How to Deal with Increasing Candidate Drop-off Rate

One of the ongoing sources of stress in hiring professionals is the unpredictable candidate behavior in this extremely competitive talent landscape. To address this issue, HR professionals and influencers have embraced solutions that support an amazing candidate experience and cater to the candidate-centric job market.

Why Candidate Drop-off Matters

The candidate drop-off rate is the applicants who begin the application process but do not complete the entire recruitment process. According to Glassdoor, almost 80 % of candidates do not finish the application process at all, meaning recruiters lost many candidates who otherwise could have been engaged and added to the recruitment marketing funnel. When companies run high-volume hiring, a high candidate drop-off rate is not a good sign of successful recruitment metrics. 

Why Are Candidates Leaving Your System?

For any recruiting strategy to succeed, it is important to not let small things go unnoticed. The small tweaks in the recruiter’s actions such as the way candidates are approached and followed up make a lot of difference. There are many reasons why you might be losing candidates- 

• The Application Process is Too Long. Candidates are impatient. A job seeker applies to numerous jobs at a time. While doing so, if the application process takes too long, candidates become disinterested and frustrated and do not finish their application. 
• Website is Not Optimized. When candidates visit career pages and apply for jobs, they expect the website to run properly. 
• Screening Criteria Are Complex. For a few job positions, there are multiple skills to be tested and recruiters need additional information. This leads to more complexities in the application process causing candidates to lose interest and drop out. 
• The Interview Experience is Lagging. Although most organizations have embraced digital transformation, few have yet to adopt the right technologies. 
• Lack of Feedback & Follow-Up. Recruiters often lose qualified candidates to competitors because they simply do not follow up with the applicants. 
• The Application Interface is Not Mobile-Friendly. Around 45% of job applications are mobile users. Candidates, especially Gen Z, spend a minimum of four hours a day on their smartphones. If the website is not optimized for mobile, candidates will leave. 
• Poor Communication & Engagement. Whether or not a candidate is hired, they always want to know about their application status. Recruiters talk to a lot of candidates in a day. Often, they tend to forget to track the conversations and engage with candidates timely and consistently. 
• Non-Inclusive Hiring Process. An inclusive workplace prospers innovation. When recruitment teams allow any kind of voluntary or involuntary biases into the process, it scares off candidates who otherwise would have been a great fit for the company. 

Reanalyzing the Recruitment Process

The recruitment process is very dynamic; constantly changing with digital transformations, economic growth, and societal needs. Therefore, HR professionals need to constantly adopt new technologies to deal with new challenges. 

Make an Investment in Automation

Relying on applicant tracking systems (ATS) allows you to standardize the entire recruitment process by eliminating the repetitive, mundane tasks that recruiters have to perform every day. Depending on the organization’s requirements, recruitment software can be deployed either to automate the entire process or to customize a particular stage of recruitment. With an ATS working at your fingertips, you can easily focus on just sourcing high-quality candidates by automating a significant part of the recruitment process such as candidate sourcing, resume parsing, job posting, pre-screening assessments of candidates, and interviewing, onboarding, etc. While posting jobs, recruiters can choose from a variety of job requisition templates and post them to numerous job boards with a single click. Using an ATS also allows recruiters to define the path of the application process for the candidate. They can choose from a given set of questions in the pre-screening stage, making the information gathering more interesting and thereby attracting more candidates. 

Using CRM to Improve Candidate Experience

In a busy candidate market, it is difficult to engage with candidates. The use of recruitment CRM gives each candidate a fair by keeping them in a loop for each activity. Recruiters can send timely messages and notifications about the recruitment processes. With CRM tools, each conversation with the candidate is recorded despite their channel of communication. This saves significant time for a recruiter that he/she spends on manually communicating with each candidate. This improves the candidate’s experience by creating a positive impression of the company. By building career pages, you can showcase the employee value proposition and culture and attract candidates to the page.

To increase applicant rates and decrease candidate drop-out rates, recruitment has to be proactive than reactive. With a change in the global workforce environment, candidates are more aware of their position and worth. To generate a steady stream of successful hiring, recruiters have to be more considerate of candidates’ opinions and demands.