It’s ten minutes past the scheduled interview time, but where’s your candidate? Have you just been ghosted?
Unfortunately, candidate ghosting is a very real thing that HR and hiring managers encounter.
Aggravating? Of course it is.
You’ve presented a fantastic opportunity and invested precious time and resources into marketing the role. You’ve been communicating for a while with your preferred candidate(s).
All is going swimmingly, or so it would seem. Then comes the interview. Or perhaps your candidate attends interview, but then he or she goes AWOL after that point.
Ugh.
Personnel Today recently wrote about the subject of candidate ghosting.¹ The publication reviewed 55,000 interview results over a year, and came to the conclusion that differentiating your employer brand must play a key role in your anti-ghosting strategy.
They wrote:
The problem is candidates often cast a wide net, applying to similar-sounding jobs in the same industry, and it becomes hard to tell one company from the other. The job you’re hiring for is lost in an indiscernible heap of career opportunities.
Their solution? “Showcase your company as a place where team members thrive.”
Guess what — we fully agree. Presenting a unique employer brand can help keep your opportunities at the forefront of candidates’ minds.
So, how do you go about developing a top employer brand?
Part of the answer lies in how your business presents itself online.
Do you have a careers website, or a careers page on your website? These enable you to showcase your team’s values, while providing a sneak peak into the day-to-day culture of your workplace.
You can even plug the site into your applicant tracking system (ATS) to direct interested candidates to current vacancies.
Engaging videos can also help promote your employer brand. More than 80% of web traffic will be video by 2022, according to a Cisco study.² This underscores the importance of video becoming a core part of your strategy to reach and engage with candidates.
Check out this example of an employer branding video. By weaving together multiple perspectives, the video shows candidates why Hudson PRO offers a great career opportunity.
But what if you’ve not got the means to create a dedicated careers site, or compelling videos? Never fear. Make the most of your company’s image on social media. While it does require time and commitment, the wonderful thing about projecting your brand via social media is that your audience tends to already be there.
Depending on the resources available, you can take a more proactive approach with social media, regularly pushing content to your desired audience. Of course, if you do publish routinely, you should always consider whether your content is relevant to the audience, or you risk losing your audience to disengagement.
If your capacity is quite limited, you could consider publishing ‘evergreen’ content onto your core platforms. This is the sort of content that remains relevant through every season. You don’t necessarily need to refresh it very often.
As an example, consider content related to the work space, particularly if it’s bright and welcoming. We’ve got some great examples of this on our Hudson RPO Instagram page.
Ultimately, if you develop and showcase an employer brand that truly differentiates from the competition, it will be harder for great candidates to disengage from great opportunities.
And all the sooner will you be saying: Buh bye, ghosties! Don’t even bother ‘not showing up’ again!
Click here to learn more about Employer Branding.
Sources
1: https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/ghosting-in-recruitment-a-growing-candidate-trend/
2: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/service-provider/visual-networking-index-vni/index.html
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