If you are 'Ghosting' Candidates You Ought to Think Twice
If you Are Professionally 'Ghosting' Candidates You Ought To Think Twice
Sometimes I find my Talent Attraction passion gets the better of me and I just have to speak my mind. With advances in automating talent acquisition and TMS systems, some Talent Attraction basics have been forgotten about. One of those being common, old fashioned, decency.
The rudeness and lack of follow up engagement with candidates, by some in-house talent acquisition professionals and agents, is shocking. I don’t know what training some of these talent acquisition professionals are getting but it’s not enough.
'Ghosting' candidates seems to be the norm these days. In case you don’t know what I am talking about ‘ghosting’ means not getting back to the candidate – ever. Even if they have taken time off work to attend an interview, they may never hear from the company again. No interview feedback, no automated rejection email, nada, zip, nothing! Are these companies crazy? I think so.
Now, I know that some of you may be reading this and think, ‘Well what about the candidates? They 'ghost' too!’. Yes, you are right. There are plenty of examples of head scratching moments, such as when a candidate goes missing, even after they received an offer. BUT, this is not a tit for tat exercise. Just because candidates do it, it doesn’t mean that you can too.
One of the top priorities for companies right now is how they are going to grow their employer brand. This is going to be fiercely debated and fought exercise, as budgets are being allocated to this boom by all major companies and your company, whatever its size, cannot leave this to the big players. Those who shout the loudest win!
Funnily though, I don’t think the urgency or even explanation of what an employer brand actually is has sunk down to the front-line Talent Acquisition teams in many companies. They are fire-fighting, time pressured, exhausted and doing their best to keep up, and so they cut corners. ‘Ghosting’ is cutting a corner. Why pick up the phone or send an email to a candidate to explain why they aren’t being offered the job after two rounds of interviews, when they could spend those 2 minutes searching for more candidates? That’s the maths. The maths is wrong!
If you are a professional talent acquisition ‘ghoster’ you really ought to resign, because you are in the wrong job. Take a moment to think of the knock-on effects of your actions. You never know what will happen to that candidate in the future. They may be the person you get told to headhunt by a Senior Manager in a few years’ time. You don’t know who their friends are. Who their family is. Who their neighbour is. But I can tell you this, that ghosted candidate will let people know what they think about your company and it won’t be good. Employer brand – forget about it!
Candidates talk, and they type. They will knock you off your pedestal on social media and any other forum they can find to let people know what a poor experience they had interviewing with you. They will make sure your company is seen as uncaring and narcissistic. Those two words are not what people look for in their next employer. Imagine having 'uncaring' and 'narcissistic' as part of your employer brand! Well that will become your employer brand as thought up by the abandoned candidates left all over town.
There is an easy remedy to this malaise. Highly automated, talent acquisition systems are supposed to make things easier. I understand junior members may be phone shy but get them trained to be decent. Even if, at the bare minimum, if it is a professionally written, automated, rejection email, carefully worded in a friendly way and encouraging reapplication in the future, that can be automatically sent. It just takes a click, a milli-second in the TMS, and you are already backing up your employer brand. Job done!
If you think you have an image problem in the candidate market and your TA team need some help identifying weak spots in their talent acquisition administration please get in contact or book a call and the Talent Optics team can come in and will help you fix it.
We also have a fabulous copywriter on the team who can provide your team with easy to use templates and train them on how to write the best rejection letters that will keep your rejected candidates from damaging your brand and help your TA team to back up your employer brand.
www.talentoptics.com
'We help companies attract better candidates and improve retention.'
#employerbranding #TalentAutomation #TalentAcquisition #copywriting #talentacquisitionadministration
