies for Campus Recruiting
“Recruiting with pizza parties is cancelled,” reads a Handshake graphic that cleverly summarizes the state of college recruiting 2021. It’s as much a nod to the impact of Covid’s effect on campus recruiting as it is a statement of how the pandemic has accelerated the shift to digital recruiting strategies. Handshake, the leading college recruiting platform, says 97% of colleges will host virtual career events this fall; 93% of employers will do the same. While that’s largely out of necessity, employers and the students themselves are finding virtual recruiting offers advantages over the traditional in-person job fairs and meetings. Half of the 2,400 students in a Handshake survey said they preferred virtual interviewing. Of those who attended a virtual recruiting event, three-quarters appreciated the schedule flexibility; 71% said it was less intimidating, and two-thirds said virtual recruiting was more convenient. Even after the pandemic ends, 87% of students want at least some recruiting to be virtual; 54% want half of the recruiting events to be virtual. Employers and college career center leaders agree. 79% of employers and 92% of colleges said they will continue to attend and offer virtual recruiting events. Many employers were experimenting with digital strategies in the years before Covid shut down college campuses. They found success with a multi-pronged approach that included a robust career site aimed at Gen Z, a strong and responsive social media presence, video and livestream events and in-person and virtual job fairs. Yello, a recruiting platform provider with a campus specialty, surveyed students and recruiting professionals to discover the most effective digital recruiting strategies. Recruiters said webinars/livestreams and group and one-on-one video interviews produced the best results and helped them meet the most students. Those relying exclusively on campus job board postings and virtual career fairs were less successful and met the fewest candidates. The 1,000 students in the survey agreed that video interviews, livestream events, virtual coffee chats and phone interviews were all effective ways to connect with them. But they also scored email and social media higher than did the recruiters. As the evidence suggests, talent acquisition professionals need to go beyond virtual job fairs to include multiple methods of connecting with students. A well-thought out digital strategy should include at least all or most of the following. Campus Recruiting: Video Nothing beats video for driving results. Both students and recruiters agree video interviews are the most effective part of a digital strategy. Video interviewing is even more valued by students of color, according to the Handshake survey, which makes it a critical part of reaching diverse communities. Video also has an important role in building brand awareness and engaging students in the company culture. Video clips on the organization’s career oages and on its social media sites – Facebook, Instagram and Tik Tock – put a face on the company, giving candidates a look at what it’s like to work there. Campus Recruiting: Webinars and livestreams Colleges are livestreaming events to recruit students. Employers are doing the same, livestreaming company tours, conversations with employees and company leaders, and Q&As on career opportunities and company culture. More narrowly focused webinars that target specific departments or majors engage students by discussing career trends and the job market and industry developments.. One important advantage these two digital strategies offer is the ability to collect names and email addresses of attendees. With students ranking email high among their favorite ways of connecting with employers, this allows recruiters to follow up with students. Campus Recruiting: Coffee chats These are informal conversations that are not interviews. In pre-Covid days, some recruiters would Tweet out an invitation to meet at the local Starbucks to talk about the industry, get career advice and learn about their company. The virtual equivalent takes the same approach. They may be one-on-one or group chats. One effective technique is to hold a post-webinar coffee chat to continue the conversation. Campus Recruiting: Social media A mistake employers make is to use their social media presence as little more than a bulletin board, posting company news and announcing events. A more valuable approach is to engage students by hosting livestreams or live conversations with recruiters. Comment on important developments to show industry leadership. Respond to questions about company culture and discuss training and advancement opportunities. Twitter, Instagram and Tik Tok make it easy to target by the use of hashtags. For Facebook and similar sites consider a separate campus recruiting page. Don’t overlook the review sites like Glassdoor, CareerBliss and Fishbowl. Students don’t. So know what’s posted there and be prepared for tough, even uncomfortable questions. Answer them honestly. The digitally savvy generation Today’s college students are as comfortable using tablets and smartphones as previous generations were using typewriters and fax machines. To reach them, employers were adapting their college recruiting strategy to include a strong digital component well before the pandemic. Now, three cycles into Covid-limited campus recruiting, the National Association of Colleges and Employers found almost 8-in-10 employers are continuing to increase their virtual recruiting options. Digital strategies are still evolving, but as Yello’s survey showed, the most effective recruiting is still personal. John Zappe reporting.
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Recruiting
Meaning of RPO in Recruitment
RPO is a frequent term used in recruitment circles but also brings some confusion. According to the RPOA (Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association), RPO is “a form of business process outsourcing (BPO) where an employer transfers all or part of its recruitment processes to an external service provider.” A company can hire an RPO agency to provide all staff and typically that staff uses the company’s recruitment technology and offices. They are essentially acting as full time staff despite being employed at the RPO itself. It’s very typical for RPO companies to work with their clients for many years, while working to improve their recruiting processes. Should Your Company Use an RPO Provider? RPO has traditionally been used at high volume recruiting organizations. These employers outsource this level of recruiting in order to save on costs. But there are now more flexible options of an RPO company, meaning that smaller companies have started to engage providers such as having them source/shortlist candidates. More RPOs are now offering various strategic solutions to employers to help them compete in the war for talent. How RPO’s Work There are typically three ways you can engage an RPO provider. On-Demand: Based on a specified contract with a defined number of roles and timeframe. Department-Based: This is where the RPO company takes over an entire function such as IT staffing. Full Service: All internal recruiting and hiring is taken over by the RPO firm as an in-house team. And these are the services they usually offer; Strategic Planning: The provider will work with employers to understand their hiring needs and craft a plan to meet those recruitment goals such as forecasting, recruitment process and more. Recruitment Marketing: RPO providers market client jobs through job boards, social media, referrals, and networking to drive candidate exposure to jobs and employer brand (a major differentiator from staffing solutions). Sourcing Candidates: Sourcing talent includes initial reach outs and explaining the employer value proposition to potential candidates in order to keep the pipeline full. Candidate assessments: Providers will also assess candidates at the beginning of the recruiting process to ensure they meet minimum requirements and have interest in the role. Candidate Experience: The overall recruiting process includes how candidates are treated and how easily and enjoyable the experience is. RPO’s will typically “own” this highly critical function because that experience is reflective of your employer brand. Who are the Major RPO’s? The major RPO providers today include companies such as Alexander Mann, Cielo, Orion Talent, PeopleScout, FutureStep and Pontoon.
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Recruiting
Recruiting KPIs to Improve the Talent Funnel
Recruiting KPIs — key performance indicators – are how organizations measure the effectiveness of their talent acquisition process and the performance of individual recruiters. KPIs are not exclusive to the recruiting and HR function. All departments and businesses have KPIs, even if they call them by some other name. Retailers, for example, measure “sales per square foot” and “customer retention,” among other KPIs. Restaurant KPIs include “revenue per available seat hour” and “table turn rate,” a metric that tells the manager how often new customers occupy a table. Typical Recruiting KPIs As with all other company operations, recruiting has multiple KPIs to measure different aspects of the talent acquisition function. The most familiar and most often used among them are these: Time to fill: The time from the point at which a recruiter receives the job requisition to the day the hired person starts work. Time to hire: The time from when a candidate first applies to the time they accept an offer. Cost per hire: The cost of making a hire. Quality of hire: How well the hire performs in the job. Diversity: The number of diversity candidates hired and as a percent of all hires. Source of hire: How did the person hired find out about the job. There are literally dozens of other KPIs. The larger and more data-driven the organization, the more likely it is to also include candidate and hiring manager satisfaction, conversion rates (the number of job seekers who after clicking into a job posting go on to apply), offer acceptance rate, and first months retention. Individual recruiter KPIs are similar to those for the entire talent acquisition function. In addition to the first four on our list, companies increasingly are including an individual diversity KPI in judging recruiter performance. Typically this includes the number of diverse candidates sourced, presented and hired. Recruiter KPIs also include individual productivity and effectiveness measures such as the number of open jobs each recruiter has on average, the number of interviews to offer and also to hire, and the number of jobs filled by the recruiter. What are the most important recruiting KPIs? Ask a dozen talent acquisition leaders and all of the ones we’ve highlighted will be on their list. Each will also have a number of other KPIs reflecting their importance to their organization and its strategic objectives. Companies looking to measure the effectiveness of their various recruitment marketing channels will want to know more than just the source of hire. They’ll look at where the applications are coming from and which of them yields the highest percentage of candidates selected for interviews. That KPI will be a source conversion rate. Other companies will want to evaluate the candidate experience. That KPI may be built around a measure of improvement in candidate satisfaction. Visier, the HR data analytics firm, lists KPIs to show the direct impact of talent acquisition on a company’s strategic goals. Such KPis as “revenue per employee,” “new hires that become innovators and top performers,” and the “dollar impact of recruiting on the business” require a high level of data sophistication, but are powerful tools for recruiting to demonstrate its importance to the organization. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it,” said management guru Peter Drucker. KPIs make it possible to measure an organization’s recruiting effectiveness and help improve it. By comparing an organization’s KPIs to those of others in the industry and to businesses generally, they serve as a scorecard, showing where the recruiting team is performing well and what needs improvement. Contribution by John Zappe
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Recruiting
Recruiter Ghosting Is Damaging Your Employer Brand
Recruiter ghosting has become so common and so widespread that to call it an epidemic is an understatement. And it is damaging employer brands by perpetuating the resume black hole that most job seekers experience. Just look what one candidate said on Reddit recently; After hundreds of applications and a few interviews, I can see that recruiter ghosting is at an all time high. The second they determine you’re of no use to them, then all communication stops. I’m tempted to build a site where ppl can post their ghosting experience. Maybe if they were publically shamed then they’d change their behavior? Borrowed from online dating, the term “ghosting” describes the situation when a candidate – or an employer – simply stops communicating without explanation. It’s different from the well-known black hole where a job seeker applies but hears nothing, not even an acknowledgement of the application. In ghosting, a conversation has actually begun between candidate and employer. Recruiters have done it for years but only in the past few years have candidates taken it up in earnest thanks to robust hiring. Ghosting was already an irritant in 2019, when the global jobs aggregator Indeed.com called it an epidemic in a report on the phenomenon. Now in its latest study, Indeed tells us ghosting has all but exploded. 28% of job seekers have ghosted an employer, says Indeed, up from 18% in the 2019 survey. About half just stopped communicating with a hiring manager. That’s troubling enough, but 7% said they went through the entire hiring process, accepted an offer, but then didn’t show up for work. As surprising as that may be, employers have done worse. 77% of job seekers say they’ve been ghosted by an employer. Stunningly, 10% report being ghosted by an employer after receiving a job offer. If you suspect a bit of job seeker exaggeration may have crept into the results, consider that 73% of employers in the study admitted to ghosting candidates in just the last year. It’s a sign, says Indeed, “that ghosting has become standard practice in the hiring process — even though it creates a terrible candidate experience and can threaten a company’s employer brand,” says Indeed. Why is this happening? Writing about the ghosting trend, executive recruiter and search firm founder Jack Kelly points the finger at society generally and the depersonalization of hiring specifically. “A combination of deploying technology, an unfortunate rise in incivility in our country and the ease of applying to jobs has made the job search experience cold and impersonal — resulting in the sudden rise in ghosting,” he writes in Forbes. A more generous Laura Mazzullo, founder and owner of a recruiting firm that places HR professionals, suspects it’s not so much intentional incivility, but fear of confrontation that causes hiring managers and recruiters to ghost candidates. Commenting in a recent article on the Society for Human Resource Management website, Mazzullo says, “That fear paralyzes them from even sending an e-mail. The fear is all about ‘How will the other person respond? What if they hang up on me? What if they yell at me? What if they’re disappointed in me? What if they give me a long, undesired sales pitch to try and change my mind?’” Ghosting employers, on the other hand, is more common among younger workers who have grown up with anonymous review sites and dating apps where ghosting is common, even accepted. “Younger job seekers have ghosting experience from dating apps, and from growing up texting — or not replying to texts that might lead to hard conversations,” speculated Robin Rosenberg, a clinical psychologist and CEO of a company that focused on workplace bias and incivility. “It’s possible that younger job candidates prefer ghosting to having conversations, even if employers weren’t ghosting.” Whatever the reason, ghosted employers hold the upper hand. Indeed’s survey found that nearly all but a handful of employers track ghosters. Indeed says 26% of employers track those who stopped responding and 35% track those who don’t show up for an interview. A third make notes about those who don’t show up after being hired. Recruiters who ghost however are not doing any favors for your employer brand. Companies need to make sure that each of their recruiters close the loop with the proper rejection email to ensure their reputation remains intact. Otherwise you risk rants like the Reddit example above.
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Passive Candidates - Are They Better?
One of the greatest myths in recruiting is that passive candidates make the best hires. This fiction has been around so long, no one can say where it came from or if there’s even any evidence to support it. Yet, it’s so widely believed that there are thousands of articles with tips on how to approach passive candidates and why they’re so much better. Before we get into what’s wrong with this notion, we need to define what a passive candidate is. A “passive candidate” is someone currently employed who is not job hunting. That simple definition encompasses 70% to 80% of the workforce. If you think about it, calling someone not looking for a job a passive candidate is an oxymoron. They’re not even an applicant, let alone a candidate. But we’ll accept the contradiction and use the idiom. To narrow the definition, most talent acquisition professionals will tell you the passive candidates they look for are open to the right opportunity. Many recruiters also believe that passive candidates are better performers. Active candidates are those who are job hunting. They may or may not be employed, though most are. Because digital resumes and profiles make it so easy to apply for a job, recruiters overwhelmed with unqualified applicants have come to think of all active candidates, even those who do have the right qualifications and requirements, as second class. Their thinking goes something like this: If they were doing well and happy where they are, they wouldn’t be looking for another job. People, including top talent, become active job seekers for any number of reasons having nothing to do with job satisfaction or performance. Two of the most common are a too long commute and family considerations. The latter includes moving to be closer to other family members, better schools or for more affordable housing. The pandemic of the last year, which demonstrated to many employees the benefits of working from home, is now prompting a surge in workers looking for jobs where they can work remotely all or at least part of the time. It also turns out that passive candidates are not all that passive. A LinkedIn survey found that 15% of passive candidates regularly reach out to their personal network quietly asking about job opportunities. Another 45% may not actively be taking steps to find a new job, but they are open to talking to a recruiter. For jobs with such special or unique qualifications that those who have them are few in number — the kind recruiters call “purple squirrels” – searching them out may be the only way to fill the job. It’s also good recruiting practice to identify the best talent in the field for current or future openings. All the better if you can hire the best talent away from a competitor. However, routinely passing over active candidates in favor of passive ones is shortsighted. It overlooks what should be obvious: active applicants who go on to become candidates want to work for you. They’ve done their homework about the organization, have learned about the company culture and are eager to win the job. Their gratitude translates into greater loyalty Passive candidates have to be convinced. They don’t come to the table already interested and may not even have heard of your organization. Largely content where they are, they won’t be as motivated to learn about the company and its culture. That can become a serious problem later, especially since a key reason for a passive candidate to change jobs is money, according to the LinkedIn survey. Active candidates on the other hand are most interested in career advancement. Prof. Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School, says, “Employers spend a vastly disproportionate amount of their budgets on recruiters who chase passive candidates, but on average they fill only 11% of their positions with individually targeted people.” Writing in the Harvard Business Review, he adds, “I know of no evidence that passive candidates become better employees, let alone that the process is cost-effective.” That alone is a powerful reason for recruiters to give active candidates as much consideration as they do passive candidates and set aside the myth that one group is better than another only because they don’t apply. ### Contribution by John Zappe ###
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