Your company’s early-career recruiting has a problem, and you may not be acutely aware of the issue’s extent. According to Robert Half, 28 percent of candidates will renege on their job offer acceptance.
But fear not: Here’s how thinking like a marketer can help your company prevent this common early-career recruitment problem.
When applying to colleges, students are often advised to have a safety school, an institution that, at least on paper, is likely to admit them based on their academic performance and overall record. Jobseekers apply this advice to their career, too.
Candidates will accept one job offer while secretly hoping to be asked to work for their dream company. The good news? There is a way you can prevent this: increased employer brand awareness.
Top talent may not realize that your company actually is their dream organization. Strong employer branding helps accomplish that. So, what’s next? Start by highlighting these two employee perks to help attract top Gen Z talent.
The war for top talent caused companies to begin early-career recruiting earlier and earlier. This tactic, inevitably, creates a long period between a candidate’s job acceptance and their start date.
There is a way you can take a page out of a marketer’s playbook to prevent these candidates from getting cold feet on the job offer: Create a drip campaign.
A drip campaign sends out emails on a schedule, and the content that a user is sent is based on a “trigger,” or an action that the recipient takes. If your company sends your latest blog to someone who’s recently accepted a job, then what’s automatically sent next is based entirely on what the person does. By the way, sending content to candidates who accepted the position is one way to prevent them from getting cold feet because it keeps them informed about the cool things your organization does.
The point is, you’re keeping candidates warm (marketing speak for engaged) and interested in working for your company by highlighting various characteristics about your organization.
Great marketers care about qualified leads. To them, it’s not about quantity, but quality.
According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), candidates are more likely to rescind their job acceptance if they frequently ask about higher compensation or try to push back the acceptance timeline while negotiating.
To combat this, your team needs to take several steps:
● Collect data that enables your team to more readily identify these red flags in future candidates.
● Reassess your organization’s compensation to see if it’s competitive.
● Evaluate your employer branding to see if your messaging needs to be adjusted. (Strong employer branding can also cause candidates to self-filter out of your hiring funnel, creating a more efficient hiring process.)
If your team makes sure candidates are qualified in both ways—as someone who can fulfill the job requirements and wants to work at your company—they’ll be rewarded with an efficient early-career recruitment process.
Chemistry plays a big part in whether a job candidate accepts—or reneges—on a role. Your employees need to be strong brand ambassadors who sell why it’s great to work at your organization.
Your company can improve this connection with candidates by inviting soon-to-be employees to company events. By utilizing an event marketing tactic—creating a personal connection to your brand—these workers already feel a part of the team.
The key to creating a more efficient early-career recruiting process is thinking more like a marketer. If you do that, you’ll convert the last 28 percent of candidates who accept your job offers into employees for your company.
