Lower Your Candidate Rejection Rate
There may be nothing more deflating than finally finding your ideal candidate only to have them accept an offer other than yours. Sometimes you may have just lost out to a better offer. Other times, though, there may have been something you could have done differently along the way to sway their decision to select your offer instead. Take a look at these couple of factors and see if you have any opportunities for change in your hiring system.
- Are you just too slow? If the time from initial contact to making the offer is too long, your risk of losing the candidate goes up. They have more time to go on other interviews, do more research on potential openings, and evaluate other offers. Yes the adage “slow to hire and quick to fire” still applies, but too slow can definitely lose the race. Communication is essential throughout the hiring process, but it becomes even more so if the process is going to be lengthy. If you cannot shorten the time frame, make sure your candidate knows you are interested and give them some concrete times for the coming events: next interviews, tests, possible offer deadline. Better still, find a way to condense the time between interview to hire by bringing the candidates in one time, and having them interview with all necessary parties in the same day.
- Is your offer a good one? Perhaps you are losing these candidates simply because you are not offering a competitive salary. Do your homework and find out what is currently being offered in your area by your competitors. If you are too low, present your evidence to whomever is in the position to approve the increase and try very hard to get your offers at least competitive, if not superior. And if you simply can’t increase the starting salary, make sure that your benefits package is in some way unique and has more to offer in the way of vacation, education, company outings, health insurance, etc. to make candidates think hard about turning you down.
- Are you building relationships? You really want to build relationships with your top candidates. Even if you don’t intend to make more than one offer for this position, maintain contact with several viable choices, because you just never know what will happen. Perhaps your first choice will not accept. Perhaps you will end up needing more than one person with this skill set in the near future that you just couldn’t have predicted. There are a number of circumstances in which keeping your top few candidates close would be beneficial. You also want to help them through this process of changing jobs as much as possible. They should see you as an ally in this journey. Ask them how their current employer will react when they resign. Then offer suggestions for making that transition smooth for them and their employer. This will help remove some of the stress associated with leaving a position, therefore removing another barrier to accepting your offer.
If you continue to experience a higher than normal rejection rate, call ERG Staffing Services. We are expert in locating, screening and hiring clerical and light industrial staff for your warehouse business. We can take some or all of this process over for you, freeing you up to run your business.
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