Does your hiring process actually lose you candidates? How do you manage something that is effectively intangible and immeasurable?
From an executive recruitment consultant’s perspective, how organisations deal with those quiet times while waiting for an internal decision or response about a prospective hire can be just as important to the relationship as how the rest – and ostensibly ‘meatier’ part –of the process is managed.
As anyone who has been through the process of recruiting senior personnel will attest, it is often lengthy and unnecessarily drawn out. As a result, it is crucial to keep candidates in the loop, if only to let them know that there is no news. Not only do people appreciate being kept informed, but such communication enables contact to be maintained at a time when they will almost certainly be talking to other firms.
Bear in mind that a candidate’s impression of any organisation is – in the first instance – shaped wholly and exclusively by the recruitment process. An apparent lack of commitment, inability to set and stick to interview dates or failure by management to attend booked interviews can all put people off.
It’s also not necessarily too far wide of the mark to say that how an institution treats candidates during the recruitment process is generally a fair indicator of how it treats its entire staff once they are in situ.
Bad practice
But there are three key stages to the hiring process and too many firms fall down at each one. Here are a few examples of bad practice:
Interview stage: A senior individual is left waiting for 40 minutes because the interviewer decides he has something better to do, but fails to inform HR accordingly. No apology is forthcoming so the candidate withdraws.
Offer stage: After having waited five weeks for a potential employer to arrive at a decision to hire, a director-level individual received a verbal offer that was about £30,000 below her expectations due to an internal miscommunication. The recruitment firm was not told that an offer was about to be made and the candidate withdrew.
Contract stage: A managing director- level hire had to wait three weeks to receive a contract as it was sent via Royal Mail rather than by courier. When it finally arrived, the individual’s name was misspelled twice – two different misspellings in two different places. The candidate eventually chose to remain with their existing firm.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. Effective communication and a more disciplined adherence to a timely process could have yielded very different results. In two of the cases, the drawn-out waiting periods contributed to candidates’ decisions to withdraw.
An effective process
So how can the recruitment process be made more effective? In my experience, it is an extremely rare thing for a hiring manager to employ the same communication skills with either their executive search partners or job candidates that they would with their clients.
But keeping in regular contact is more than just good business practice. It makes a material difference to whether potential hires accept your job offer or choose to stay put. Even if there is little to say, it is simply the gesture of making the phone call that counts.
In many cases, executive recruitment firms are – quite rightly – held to service level agreements, but very rarely do client firms offer the same commitment. I believe that such arrangements should be routine, however.
Hiring firms should guarantee response times after CVs have been submitted, following interviews and so on. That way, weeks will not pass by before a candidate is provided with interview feedback and the like.
A commitment to these kinds of SLAs also enables a more detailed analysis of where issues may have arisen during the recruitment process, not least to understand what the root cause might be if hiring targets are not being met.
Communication is key
To ensure success, the hiring institution has to stay uppermost in the mind of candidates during the decision-making period and they need to feel goodwill towards any potential employer.
While meetings may have gone well and the opportunity on offer may dovetail nicely with their career goals, it is simply not reasonable – although it is all too common – to expect experienced professionals to hang around for months without a valid and obvious reason for delay, simply because internal processes are not effective enough for the right people to make the necessary decisions in a timely fashion.
Candidates’ time is equally as valuable as yours’ and the longer they sit around waiting, the longer they have to reflect on any negative impressions. Once their goodwill is lost, however, it’s a very short step to quitting the process altogether.
What this means in reality is that, if there are gaps in your hiring process, perhaps now may be the time to close them. Sometimes, the only way to see those gaps is from the outside so ask your recruitment suppliers for help. They will likely have very distinct views on where improvements could be made because they will have been on the receiving end of any disconnects in the past. Just ask them to be honest – you may be surprised.
Lyssa Barber is a managing consultant and head of private wealth management at specialist financial recruitment company, Allemby Hunt.
