Every recruiter knows the candidate experience is important.
A top-tier candidate experience protects your employer brand, encourages repeat applications from good people, decreases abandoned applications, accelerates time-to-hire, and improves quality-of-hire.
But only 26% of candidates across EMEA had a great candidate experience in 2020, the 2020 EMEA Candidate Experience Benchmark Research Report finds.
We conducted research earlier this year to understand why and discovered a major culprit: ghosting. We found:
- 65% of job applicants in the UK have been ghosted by an employer
- 86% of ghosted applicants are left feeling down or depressed
- 43% of ghosted applicants take weeks or even months to move on
- 94% of ghosted applicants retain negative feelings towards that brand
Take a moment and just imagine that. Nearly half of applicants you ghost take several weeks or even months to recover from their experience.
At the least they’ll never apply again for your roles, even if they’d be a perfect fit. But imagine the impact ghosting also has on, say, whether they’ll buy from you as a customer again. On how they talk to friends about you. On how insincere your claims to prioritise mental health seem.
From your perspective, ghosting wasn’t an intentional slight. You were just snowed, right? But from applicants’ side, you treated them without respect. From their perspective, it feels like you shoved their time and effort back in their face.
Little wonder most businesses still have so far to go on improving the candidate experience. So… let’s talk about fixing that.
We’re proud to lead the charge to #EndGhosting (join the movement here). (Yes, even when you’re handling extreme application volume.) Here are the most important features in the Tribepad talent acquisition suite that’ll help.
If you’re already a Tribepad customer, use this article to check you’re harnessing all the features at your fingertips – grab your account manager if you need any help. If you’re not a Tribepad customer yet, get in touch 👀)
1 – Job List dashboard
The Jobs List dashboard gives you an overview of the candidates you have in-process at every stage. That way, you can easily see if you’ve left candidates behind and accidentally ghosted them.
For example, you might’ve left candidates in shortlisted status when you’ve already made an offer, so you need to send them a rejection message.
2 – Questionnaires and automated screening
Accelerate your recruitment process and you create time for crucial stuff that otherwise falls by the wayside, like responding to applicants…
To that end, questionnaires and automated screening are a huge injection of turbo-fuel. Pre-screening questionnaires and assessments surface the best people faster, so you can fill and close jobs faster (and give applicants closure sooner).
Tribepad empowers you to set custom scoring criteria for automatic ranking and screening, with personalised emails triggered accordingly. This not only gives your recruiters a quality-prioritised list of applicants for faster processing. It means your unsuccessful applicants are automatically contacted – with a custom delay – without any effort from you.
3 – Unlimited email templates
It’s important to #EndGhosting, yes. But it’s also important how you contact candidates. An impersonal, bland, cold, non-role-specific email triggered immediately on submitting a CV is also the stuff of nightmares. (“You are the weakest link, goodbye”, *shudder*.)
Tribepad comes with unlimited email templates configurable by-role, so you can embed personal, branded, empathetic messages with a click.
I really liked the wording used for my invitation to interview. It was a departure from the usual sort of email wording and came across as interested and supportive
4 – Comprehensive filters
Ghosting is common when you handle a large volume of applications because gaining bird’s eye visibility can be extremely hard. Applicants get lost in the melee.
Not with Tribepad. Our comprehensive filtering means recruiters can sub-divide candidates by various factors like distance, skills, questionnaire scores, individual question scores, or status – to rule out or move candidates through your process faster.
5 – Bulk Processing and Quick Actions
Another fuel injection, our bulk processing and quick action buttons let recruiters move faster to process candidates. For example, if you’ve just had an offer accepted you could bulk select every shortlisted candidate and send them a rejection email.
6 – Flexible interview workflows
Flexible interview workflows are another way Tribepad is built to accelerate your recruitment, so you can make and communicate hiring decisions to candidates faster.
Configure up to five different interview stages and choose for each role, so you can deliver a process – short and sweet, or more involved – that suits each job. This also introduces more touchpoints with candidates, so there aren’t long wait periods where candidates don’t hear from you.
Our talent acquisition suite also includes Video Interviewing, which can accelerate the interview process by 90%. Faster process = less ghosting.
7 – Robust internal collaboration functionality
A major reason ghosting happens is internal disorganisation and lack of accountability, especially across large teams. To #EndGhosting, you need clear lines of responsibility and a consistent process.
Tribepad makes that simple, with extremely configurable internal processing workflows, alerts, mentions and tagging to improve recruiter and hiring manager collaboration. So you can instantly pull the right people into the process, to make sure candidates aren’t the victim of internal chaos.
8 – Simple, flexible comms
A central aspect of ending ghosting is making candidate communication simple and flexible. With Tribepad, you can reach out to candidates ad-hoc – either individually or in bulk – pulling up over 250 multi-media email templates with a click.
You can also easily build customised comms workflows that are automatically triggered as you move candidates through stages. For example, you could automatically send shortlisted candidates a notification updating them, or send all candidates invited to interview an interview prep pack.
This is especially useful for keeping candidates engaged during longer recruitment processes.
9 – SMS
Text messages offer immediacy that email doesn’t, and the open rate is much higher (98% compared to 20%, according to Campaign Monitor). Dropping your candidates an SMS – either ad-hoc or automated, as above – can ensure candidates don’t miss crucial messages and can keep them informed in real-time.
This tactic can be especially beneficial with younger generations – for example, integrated into your graduate recruitment. Yello report that 86% of Gen Z and Millennials like SMS as part of the interview process.
10 – Candidate self-service portal
Instead of recruiters acting as the gatekeepers for feedback, Tribepad offers a self-service portal where your candidates can log-in and track their own progress, as well as review their application and search for new roles.
Provided your recruiters correctly move candidates from stage to stage, candidates are then empowered to track their own application. It’s the opposite of ghosting.
11 – Automatic actions based on inactivity
This handy feature is your fail-safe. Although you’ll hopefully have contacted your applicants before this using some of the other features we’ve talked about, this feature gathers up any stragglers. It automatically withdraws or rejects candidates and sends them the relevant communication based on a custom period of recruiter inactivity.
There’s also the option to close a job after a custom period of inactivity too, so you don’t keep getting bombarded by irrelevant applications. It’s a nice way to keep your talent platform tidy, as well as ensuring no applicants fall through the gaps.
12 – Talent Search and Tagging
Talent Search – part of Tribepad Core ATS + CRM – is an extremely rich part of our talent acquisition platform.
It’s a database of every candidate who’s ever applied for roles at your organisation plus any profiles you’ve imported from job boards or social media via our Sourcing add-on. Talent Search used advanced AI-powered filtering, suggestion, and search to allow you to quickly surface people you want to stay in touch with.
Tagging particularly is invaluable – not to end application ghosting per se but to maintain warm contact with your important talent communities. For example, your team could tag interview finalists as #SilverMedallist (tags are totally custom) then nurture them regularly.
You could also combine this with running Evergreen Roles – roles that always stay live – so you have a steady stream of candidates coming into your talent pools, ready for ongoing nurturing.
13 – Insights reporting suite
The final Tribepad feature that’ll help you #EndGhosting is our comprehensive Insights reporting suite. Insights comes with more than 60 pre-built reports for instant insights, plus unlimited custom reports, so you can drill right into jobs, teams, or individuals to understand exactly what’s happening for candidates.
Jobs Reports are a popular live report that give you the bird’s eye view into your entire recruitment process in real-time, for example, to understand possible ghosting hotspots and take action to resolve. Use Insights to mandate accountability and track progress towards your goal to #EndGhosting.
Join the #EndGhosting movement now
At the height of the pandemic, retail giant Tesco was handling 300 applications a minute – and using Tribepad, they coped extremely well. High application volume isn’t an excuse. There’s no excuse.
Ask most recruiters what they love about recruitment, and you’ll almost certainly hear the desire to help people. The brilliant feeling when a candidate gets a new role. The sometimes life-changing impact of a new career.
Ghosting threatens all that. Let’s do better.
