Are Candidates Ghosting You? Or, are you not communicating with them?

I hear it a lot… “A candidate just applied, but when I tried to reach them on the phone or email, they ghosted me!”

Is that really ghosting you, or not calling back?
Or are you trying to reach hourly workers by phone and email, two channels they just don’t use like they used to?

Are Candidates Ghosting you, if you're not communicating with them on the channel of their choice?

In the video, I show how HR Managers and Recruiters can quickly reach candidates with Text Invites.

What are Text Invites?

They are personalized text recruiting messages that ask the candidate if they would like to talk to a recruiter… which is what every job candidate wants… so the text messages get very high response rates.

Then, when the candidate responds with a “Yes”, Text Invites finds time on the recruiter’s synced calendar, and responds back to the candidate with available times.

It’s super effective…

80% of Text Invitees self-schedule a call within 24 hours.

And that 4 – 8X the number of candidates recruiters are talking to compared to trying to make phone calls and send emails that don’t answer or respond.

Full Transcript:

Hi everyone, if you’ve been frustrated with recruiting, especially in the part-time hourly space over the last couple of weeks and months I’ve got some tips for you. So here’s what I’ve been hearing and it just came through when I talked to another recruiting manager and a hiring manager team.

The issue that most people seem to be having is either a lack of candidates, Applicants coming into the database or candidates not responding back. So acquisition or engaging the candidates as they come through and then ghosting. And so there are really three things I just want to give you some tips about.

Number one is acquisition. Most applicant tracking systems and job boards never tell you this. It’s not the job board’s fault. But in the process of moving a candidate from a job board to an applicant tracking system and completing an application on your website, 95% of people on a mobile phone will never complete your application.

So if you’re trying to hire people who are typically gonna use their mobile phone, which is about 60% of the us market now, and high numbers specifically in the hourly part-time roles you’re not doing yourself any favors by trying to send them to your career site. That number has been statistically proven over several years by a company called App Cast over millions of postings in millions of industries.

So you got a 95% failure rate, so only 5% of the candidates are coming through. So if you can fix that from 5%, you can move it to 10%. You just basically doubled your budget. That’s one tip

Another thing that’s happening is if you’re running the typical recruiting strategy over the last 20 years, which has been a candidate comes into your website, or your applicant tracking system, the next thing you do is you reach out on the phone.

Or you send an email to the candidate to respond back. Two things you need to know about. I’m sure you’ve done just like I do. I get robocalls all day long in the middle of sales calls when I’m heads-down working. I don’t know who it’s calling, but because it’s my work cell phone, I have to pick it up a lot of times.

It’s a robocall. So immediately block, click, and go on. But for most of our job seekers, they’re just not picking up the phone anymore and they don’t know your phone number. So guess what? They’re not picking up your phone either. So if you’re thinking, hey, candidates aren’t responding and not picking up your phone, that’s exactly why.

It’s because they’re getting robocalls and we now have an entire generation who doesn’t like to speak to people specifically. So they would rather get the information. Via another method, which of course is text messaging in many cases in the United States. Another problem is email.

I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but it was about 40% of the US workforce, which is about 70 million people. Predominantly part-time hourly. Don’t use email on a regular basis more than once a week. So if you’re trying to schedule an interview with a candidate they’re not responding back via email, and that’s because they don’t use email.

It’s not because you didn’t have the right subject line. It has nothing to do with that. It’s just that the channel you’re trying to reach people no longer works. They’re just not responding to phone calls because of robocalls and they’re not responding to emails because they just only have an email account, so they could get on Instagram or Snapchat or another social channel.

So the playbook that we’ve used for a long time doesn’t work anymore or not as efficiently, especially in the hourly part-time programs. 

Additional Recruiting Resources