Last week, during the course of an informal gathering with fellow CHROs, we were having a hilarious conversation about how different innovative reasons, are cited for last minutes candidate dropouts. We all face this scenario quite often. While this used to be quite common at the junior level, now started becoming a pattern even for senior-level of employees as well. During the course of our conversation, we touched upon the topic “Professional Ethics”.
I wonder whether this is still relevant in an absolutely fierce talent market. Unfortunately, this is creating an adverse impact both in terms of cost as well as project plans for many global as well as domestic organizations. Recruiting teams started taking some steps, which otherwise they would have never considered adopting under normal circumstances.
Companies building workforce plan with an assumption of 50% dropout consideration; hiring talents who are already on notice period by giving a counter offer and many other steps, which will force us to stay in this vicious cycle for even longer time. Can this be a sustainable solution in a long term? I believe, there needs to be a fresh look at this issue.
One may have to look at the candidate’s psyche as well. Let us also accept that there is no one size fits all solution. For a junior engineer, it can be compensation. For a middle management employee, it could be smooth onboarding support while for senior leadership, it is mentoring from senior leaders about the transition to a new role… the reason can be multifold.
My discussion with a cross-section of talents who joined us and who declined, provide insight that candidates stay engaged when it is relevant qualitative information gets shared about their role, transparency about the benefits structure, and overall direction of the organization.
Here are a few simple steps, if taken with the right intent, that can really bring forth significant improvement in candidate stickiness and a better conversion rate.
EVP
It’s important to have a clear understanding of EVP. Every hiring manager needs to offer a “consistent” narrative about the “unique” value proposition that the organization offers. In most organizations, EVP is considered to be an HR lingo and responsibility. Unless we can make our EVP inclusive and consistent, we lose out big time to connect with our target talent group.
The targeted talent population is more comfortable connecting with their friends and seniors, who are working in your organization – both before they get an offer and more importantly post they are offered a job. So if this group is not articulating the EVP narrative clearly, we are creating a risk of losing the talent.
In a tight talent market, it is not a good idea to rely on compensation as your sole EVP. It’s your purpose, values, culture, quality of work, and growth opportunity, that play a critical role. Again, I am not suggesting that HR is out of the game, but an inclusive approach will amplify your effort manyfold.
Job Descriptions
One more area where we can make slight tweaks – Job descriptions or Position descriptions. In almost all cases, this is a standard description of tasks. Is that enough in today’s context? The talent market has undergone a tectonic shift in the last 24 months. There are talks about Great Resignation in every talent market across the world.
Every expert is talking about “Purpose” as a big talent driver. In this context, our traditional JDs will not suffice. My suggestion will be to bring in some element of change. How about, providing a narrative of how this job will contribute towards the overall organizational goal; maybe offering a storyline of what kind of culture/values we encourage; – we can be more creative. The main message here is to offer the purpose of the job in an overall organizational context to the candidate.
Connect
How are you keeping yourself connected with the offered candidates? This is one of the major folly of any organization. Most of the time, this job is done by a bot or some very junior person in recruiting team.
This is the most delicate time and unless we have a strategic approach to keep the candidate engaged with qualitative updates about the organization and respond to their query in a timely manner, we face the risk of losing talents.
My suggestion here will be to engage an extended team of hiring managers; multipliers (hi-pot talents who can be trained) and HR teams to keep them engaged. Of course, chatbots can be used as an enabler but at the end of the day, we all love human touch in all our interactions.
Employee Experience
Employee experience at every juncture of the employee life cycle is crucial in building your talent brand. Irrespective of how compelling and unique is your EVP, every “negative” experience adversely impact. Here I would specifically mention employee exit transactions. Let me give you an example.
Very recently I saw a tweet by an ex-employee congratulating his past employer for settling his past dues in record time. Imagine the positivity he creates for the brand, even after he leaves the company. Smooth “Exit” also plays an important role in building your talent brand. We are living in an era of social media.
Therefore, it is important to have a strategic approach to highlight the positive employee experiences in forums like Glassdoor and most importantly, offer a constructive timely response to any adverse feedback from any employee. Being indifferent to such feedback is not relay going to help. Every talent, today, checks these forums before taking a final call.
Red Flags
Are all the people involved in the selection process, trained to look for “Red Flags”? There are some obvious indicators and there are some hidden traits. There are psychometric assessments that reveal personal traits, and motivation drivers.
Many organizations do not really leverage this report and subsequently, suffer from a bad selection decision. If we can use them as enablers during the interview process, this can be of immense help.
Even without assessment, it would be worthwhile, to train our hiring manager in interviewing techniques. I find it quite interesting to hear that we are willing to factor in 50% dropout in the selection process but not ready to drop a “doubtful” skilled candidate during the process. Have you ever imagined the manhour and productivity loss in the process?
Honestly, there is no magic wand for this disruptive trend, which we are experiencing in the talent market today. This is impacting business and also impacting our competitiveness as a country.
This is not so common in global market and for obvious reasons, global companies are worried while making investment decisions for India. Having said that, we can not afford to accept this as fate accompli. If we take a few proactive steps, we can certainly improve the situation.
My best wishes to all of you.
