What is Candidate Ghosting and How to Avoid It

Candidate ghosting is an increasingly problematic issue facing employers. There are two common types of ghosting you have probably experienced in the last few months:

Situation 1After a candidate applies to one of your job openings, you review the resume and schedule an interview for later in the week. Interview time comes, and you’re left sitting alone. The candidate didn’t show up, and won’t respond to your messages. You’ve been ghosted.

Situation 2The time between when your top candidate has accepted the offer and when he or she starts the job can be a great feeling. The search is over and you’ve found “the one.” Great job! But, when the scheduled first day comes around…no one shows up for work. That individual who was so excited to accept the job is nowhere to be found, and isn’t answering your calls.

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In a highly competitive market for talent, candidate ghosting is on the rise. Ghosting isn’t a metric that is officially tracked, but many businesses report ghosting rates of anywhere between 20 and 50%.

Candidate ghosting costs your HR department massive amounts of time and productivity. It’s a budget buster that also demoralizes your staff.

How to avoid candidate ghosting. While candidate ghosting is an increasingly common problem, here are two big steps you can take to mitigate your risk:

1. Build a better candidate experience. Research shows that employers who invest in a strong candidate experience improve the quality of their hires by 70 percent. It can be challenging for HR departments to put the attention and effort necessary into substantially improving candidate experience. Your HR department is already maxed out! With so many responsibilities well beyond hiring and candidate experience, it can be difficult for any HR department to invest in a candidate experience transformation.

When new clients reach out to us for help hiring Salesforce admins and developers, we frequently receive feedback regarding the candidate experience we deliver to talent. Among other benefits, we serve as an extension of your brand during the hiring process. Our team makes candidate experience and candidate engagement a priority, so that talent is eager and excited to both meet with you and eventually, work with you!

2. Target more engaged candidates. This one is easier said than done, I know. But it’s still incredibly important. I touched upon this a bit in the last point, but when you identify and attract the right talent, the odds of being ghosted drop significantly. There are a few things you can do to attract more engaged and excited candidates to your job openings, like:

  • Write better job postings. Your job postings should be written like marketing copy. They should sell your job and your company, and do much more (or in some cases, much less, since they are frequently very long) than a simple job description.
  • Leverage referrals. A strong candidate network means that you have a deep well of talent to source for referrals. If you’ve focused on candidate experience like mentioned above, your employees will be thrilled to send referrals your way.
  • Partner with a recruiting firm. With a specialized Salesforce recruiting firm like Tech2, you take advantage of both points above — we craft job postings that get eager and active responses. And, our network of talent trusts us to only send them the best Salesforce job openings. We only refer highly engaged Salesforce professionals for our client openings, and as a result, our ghosting rate is non-existent.

We can help you reduce candidate ghosting and hire better Salesforce talent. We’ll leverage our network and relationships to help you make better Salesforce hires and reduce candidate ghosting. To learn more about how we can help, contact me directly.

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