Ghosted By Interview Candidates: Why It Matters and The Best Way To Prevent No-Shows
If you have heard of ‘ghosting’, it is probably on a personal level: friends or dates who refuse to answer your calls or stay in touch. More and more, however, ghosting is affecting the recruitment process. For employers, ghosting takes the form of candidates who don’t show up for job interviews. As a result, the time, effort, and often expense of finding the right people to interview for a job vacancy is wasted.
So how can employers safeguard against being ghosted by interview candidates? Let’s start with why interview no-shows are bad news for businesses.
Why Interview No-Shows Are A Problem For Employers
Besides being annoying, candidate no-shows can negatively impact a business in three ways:
- Wasted time and effort – when a candidate doesn’t show up for an interview, all the time and expense involved in finding that individual and inviting them to an interview is lost.
- Wasted productivity – you may have put work on hold to carry out recruitment tasks and attend the interview. When the candidate doesn’t turn up, that delay in your workload has been for nothing.
- Smaller pool of candidates – interview no-shows reduce the number of potential hiring choices for the job. This might mean that you have to begin the recruitment process all over again.
Being ghosted by a candidate isn’t only frustrating. It can disrupt an employer’s productivity, waste their time and resources, and increase their recruitment costs.
Reasons Why Job Seekers Ghost Employers
To solve the problem of interview no-shows, employers need to understand why job seekers might ghost an employer at the interview stage. Beyond ill health, accident, or life events getting in the way, here are the three main reasons why interview candidates might ghost a business:
- They’ve received another job offer. If they’ve landed another job, they may forget to tell you in all the excitement.
- The candidate may feel that the job or the company isn’t the right fit for them. Often this is caused by a lack of transparency, for instance, not advertising the salary range for the job. Further research may have turned up aspects of the job or company culture that don’t meet their work preferences. For instance, they want to work a 4 day week but discover that the business doesn’t offer this.
- They don’t want to attend an interview but find it awkward to communicate this to you. This could be down to a lack of confidence in their own communication skills or because it’s difficult to contact the right person or department in the business.
While it’s impossible to stop all interview no-shows, understanding why this might happen can help employers reduce the number of missed interviews.
How Employers Can Prevent No-Shows
Here are seven steps employers can take to make sure they’re not ghosted by candidates at the interview stage.
Set Up Interviews Quickly
The longer you take to move from application to interview, the more likely that your candidate will find another job. Setting up an interview quickly also reduces the chance that the candidate will forget about it.
Keep Them In The Loop
Another way to remind candidates about their interview, keep them interested in the job, and give them a way out if they find another job, is to follow up at each stage of the recruitment process. That means not only saying that you’d like to interview them, but providing more information in the interim, and then re-confirming the interview details before the day arrives.
Be Transparent
There are very few things more frustrating to a job candidate than an employer who won’t reveal details like salary package, working hours and patterns, or how long the selection process will take. Candidates may feel that the employer is purposefully misleading them and is even dishonest.
Transparency also weeds out the candidates who aren’t suitable, for instance, they want a higher salary or different working conditions.
Be clear about the role, working conditions, and compensation before the job interview to keep the right candidates interested.
You might also like to read the blog post on www.joblookup.com Salary Transparency.
Keep Your Offers Competitive
What salary packages and working conditions are your competitors providing? Can candidates get a better employment deal with other businesses within your industry? Research your competitors regularly and re-assess what you can offer job candidates.
Be Flexible
Can you offer a range of interview options to help a wider pool of candidates to apply? For instance, you could offer video or in-person interviews, especially if the vacancy is hybrid or remote. You could hold interviews at your nearest workplace to the candidate’s home, instead of asking them to travel to your headquarters in a different city. This type of flexibility will create a positive impression of an employer who cares about their workers.
Set Clear Expectations For The Interview
Make sure that the candidate knows exactly what will happen at the interview. Who will attend? Will the interview include tests or a tour around the workplace? Will the candidate need to bring certain documents with them? Is this the first of several interviews?
This transparency means that the candidate can prepare and present their best self on the day. It also guards against misunderstandings.
Make Communication Easy
Make it easy for the candidate to get in touch with the right people within your business. That might be by phone or email. Try to avoid automated communication. Instead, make sure that a real person will respond, and make that response quick. There’s no sense in using a general email that is rarely checked or has nothing to do with recruitment.
Making communication easy means that candidates are more likely to let you know if they can’t attend an interview or have found another job. That has to be better than a no-show that wastes your valuable time.
Wrapping it up
Ghosting by interview candidates is a frustrating, time-wasting, and often expensive experience. However, there are steps that employers can take to reduce the likelihood of an interview no-show:
- Set up interviews quickly once candidates have been identified.
- Stay in touch with them throughout the recruitment process.
- Be transparent about what the business can offer the candidate.
- Make sure your salary packages and working conditions are competitive.
- Be flexible about the interview format to appeal to a wider range of candidates.
- Set clear expectations for what will happen at the interview.
- Make it easy for candidates to contact the right people in your business.
Take these seven steps to cut the number of no-shows and improve your candidate experience.