Candidate to Employee: The Transition Matters

Have you ever been ghosted by a candidate? You're not alone. Suffice it to say, employers are struggling with promising candidates who, in the middle of the recruitment process, suddenly becoming unresponsive to all efforts at communication. But what about employees who go radio silent? Unfortunately, that’s a problem, too.

The following types of scenarios are increasingly common:

• A prospective hire is given a conditional offer of employment, subject to a few background screening details, but doesn’t complete the process or reply to the recruiter’s follow-up attempts.
• A candidate accepts a job offer and schedules a first day of work but doesn’t show up or respond to further contact.
• A new employee dutifully arrives for a few days but silently “resigns” and is never heard from again.

Entry-level roles are highly likely to be affected by the ghosting phenomenon. If you’ve been struggling with ghosting as you recruit for such positions, you are not alone. In fact, 50% of newly hired individuals will ghost on an entry-level job. What gives?

Overlooked Deficiencies in Onboarding

With all of the talk about evolving recruitment strategies, most employers have made great strides in remedying old fashioned, burdensome, and time-consuming application processes. Onboarding, on the other hand, hasn’t garnered the same attention from HR advice-givers, and some employers’ practices are in need of improvement.

This may be all the more harmful today in light of the quality candidate experience companies are delivering. After all, how disappointing must it be for a candidate to enjoy a personable, responsive, and quick recruitment effort, only to receive an offer and be hit with a bureaucratic attitude, a pile of paperwork, and seemingly endless delays on the way to the first paycheck?

Does any of this sound like your organization?

• You offer jobs conditional on a background check, but the results take ages to come back, by which time many of your top candidates have moved on.
• An employee’s first day is consumed by forms and rigid discussions about rules. Many people don’t return for Day 2.
• New hires seem surprised—and frankly, disillusioned—by the responsibilities of the job, the environment they’ll be working in, or other aspects of their new role.

These and other issues can be signs of a disconnect between your recruitment and onboarding processes. Fortunately, there are answers. For example, rapid, accurate background checks are essential in speeding the pre-employment screening process and can have a direct impact on the number of candidates who join your organization.

And there are many other ways to reduce new hire ghosting, too. We talked about numerous solutions during our live webinar on ghosting. Did you miss this event? No problem. We’re making the recording available here.

Answers to More of Your Questions

Asurint is fully invested in disseminating information about the issues HR professionals and recruiters care about most. The ghosting webinar was, simply put, one of our most popular. That goes to show how complex a problem ghosting has become and how desperate many in the industry are for answers.

The webinar hosts, both experts on the issue, fielded dozens of participant questions about ghosting and offered various strategies to minimize the behavior. Access the recorded webinar here and halfway through you’ll find the Q&A portion. At that point, you may feel a tingle of recognition as attendees in situations just like yours get the information they—and you—need.