You've Been Ghosted: 3 Steps to Becoming an HR Ghostbuster

You’ve Been Ghosted: 3 Steps to Becoming an HR Ghostbuster

Applicant Pro

Ghosting is at an all-time high…according to a recent Gallup Poll, ghosting is up to 28%!!! That’s a lot of job applicants disappearing during the hiring process.

With numbers that high, it’s probably safe to assume that you’ve been the victim of ghosting…or maybe you’re guilty of ghosting…have you ever had someone apply for one of your jobs and never got back to them? Maybe they weren’t qualified, but instead of sending them a rejection letter, you just stopped communicating with them. Guess what? That’s ghosting too! So hiring managers and job seekers are both guilty of ghosting.

There are a few key stages within the hiring process that are more susceptible to ghosting than others; the job ad, the application process, and the screening phase.

Let’s start with the job ad since that’s where the job seeker will get their first impression of you and your open jobs. The biggest reason, we have found, that job seekers will ghost you right from the beginning is that you use a job description as your job ad. In fact, 82% of employers do this! The truth is, your job description was never meant to be a job ad!

Job descriptions are missing a few key items that will lead to ghosting:

• They’re not exciting or enticing for job seekers… at all

• They usually don’t include the job schedule

• The pay structure and benefits package is not part of the job description…but this is one of the most important pieces of information to job seekers

• Job requirements are not generally listed in the job description

Using your job description as your job ad will lead to applicants moving on past your job before you even knew they existed! You need to draw job seekers in with a really compelling job ad that markets your company as an employer of choice!

Next, the application part of the process. The first thing you can do to ensure your application won’t drive applicants away is to make it MOBILE-friendly! Job seekers are constantly reaching for their phones to look for jobs. So, if your job applications aren’t mobile-friendly, they won’t be willing to apply for them.

Quick-Apply! This is crucial…your job should take no longer than 3 minutes to apply for, at least the 1st stage of the application. Studies have shown that for every minute over 5 minutes that it takes to apply for your job, you will lose 50% of applicants.

The third important thing to remember for your application process is to NOT USE REDIRECT! 76% of your applicants will ghost you if you make them redirect to another website to apply. Resume/profile parsing is so important…if they can apply right on the job board where they already have a profile set up, it will auto-populate their information and save them so much time!

And lastly, the screening stage! The main point here is COMMUNICATION! Just keep an open line of communication with your applicants. Make sure they always know what’s going on with the process. Currently, job seekers are only on the market for 18 days (on average) before being hired somewhere. If you aren’t communicating with your top picks at least every 2-3 days, they’re going to ghost you and take another job somewhere that has been better at keeping them in the loop.

When doing interviews, remove any distractions, so you can ensure your interviewers are able to focus 100% on the applicant… this will make them feel important and wanted. Make sure your interviewers are your brand champions! If they’re excited about the job and love working for your company, that’ll come across during the interview and make the job more enticing to the candidate. If your applicants don’t feel important or excited about working for your company, they will for sure ghost you!

While you may not be able to prevent ghosting 100%, especially in a competitive labor market, paying attention to these crucial steps in the hiring process will definitely mitigate the risk of applicants leaving you in the dark!

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