Post #22: "I am tired of candidates backing out!"
This week’s newsletter stems from a conversation on Cutshort’s TA Refresh community.
Here are a few tidbits from the entire conversation. Check it out!
I am tired of candidates backing out!
“It’s very frustrating when candidates accept your offer, make you wait for two months, and just before the joining date, tell you ‘I’ve accepted an offer elsewhere’. All my strategies are failing”, said Priyanka, in the hope of a solution.
Candidates backing out has been such a hassle for every company. You spend enough time and resources on someone only for them to back out at the last minute! I know how that feels.
What does the TA Refresh community have to say?
Ananthakumar from GSN consulting was quick to assure and remind her that candidates backing out isn’t the recruiter’s mistake, and it’s wrong for them to take the blame.
”If the candidate is a job hopper, partial fit, or has non-meetable demands, no one can save the recruiter” - Ananthkumar
A very valid point! If you have to improve your joining ratio, the first step is to source the right talent.
If you can identify the right people in the first step, you’re cutting down on all the noise and focusing your time only on the right people.Shraddha Dave from Paytm added her two cents to the conversation by mentioning that it’s always wise to build a backup pipeline in case there are any off-cases.
“Frequent pre-onboarding catchups, and connecting them with the hiring manager once every 15 days in order to give a good pre-joining experience may help” - Shraddha
Sumit Sharma from Indventur shared his own experience of how they are solving this problem at their organization.
“Our team is honest with the candidates, telling it’s our interest for the person to join, and follow through with why this is a perfect fit in their career progression” - Sumit
How are we solving this at Cutshort HQ?
Being India’s #1 tech hiring platform on a mission to solve the challenges of recruitment, and being the innovators we are, we decided to do things a bit differently.
This has not only helped us with a constant 90%+ joining ratio across roles but also helped us discover and onboard some of the brightest members to the team!
It all begins with the sourcing
Right from the role kick-off happening internally to the final offer stage, we are very clear about the type of people we want on board. Chasing a huge number of applications is never a priority.
We think that finding 10 highly relevant candidates is way more productive than going through 100 not-so-relevant ones. This saves the time and effort of the team and also gives us more confidence about who we are hiring.
This thought is also used to build our platform and its matching. Once you tell us what you’re exactly looking for, we will sift through a database of 3.5M+ candidates and recommend the best matches so that you don’t have to spend time screening the irrelevant ones.
We redefined the traditional interview process with Open houses!
Unlike the traditional method where you first interact with the candidate to get to know them better, we decided to do it the other way around and let them interview us.
As soon as we shortlist a candidate, we ask them to schedule a slot for an upcoming open house where they can ask any questions they’d like to know about us.
We first open with a brief description of the product, the organization, its culture, and its values. Post this, candidates are free to post any queries they have on these topics.
How has this helped us?
With this Open house, we are able to showcase everything about the organization right at the first step. The ones who accept the assignment after this Open house are the people who are genuinely interested in the role and the organization.One-on-one connect with the candidates.
Like Shraddha mentioned - Frequent catchups with candidates always help.
Whenever we find a really interesting candidate, we make sure to catchup and check in on them frequently, get them warmed up to their future team, and quite often invite them to collaborate with us on our on-going projects even before rolling out an offer.
This not only helps us gauge the candidate in the actual work environment, but also gives the candidate a taste of what it feels like to work with the team.Voice your values!
Nikunj (Co-founder & CEO, Cutshort) has written a ton of blogs and articles about Cutshort and how the organization is different from the others. To name a few -
Ever since we started doing this regularly, every candidate that has joined Cutshort has always responded with “The articles really helped convince me that this is where I have to be” to the question “What made you join Cutshort?”.
Heck! Even a simple LinkedIn post describing how your organization is different can work a lot in your benefit.Cutshort’s Secret Ingredient - Trust Score.
What’s the biggest factor to know if a candidate will join? Their trustworthiness.
This thought was the genesis of the idea - “Trust Score”.
Just like how a CIBIL score defines your financial health, the Trust Score defines your professional credibility.
Once a candidate on Cutshort opts in for the Trust Score, they are now confirming that their data on Cutshort is 100% accurate, and they will not back out after accepting an offer.
Any bad behavior on these lines will create a negative impact on their Trust Score, thereby affecting their profile’s credibility and decreasing the chances of getting hired. Read more about the Trust Score here.
While there is no definitive playbook to tell you how to improve your joining ratio (since the context for each organization is different), we think that these tips can significantly increase your organization’s joining ratio.
That’s all the updates we have for you this week. See you again in the next newsletter!
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