Your Hiring Experience: Strength or Achilles’ Heel?
The path toward talent acquisition dominance and world-class employee engagement is rocky, perilous and traveled successfully by a few lucky corporations. Traversing this path successfully is the topic of countless conference sessions and webcasts. But whether the topic is about conquering social sourcing, building loyalty from within the ranks of employees or measuring and improving engagement, all pursuits are for naught unless your hiring experience is under control. If you’re not moving candidates through a high-quality hiring process, everything else is a waste of your time and resources. Why? Because that hiring process is what stands between a company and its next engaged employee and makes or breaks its employer brand. According to a recent study of job seekers who turned down a job offer, 32% report they rejected the offer primarily because the hiring process was a negative experience1. That means that on average, nearly a third of those who decline your job offer do so not because of salary, benefits, vacation or career path, but because of their interaction with your organization. It could be your people or your process, but regardless one-third of the time, it was entirely within your control.
Adding Insult to Injury
Unfortunately, when a negative impression takes hold it rarely stops there. According to a separate survey of job seekers who had recently interviewed with a company, how they perceived the quality of the hiring process – either high or low – greatly impacted their willingness to recommend the company to others2.
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Turning Off the Younger Generation
If your organization relies at least in part on younger hires, attention to your hiring process is an even more urgent mandate. Among the respondents in the 18-24 age group, nearly two-thirds (62%) reported that they rejected the job offer primarily because the hiring process was a negative experience.
Unless and until this problem is solved, then, why bother with that initiative for new sourcing contracts? Why update the career page with beautiful testimonial videos? Why bother hiring a fancy consultant to monitor and troubleshoot the latest employee engagement survey? When the hiring process is broken, any new sourcing investment will be wasteful and new employee engagement is starting in a hole.
The Ongoing Impact
Introspective hiring managers may want to look beyond those candidates who rejected their offer and contemplate what impact a negative hiring process has on the candidate who accepts a position. Is the organization’s hiring process actually undermining employee satisfaction, loyalty, productivity and performance? It’s widely recognized that the level of engagement employees feel is a key factor in how quickly they become productive, how long they stay and most importantly, how they contribute during their tenure with an organization.
The hiring process is a critical battle in the war for talent, and unlike many elements on the talent acquisition continuum, this one is within an organization’s control. By strengthening your interview and offer phase, you strengthen your entire process and elevate your employee engagement.
Notes:
1. Written by Montage and conducted using Google Consumer Surveys, December 2013.
2. Written by Montage and conducted using Google Consumer Surveys, December 2013.
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