Dr John Sullivan Talent Management Thought Leadership
Employed candidates are the most valuable because their skills and experience are up-to-date. But because they are busy working, employed candidates usually have the highest “didn’t complete” rate among all interviewees. This checklist is intended to be used as a tool for dramatically improving your interview completion rate, especially among your top employed candidates.
Your chances of hiring a top candidate go to zero…
the minute they fail to complete one of their interviews!
Currently Employed Candidates Have The Highest “Didn’t Complete” Rate
We are experiencing a record rate of candidate ghosting. As many as 30% of all potential interviewees never schedule or actually attend all of their interviews. However, it’s a mistake to assume that every candidate category has the same probability of interview ghosting. Because your unemployed candidates (often 70% of your total applicants) are by far the most likely to finish all of their interviews.
In direct contrast, currently employed candidates usually have the highest “didn’t complete” rate. Because they are currently working, they are the only candidates who will encounter difficulty in getting away from their work. Employed candidates are also more likely to become a “didn’t complete” failure. If they get frustrated with your hiring process, they will stop interviewing and simply decide to stay in their current job.
When It Comes To Interview Attendance, You Should Focus On Employed Candidates
It’s important to realize that in most cases, employed candidates (who currently have a full-time job) are likely the most valuable of all of your candidates. There are four business reasons why they are the most desirable category of candidates.
- Up-to-date in technology – because their current work likely requires them to use technology like AI. If you hire an employed candidate, you won’t have to wait for them to get up to speed with your latest technologies.
- A skill-set that is up-to-date – because they use their skills every day in their current job. The skill sets of any employed candidates that you hire are likely to be completely current.
- Their training and experience will be up-to-date – because they are supported by their current employer, their training and the experience will be current. And unlike an unemployed hire. With a currently employed candidate, you won’t have to pay for additional training or wait for it to be completed.
- They’ve already been judged to be a keeper – because this employee has kept their job despite numerous budget cuts and layoffs. It’s clear that their current employer and their manager have judged them to be “a keeper.”
A Checklist – Covering The Best Practices For Improving Your Interview Completion Rate
It’s a mistake to assume that today’s low interview completion rates are unavoidable. After years of researching this problem, I have found that there are numerous no-cost actions that can almost immediately improve your interview completion rate.
Begin by understanding that there are two components of the interview completion goal – for an interview to be rated as completed, two things must occur. First, the target percentage of the candidates who have been offered an interview opportunity must actually complete the interview scheduling. The second “completion component” covers the percentage of all scheduled interviews where the interviewee actually shows up.
Because failing to schedule quickly is a major failure factor, interview scheduling should be done online – the earliest failure element in the interview process occurs when a candidate is offered an interview opportunity. But for whatever reason, they never complete the scheduling of that interview. I estimate that most companies lose as high as 30% of their potential interviewees because they fail to schedule. Some candidates simply don’t try hard enough to schedule. In other cases, the primary cause of not completing the interviews is the tremendous difficulty in scheduling interviews. And of course, you must realize that interview scheduling is even more difficult when attempting to schedule currently employed candidates. So today, many companies are avoiding the time-consuming give-and-take of interview scheduling by adopting online self-service scheduling software (e.g., Rakuna). This software makes scheduling faster, easier, and much less frustrating for a candidate.
Convert a majority of your face-to-face interviews, so that they are now electronic – it should be obvious that face-to-face interviews have the highest “didn’t complete” rate. It is difficult to find open times when the candidate can participate in them. So it makes sense in today’s world, where most are familiar with electronic communications channels. To convert most face-to-face interviews into electronic ones. That means, unless there is a compelling reason for a face-to-face interview, you should primarily hold electronic interviews because they have a significantly higher completion rate. And since almost all candidates now have smartphones, it makes sense to use them for voice, live video, automated video, text, and online interviews. Obviously, electronic remote interviews should also be the first choice when you have international candidates because the need to travel results in a low interview completion rate. You should also realize that most electronic interviews can be easily video recorded. This video recording will provide those who couldn’t initially attend the live electronic interview with a chance to review the video later.
Schedule electronic interviews when employed candidates aren’t on the clock – you can make it easier for employed candidates to participate in your electronic interviews. If you schedule them outside of normal working hours, when the candidate is “off the clock.” The best times when employed candidates can find a quiet place to interview are while they are still on the worksite, either during their lunch hour or an hour and a half before or after their 8 to 5 workday.
Hold in-person interviews at alternative times and days – top-performing employed candidates may be so busy with their current work. That they simply won’t be able to get away for an in-person interview during their normal working hours. So work with your hiring managers to determine if they are willing to hold their in-person interviews at alternative times, which include after work hours, on Saturday, or even during some federal holidays. Not only will these alternative times make it easier for your employed candidates to attend, but also the hiring manager’s willingness not to make an employed candidate take time off work in order to interview will likely impress the candidate. Because that flexibility will show your employed candidates that you have some empathy and appreciation for their situation.
Hold your face-to-face interviews at a more convenient location – when your corporate facilities are hard to reach. Or in the cases where an employed candidate might not want to be seen around your facility. Consider offering your face-to-face interviews at alternative locations, which might include one of your company’s branches, at a hotel near a major transit hub, or at a library close to where they live. You can also improve your face-to-face interview attendance by minimizing the chance that your interviewee gets lost and misses the interview. Also, it’s a good idea to provide each candidate with pretested, foolproof directions on how to get to the interview location. It also makes sense to guide candidates on what to wear and what to bring to their face-to-face interview.
Complete all of a candidate’s in-person interviews on the same calendar day – if you arrange all in-person interviews so that they can be completed during a single business day. That will mean that your employed candidates will only have to take one day off work in order to complete your interviews. Many companies choose Friday as the target interview day because at most employers, it’s easier for an employee to get the day off on Friday.
Minimizing candidate’s anxiety will dramatically improve interview attendance – It’s a fact that anxiety related to their upcoming interview negatively impacts both the candidate’s attendance and their performance during their interview. As a result, hiring managers and recruiters should try to minimize a candidate’s anxiety. Start by providing them with a brief outline (or preview) of what will likely happen during their upcoming interview. And if you’re bold, you should consider asking them about their potential anxieties and what the recruiting team could do to minimize them. You can learn more details about how to reduce interview anxiety here.
Let them know when it’s their final interview – reluctant candidates are more likely to schedule and attend an interview when they know that this interview will be a finalist interview. So, give your interviewees a heads-up alert when they are coming to the end of their interview string.
Make it clear that you have prepared for them – employed candidates are more likely to attend an interview after they realize that the recruiting team has put a great deal of preparation into their upcoming visit. You can show your recruiting team’s preparation and excitement. By reminding the candidates what you like about them and how their interview will be well attended by your potential future teammates. Also, mentioning that in addition to their interview, you will be offering them a tour or a team lunch will further show the extent of your preparation and interest in them.
Reward candidates for showing up – often it only takes a little encouragement or a nudge to increase interview attendance. So, consider offering employed candidates a small reward (like a $50 gift card) as a thank you for their attendance. Some have even paid employed candidates for the hourly pay they lost when they were away from work. On the other side, although I don’t recommend it, some companies automatically punish candidates who fail to schedule or attend an interview.
Reduce the number of interviews you hold – I may be stating the obvious. However, reducing the number of interviews you require will have little impact on the accuracy of your candidate selection. Additionally, most candidates believe that we interview too much. Decreasing the number of interviews and making them less painful will increase candidate excitement and speed up your time to fill (I call it death by interview).
Whenever possible, protect the privacy of your employed candidates – most employed candidates won’t want it to be widely known that they are seeking a new job. You will get better interview attendance from your employed candidates after you convince them that you will be discreet about their job search.
Learn from your mistakes – you can dramatically improve the success of your effort to improve interview attendance, if your process is data and metric-driven. Only with performance data and failure analysis is it possible to continually improve your interview completion results. Failure analysis is especially important because it allows you to identify the underlying factors that cause most interview completion failures. So, as a first step, you should put together a measurement system that identifies when an interview completion failure has occurred. And after your hiring for the job has been completed. It’s smart to proactively survey a sample of your top candidates who either failed to schedule or show up for an interview to find out the real reasons behind the failure.
You can learn more about the five easy steps for improving your interviews here.
Final Thoughts
Be aware that by making your interviews easier to schedule and attend, you can be assured that improved recruiting results will follow. However, most don’t realize that there are also other business benefits that result from this effort.
For example, a significant quality of hire benefit occurs when you reduce the total time it takes to complete all of your interviews for an open job. This result will also dramatically shorten your time to fill.
With faster hiring, you will no longer be losing many of your top candidates to other companies that simply made earlier offers. And because your positions will be vacant for as long, it will be much easier for your hiring manager’s team to maintain a high level of productivity.
Finally, once the word gets around that you have made your interview process much less painful, that will improve your overall employment brand and eventually lead to more and higher-quality job applicants.
Thank you for reading
Note for the reader
This is the latest article from Dr. Sullivan, who was called “the Michael Jordan of Hiring” by Fast Company. Please help spread his ideas by sharing this with your team/network and by posting it on your favorite social site.
