Candidate Experience - Reducing Pre-Joining Attrition

Candidate Experience & Pre-Joining Attrition

(This blog continues the theme of treating Employees & Candidates as Customers that I had written about in one of my earlier blogs.)

First, let’s focus on why Employees & Candidates are customers? Every Organization provides product or service. And these employees & candidates are two parts:

     1)      They might consumers of these products & services, either directly or indirectly;

   2)  They are also brand ambassadors of the organization. Every minute of their career with the organization, they represent the organization.

Talent Acquisition

There 4 distinct areas in Talent Acquisition:

      1)      Talent Demand;

      2)      Talent Search;

      3)      Talent Selection;

      4)      Talent Acquisition.

The 4^th pillar, Talent Acquisition is where mostly focus is diluted and adds to the Pre-Joining Attrition or Drop-Out rate.

Organizations focus on Cost per Hire, Source Mix and Effective Source, Recruiter SLAs etc. However, one of the most important metric (in my opinion) is either missed totally or not focussed on as much as it should be:

Pre-Joining Attrition. Or in other words, Drop-Out rate. This refers to the number of candidates who accept / receive the offer after going through the entire process of Recruitment and then do not join or decline the offer. Some of the statistics show that the drop-out rates range from 19% to 40% in different industry sectors.

Why is Pre-Joining Attrition important? This has a cascading impact on various other metrics like Cost per Hire, Offer-2-Hire ratio etc. And this to a large extent defines an organization’s ability to ramp up faster.

While there are organizations which also track Offer-2-Hire ratio, to a large extent, the remedial actions for this are missed out.

Hence, the questions that should be asked by every organization should be:

      a)      How do we sustain the interest of a Candidate in our Organization?

      b)      How do we provide exemplary experience for Candidates to assimilate with us?

      c)      How do we make New Hires get up to speed faster?

      d)      How do we enhance the ease of joining us?

These questions focus on 4 distinct categories:

 1)       Communication & Marketing – Continuing to project an Organization’s image to sustain the                 interest of the Candidate in that organization which has selected him/her.
     

 2)     Candidate Experience – making sure Candidates’ identify & bond with the organization in the            most seamless manner, even when they have not joined.
     

 3)     Faster Time to Productive Use – reducing the time taken to get New Hires upto speed in such a          way that they hit the deck running.
     

 4)     Easier On-Boarding – making it easier for the Candidates to blend in smoothly right from day one. 

This is where Candidate experience initiatives should be focusing on. While Applicant Tracking systems and Talent Communities etc may provide the “feel good” factor, to a large extent, they are focused on easing the pains of a Recruiter and enhancing productivity of a Recruiter from an organizations’ point of view.

While it is right to do so, what makes a winning proposition for an organization would be to focus on the above questions, since they try to provide answers to the problem from the perspective of the Candidates.

When organizations change the focus of the systems & processes from “Inside-Out” to an “Outside-In” (looking at things from the Candidates / Customers / Employees) perspectives, organizations start being disruptors & see quantum jump in the business benefits.