Recruiters can stop ghosting

In the candidate short market we’re in, it’s absolutely critical to keep talent engaged throughout the entire application process. You simply cannot afford to lose the talent that you’ve spent time and money attracting.

This sounds obvious, of course, but abandonment is a key problem – and few companies know where, when, and why it is happening. 

Let’s start with the metric, and then talk about how we apply it to your wider talent acquisition journey.

Overall candidate abandonment rate = number of candidates still in the process at shortlist stage, minus the total number of candidates who landed on your careers page, divided by that total number again. Or:

At the very minimum, this is the metric you need to start tracking, because it is a generalized diagnostic for the health of your recruitment process.

If you know that you had 100 visitors to your careers (or job ad) page, but your shortlist has only 10 candidates in it, you’ve lost 90% of your possible talent pool at one stage or another.

Simple math, yes, but in our experience, many recruiters and talent acquisition managers don’t look at what their starting pool of candidate interest was – and therefore, what their theoretical talent pool might have been – and look only at actual applicants.

This poses another, related question: How do I know what my abandonment rate is at each stage of the application process? 

Let’s say, like the example above, that you had 100 visitors to your careers (or job ad) page, and 20 of them completed the first-step application form on that page. You’ve lost 80% of your possible pool right there.

Not great, but at least you know – now you can examine that page to uncover possible issues preventing conversion.

• Is the page too long?
• Does it have too much text?
• Is the ‘apply’ button clearly shown?
• Is the form too long, requiring too much information to fill out?
• Are your perks/EVP attributes clearly displayed?

Without examining stage progression in isolation, you might never know why people aren’t sticking around.

To reiterate: As well as an overall abandonment rate, you need to measure the drop out rates at each of the stages of your talent acquisition journey. The next section can help show you what to focus on.

Where, when and why do candidates drop out of the application process?

Conventional wisdom tells us that the longer your application and interview process goes on, the higher your dropout rate will be.

But that’s a generalized issue – it tells you nothing about how to fix the problem, beyond simply making it shorter. You need specific, localized data to diagnose and fix your leakage spots.

Data from a 2022 Aptitude Research report on key interviewing trends found that candidates tend to drop out at the following stages, in the following proportions:

• 22% of candidates drop out at the application stage
• 24% at the screening stage
• 25% at the interview stage
• 18% at the assessment stage
• 9% at the offer stage

Good to know, right? If you audit your own journey, looking at these stages and using these numbers as benchmarks, you can quickly identify your weak areas. 

For example: You might be proud of your four-step culture-building interview process, in which candidates have a coffee meet-and-greet with the team they’re hoping to join.

But if it’s cumbersome for the applicant and relies on several stakeholders to orchestrate, it may be dragging your process out unnecessarily, and doing more harm than good.

The most common job application abandonment stage: The interview

25% of candidates drop out here. Shouldn’t really be a surprise, should it? Job interviews are long, numerous, and in many cases, ineffective. According to Aptitude Research, 33% of companies aren’t confident in how they interview; 50% believe they’ve lost talent due to poor interviewing.

When asked about their top interviewing challenges, surveyed HR and TA leaders responded:

• Our interview process is too long (52%)
• We make candidates go through too many interviews (39%)
• Out interview process is inconsistent (38%)
• We don’t use objective data to drive decisions (32%)
• We have bias in the interview process (21%)

Let’s focus on that second-last challenge: lack of objective data. Almost a third of companies are approaching their interview and application process with assumptions and gut feelings; and half of them believe their interview process is too long. 

Despite this, 68% of companies say they have not made any improvements surrounding candidate experience this year. How many, then, are looking seriously at their entire talent acquisition journey to see where it’s failing? 

This is why we’re focusing on candidate abandonment rate in this post: It is a simple metric to show the health of your application process, easier to measure than many of the other recruitment metrics for which you’re responsible (the ever-nebulous quality-of-hire being a prime example). As the saying goes, what gets measured, gets managed.

Start here today, and see what you learn.

(P.S. Sapia’s Ai Smart Chat Interviewer combines the first four stages of your process – application, screening, interviewing, and assessment – together, resulting in an application process that can secure top talent in as little as 24 hours.

Because it’s a chat-based interview with a smart little AI, your team doesn’t need to do anything – everyone who applies gets an interview, immediately. That maximizes your talent pool right from the get-go.

What’s more, our candidate dropout rate is just 15%, on average. That means that 85% of your starting talent pool will stick around.

Why do our candidates stick around? More than 90% of them love the experience. See how we can help you here, today.)

The Workforce Science team are on the road again!

This time, we are heading to Sydney to host a session at APS’s 12th Industrial and Organisational Psychology Conference (IOP).

IOP is Australia’s premier conference for us organisational psychologists, so it has a permanent spot in our calendars. And this year, we got extra excited when the conference was announced.

Why?

The theme of the conference is set to;
‘From Ideas to Implementation: Embracing the Challenges of Tomorrow’.

With a theme this relevant to our day-to-day work, we couldn’t stop ourselves from hosting a professional practice forum. The forum’s theme is what Elliot and I spend most of our time thinking about; the robots that are coming for our jobs!

It is crystal clear that there is a real need to discuss how our roles will change in the (not so distant) future.

Leading researchers from Oxford University and Deloitte estimate that machines could replace up to 35% of all job types within the next 20 years. So, we will need to find ways to coexist and work with the machines. But how?

In the forum, we will discuss our view on how the role of organisational psychologists will evolve. We will also present our thoughts on how this shift will impact us, both negative and positive aspects.

If you are attending IOP, feel free to come along and add to the discussion!

Our presentation – “The robots are coming (to help us with hiring) for our jobs” – is scheduled for Thursday 14th July at 3.30pm.

We would love to hear your thoughts on the opportunities and challenges we face, as implementation of AI gets more widely adopted.

If you’re not attending the conference, but still would like to discuss this, don’t hesitate to drop us a line on LinkedIn (Elliot Wood/Kristina Dorniak-Wall). Elliot and I are always keen to chat about it!

Hope to see you at IOP!

Here’s a hot take: The science of Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is dubious, confusing, and anything but settled. When it comes to talent identification, that can be a problem.

First, what is Emotional Intelligence (EQ)?

We tend to measure EQ in the same way we do IQ: Using a test with a series of questions. But emotion and cognitive ability are totally different, and as sciencealert.com points out, ‘It’s much more difficult to measure EI scores as often emotion-based questions do not have one correct answer.’ Add to this the fact that many EQ tests rely on self-reported data, and you can see how IQ and EQ are not simply two equal sides of the coin that make up a person.

That’s not to say that Emotional Intelligence doesn’t exist, just that it’s a roundabout way of measuring personality traits and behaviours that other mechanisms, such as the HEXACO personality inventory, do more reliably and effectively. EQ also carries the issue of ranking certain traits as more desirable or ‘better’ than others – for example, extraversion, agreeableness, and openness.

The trap of over-weighting agreeableness

When we say someone has good or high EQ, what we tend to mean is that they’re friendly, kind, self-aware, and generally speaking, extraverted. They can adjust their tone and approach depending on who they’re talking to. They’re not known to be rude, or brash, or talk too much.

That’s an estimation of someone with good EQ, and this is the problem: It’s an empirical judgment. And while we think we’re describing someone who is emotionally intelligent, we’re really describing someone who is high in agreeableness, emotionality, openness, and other more valid measures of personality. Sounds like a great person, sure, but not necessarily a better type of person for every situation.

Consider this: Many studies have shown that disagreeable people tend to perform better over their career than people who are polite, kind, and friendly. A great proportion of CEOs, be they women or men, are high in disagreeableness. It’s easy to see why: though there are many downsides to disagreeableness, it pays, in many situations, to possess the ability to be combative, straightforward, and brutally honest. To think of disagreeableness as inherently worse than agreeableness is misguided and, at worst, discriminatory.

And even if that is not true, and all of the varied and ever-changing definitions of Emotional Intelligence lead to better job performance, how do we even measure it accurately?

How do you accurately measure Emotional Intelligence (EQ)?

In the context of hiring, EQ is often used as a gut-feel heuristic we apply to people with whom we gel. Even in structured face-to-face interviews, it can be very difficult to assign as score to the different measures of EQ. 

Imagine someone is sitting across from you in an interview. By sight, they appear to be an average person in every way. So, by your questions and their responses, how do you measure their:

• Self-awareness. What are the repeatable, verifiable signals of someone who is aware of themselves? Is it their propensity to correct statements mid-sentence? Is it the way they ask you where to sit before committing to a position? Is it the way they maintain eye-contact? How much or little eye-contact do you need to be satisfied of above-average self-awareness?
• Adaptability, teamwork, or ability to influence. Sure, you might ask them about a time where they had to apply abstract thinking to resolve a stressful situation, but how do you rate their answer objectively? Experience may tell you that they have been adaptable, and that’s all well and good, but how do you rank that against someone who is, personality-wise, highly geared for adaptability, but has not had the opportunity to prove it? In other words, how do you assess potential fairly, from candidate to candidate?

The alternative to measuring EQ badly

Again, aside from face-value judgments of agreeableness and social tact, it’s near-on impossible to assess EQ in any fair or meaningful way. That’s not even accounting for the many biases we, as humans, bring to the hiring process. You might, with some accuracy, be able to appraise a person’s EQ once it’s been proven, but that’s not useful at all in recruitment. In hiring, you’re hedging against unknowns, hoping for the best.

That’s what makes accurate personality assessment so critical – and why we built our Ai Smart Interviewer. It finds you the people you need based on an accurate, HEXACO-based assessment of their personality. One interview, via chat, is all it takes.

We look at the critical power skills – communication, emotionality, empathy, openness, and so on – and profile all candidates fairly against one another. So you’re ranking suitability on objective and repeatable measures. No guesswork involved. No bias.

You bet it works. 94% of the 2+ million candidates we’ve interviewed found their personality insights accurate and valuable. On average, 80% of the candidates who experience our interview process recommend you as an employer of choice, even if they don’t get the job.

Someone with an ostensibly high EQ is, in most cases, someone you might want. But appearances can be deceiving, and humans, by nature, are not good at objectively assessing personality. We’re just not, period.

Get the help you need, and you’ll quickly hire the people you want.