How To Prevent Hourly Job Applicants From Ghosting

Garlic can help protect your home from vampires and water can melt a witch with just a few drops, but what can help rid your hiring process of ghosts? Ghosting—which is when a candidate stops all communication with a recruiter without warning—is on the rise. 

According to a survey conducted by Indeed, 28% of job seekers have ghosted a potential employer, a number that has gone up by an additional 10% since 2019. With Halloween right around the corner, there’s no better time to talk about actionable best practices talent acquisition teams can implement to bulletproof their hiring processes against ghosting. 
 

Reasons for ghosting can vary across industries and verticals, which means strategies to prevent the practice are not one-size-fits all. In a high volume hourly recruiting environment, talent acquisition professionals must take extra care in understanding their candidates’ motivations for ghosting to reduce the likelihood that a candidate will go dark. Maybe a candidate is prioritizing positions that offer a signing bonus, or perhaps they want to get a new job as fast as possible. 

Whatever the case may be, these personal factors can play a major role when hourly applicants are deciding whether to move forward in a hiring process. This Halloween as you take some time to carve a pumpkin, remember to also carve out some recruitment strategies that may help reduce the number of ghosts in your talent pool.

One way to prevent ghosting is by making a vested effort to get to know hourly candidates during your initial phone calls. Cat Almanzor Hancock, Talent Acquisition Leader at North Coast Electric, suggests positioning phone screens as a casual chat rather than an interview. In doing so, Almazor Hancock has been able to build more personal connections with applicants and help set expectations. 

Informal informational calls create a strong foundation for a successful recruitment process and allow candidates to create a stronger bond with a company, which in turn will make them less likely to ghost. 

Talent acquisition professionals should be sure to ask candidates early on in the hiring process how they would like to communicate. Some candidates prefer to chat via email, while others are more responsive via SMS. Recruiters should honor candidates’ preferences to keep the lines of communication open throughout the recruitment process. 

If communication about the hiring process takes place through a channel that is not convenient for a candidate, they may be less likely to engage. Companies should invest in technology that allows candidates to communicate with recruiters using a wide variety of channels.

Engaging with candidates throughout the recruitment process is a reliable way to reduce ghosting. Recruitment Manager at BrightStar Care, Jose Watson, requires his team members to set aside at least one hour a week to simply engage with candidates. While there may not always be a firm update to give candidates, simply letting them know that their application is still under review is a great way to continue to build the relationship. 

If a job seeker submits an application and has little to no interaction with the company afterwards, they will be far less likely to keep the lines of communication open. Putting a stop to ghosting starts with a consistent candidate engagement strategy.

Recruiters must prioritize making the hiring process as quick as possible to reduce their candidate drop-off rate. Frontline hourly workers don’t have weeks to wait to hear back from a company. If companies aren’t fast enough they will lose a qualified candidate to another hourly employer that responds back faster, which can result in the candidate ghosting. 

Talent acquisition teams should take a critical look at their recruitment process to see which steps can be combined, automated, or eliminated altogether. An applicant tracking system (ATS), specifically designed for high volume hourly hiring, like Fountain, can enable talent acquisition teams to hire more employees faster so candidates don't even have enough time to ghost!

There is nothing more frustrating than finding a great candidate only to have them stop responding. Recruiters should apply these four strategies to their hiring process so that the only ghosts they encounter this Halloween are the ones knocking at their doors for candy. Happy Halloween!

Erica Weiss is Senior Social Media and Brand Manager at Fountain. Visit get.fountain.com Connect Erica Weiss