14 best practices to manage ‘Candidate Ghosting’
Arindam Chandra
As an employer or hiring manager, you put a lot of time and effort into hiring new employees, so it can be devastating when someone you thought was suitable disappears. Your time-to-fill will be significantly stretched when ghosting occurs.
During my first meeting with a potential client, I learnt that they are averse to candidates with long notice periods because of high instances of candidate ghosting i.e. candidates not joining them despite having accepted an offer.
Ghosting can take other forms such as not showing up for scheduled job interviews, not returning calls or emails from potential employers or receiving a job offer and never responding.
Since candidate ghosting is a growing trend in recruitment, it could have happened to you as well.
As an employer or hiring manager, you put a lot of time and effort into hiring new employees, so it can be devastating when someone you thought was suitable disappears. Your time-to-fill will be significantly stretched when ghosting occurs. Besides, an unnecessarily open position creates productivity issues and opportunity costs.
But do you have to accept this hard reality and do nothing about it, or is there a solution?
Thankfully, I think there is.
- But first, we need to acknowledge that a candidate is not a commodity - he or she is a human with real emotions. Treat him / her with respect and truly understand his / her motive for considering a job change as well as the level of interest towards the job you are pitching.
- And second, we also need to acknowledge that a candidate may have multiple opportunities and his / her motive to join others may be stronger, either due to a better employer brand, more perceived growth possibilities or higher pay. This hard fact sometimes gets ignored.
Once we have acknowledged the above, if we follow the 14 best practices outlined below, it should go a long way in reducing the occurrence of candidate ghosting:
Before an interview:
1. If a candidate’s motive for a job change or the level of interest towards a new opportunity is unknown or not strong enough, irrespective of whether the candidate is active or passive, do not push for an interview; else be prepared for candidate ghosting at the interview stage itself.
2. Become a talent advisor to a candidate from being a recruiter - create a future roadmap for the candidate with your job being one of the milestones in that future. Be creative but remain honest. Once candidates make up their minds, the chances of participating actively in the interview process become much higher.
3. Prioritize if you are facing a shortage of time and resources. Not all open positions or candidates have an equal business impact. Plan & prioritize (A) your key high-impact jobs / jobs in those functions or locations where ghosting occurs more frequently (such as for technology / development jobs requiring highly-in-demand / niche skills in a start-up hub like Bangalore) and (B) your top applicants who would have more options and hence could be the first to ghost.
During an interview:
4. Make the interview process as quick, transparent, personalized, predictive and painless as possible. Your best candidates are probably employed, so the amount of time they have for interviews would be limited. Design your recruitment process to minimize the number of hours that they must take off work to interview.
5. Often, the hiring process gets stretched - that is a big mistake. If things take longer than required, a candidate may decide to move on without informing you. The best way to stop making this mistake is to communicate the interview process and the timeline in advance and to keep the candidate proactively informed about any updates or changes.
6. Create a welcoming environment for candidates - make sure your office is prepared when potential employees come in for an interview and there is someone to greet them and make them comfortable. An interview is stressful enough and can be more intimidating if the workplace seems unwelcoming and future colleagues do not seem to be friendly.
7. Be consistent - candidates ghost if the job they hear about during the interview doesn’t match the job description. If multiple people are involved in the interview process, make sure everyone is on the same page about what you are looking for in a candidate and what is expected from the position. Encourage the candidate to ask questions and answer them honestly.
8. After the interview, communicate in what time-frame, from whom and through what communication channel the candidate can expect to hear regarding qualification to the next stage and make sure this happens. Just imagine - you shortlisted a candidate for the final round but nobody informed the candidate on time, who meanwhile accepted another offer.
9. For those who are not in the final shortlist, calling and emailing is the considerate as well as wise thing to do because you never know when you may need to turn to your back-up candidates. Letting candidates know that they were high on the list and that you’ll contact them if the job opens up again would improve your time to hire.
After an offer:
10. After an offer is made, try to get the new employee to join as soon as possible. Offer a joining bonus for starting to work within a specific period. Create a policy around buying out notice periods if you don’t have such a policy already. Politely insist on proof that the candidate’s resignation has been accepted and the last working date has been agreed upon.
11. Never allow long lapses in your communication with the offered candidate. Set-up a regular check-in process - it can be a simple telephone call, or a lunch with the hiring manager and the team to keep them excited about joining you. If you’ve treated a candidate well, in most cases, they will tell you what is going on in terms of other opportunities or competitive offers.
12. However, it is possible that a candidate may have simply accepted another offer and been too embarrassed or shy to admit it to you. See if you can get someone else to call the candidate to check whether he / she is continuing to look out or not; and if possible, gather more intelligence on what the candidate is seeking - it will give a good insight on what’s missing in your offer.
13. It may not be always easy for a candidate to tell a potential employer that he / she has changed his / her mind or accepted another job. Keeping that in mind, consider creating a survey that candidates can access throughout the process. Candidates are more open to clicking a multiple choice option from a survey than telling a hiring manager that they have moved on.
14. It isn’t over till a candidate joins you. No matter the reason, ghosting comes at a big loss to any company because being ghosted delays the time to hire and you may have to settle on your 2nd or 3rd choice. So be flexible to re-negotiate the offer if required. If a candidate has better offers from similar employers, it is possible that your salary benchmarks are ignoring market reality about the cost of good talent while your competitors are not.
What if you get ghosted despite all this?
Identify when and why your candidates ghosted you using a data-driven approach, re-assess which parts of the process were not followed, drive accountability with the recruiting team and the hiring managers and ensure such break-downs are eliminated.
In the example I gave in the beginning of this post about a potential client, we later realized that they had challenges with candidate ghosting after an offer was accepted because they had long lapses in their communication with the offered candidate.
But if you diligently followed this process, make peace with yourself because then, it's not you, it's them. If a candidate lacks the professional courtesy and honesty, then they were perhaps never a good fit and you may want to thank your stars that ghosting saved you from a wrong hire!