Is this Damaging your Recruitment for Years to Come?

At Exacta, we are in quite a unique situation.

We get to talk to the passive candidate market, every day.

Why does that matter, I hear you say. Well, these are people who aren’t reading your job adverts, visiting your careers page or registered with the agencies on your PSL. So chances are you might never speak to them.

However, aren’t you curious as to why they‘re not beating your door down with a stick to work for you?

Sure, they might be happy where they are, but perhaps, just perhaps there are other reasons.

When we talk to passive candidates, quite often, with a little work, we get to the route of what the passive candidate’s perceptions are of your roles and company brand, and possibly, your competitors too.

This information can be an eye opener. Moreover, it can help you understand why a role has been particularly hard to fill. Armed with this information, you can make changes such as to the salary, responsibilities, career progression and so on.

However, lately, we have noticed that the role has not been the issue. The role could be all singing and dancing, but candidates can still be put off throwing their hat into the ring. Quite often, this is down to candidate management.

Let me explain further by outlining a discussion one of our Research Consultants had a couple of weeks ago, with a passive candidate.

Our Researcher was working on finding candidates for a very specialist role, and she described these candidates as “gold dust”. She had identified a small pool of suitable candidates and had progressed to the approach stage.

As we all know, engaging the passive candidate can be tricky, but our Consultant does this every day and is well skilled at this, but even she was shocked by the response of the first candidate.

When we told the candidate the company we working on behalf of, he suddenly changed direction and was no longer open to a conversation.

What was the reason for this? The candidate had interviewed with that company many years ago, just after graduating, and had never heard back from the interview, in which he had travelled over 100 miles to.

Whether you think that is a good reason or not to dismiss a job opportunity is a moot point. It had annoyed him so much that he had formed a negative opinion of that company and brand. Years later when he possessed the skills the company was crying out for, he wouldn’t consider them.

In this technological age, people’s opinions, thoughts and experiences are often shared online, where your brand can be further damaged.

Poor candidate management can affect your recruitment and brand perception for years to come.

In our next blog, we will be describing the five ways to ensure you deliver excellent candidate management, every single time.

If you would like support with candidate management, call us on 0800 085 6618.