Candidate Ghosting, are you causing it?

This 5-minute rant on candidate ghosting was transcribed by https://otter.ai

Hello, it’s Katrina Collier. I thought I would follow Sue Ingram, Shareen, Daniels, other people who have been incredibly brave and coming on to LinkedIn every day Live, and actually, I’m going out also on Periscope and Facebook, to hopefully add value to the industry at this really peculiar time that we’re all going through.

0:24
Anyway, you may have seen my post about ghosting, that went a little bit insane. Crazy, I’ve never had a post have so many comments and so much visibility, and it certainly led on to some interesting conversations. It was quite thought-provoking. So ghosting, for those who don’t understand what it is, is basically somebody disappears out of a relationship. I think we’ve borrowed the term from actual relationships and bought it into recruitment. So in a recruitment case, it can be that the recruiter disappears, or the candidate disappears out of the process.

0:58
It’s really amazing when you think about it. Here, we have these tools [waving phone] that allow us to communicate. I mean, right now, I’ve got another message. I mean, they just allow us to communicate constantly, right? Interrupt us all the time. They’re within reach, but yet we ignore them. We don’t answer people, we cannot go back to people. So it’s kind of fascinating that we’ve ended up in this place. And certainly when I started out in the world of recruitment, actually, when I started in the world of work, it wasn’t like that.

1:26
So, my post was actually about the fact that there had been some advice that had been promoted by the LinkedIn editors, which was saying to candidates and job seekers, who are in the interview process, that if they don’t hear feedback from a recruiter, they should chase up three times to find out where they stand in that process, and then if they don’t hear then they should go to other people within the company to get them to chase and I find this unacceptable.

1:57
Now I get that recruiters are human. I get recruiters are inundated with applications. But I also feel that it’s completely possible for you to reply for your chase just once. Just once. We’re all human, I lose stuff in my inbox all the time. But if you chase me up, I’m like, oh, my goodness, I should have replied to that, and I reply to that. I feel that that’s just common courtesy. That’s common respect.

2:21
But I also feel there’s more to this ghosting thing other than… Yes, Brian three times? Yeah, so I’m getting some comments on the side here. I know, right? I mean, come on, can you not answer in one go? But I think there’s more to ghosting than this. Um, I think sometimes. I think sometimes recruiters are caught in the middle. So I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. So sometimes it’s not about actually I’ve got too many people to go back to. Because as beautiful Elzette recommended, you could just change your email signature to actually be an auto-response and use that to reply to people.

2:55
I think sometimes we’re caught in the middle. You know, we haven’t got feedback from those hiring managers because We haven’t managed those hiring managers very well. And in fact, I’m on a panel in a couple of weeks [September 8, 9, 10] with Tangie Pettis talking about that at the Virtual Reality Global HR Summit, and we’re going to talk about managing those hiring managers and, I cover it in the Mastermind because I think sometimes that’s the problem.

3:18
But the other problem is it can be too long-winded. Now, is that in a recruiter’s control, or is that in HR’s control? It’s a bit hard sometimes, who’s actually causing the problems, who’s put all of the obstacles in the place to make it so actually, someone has to jump through so many hurdles that they just give up and they go radio silent. But to me, I personally think that the real problem with ghosting comes down to trust. Now The Robot-Proof Recruiter Mastermind, which you may or may not have heard about, I may or may not have randomly appeared in your inbox at some point if you’re a first-level connection, I am messaging you all I apologise.

3:56
But it is a 12-month program and it is about amping up the human skills because I feel we’ve lost those somewhere. We’re so focused on the marketing and the sourcing that we’ve forgotten the human skills that are involved to woo someone through the recruitment process. So by that, I mean trust, I think the trust has gone. I think both ways there’s a trust issue, and I’m going to talk about that in the next few lives. I’m going to do I’m already aware of where four minutes have gone, this goes so fast, what a challenge to be doing. And that I feel that that is a big, big problem and a big factor. And that’s why trust is the first one I start on in the Mastermind. So yeah, definitely go have a look and see what I’m up to. And it’s about building that trust and keeping that trust and what’s involved in that. And a lot of that is communication. And again, we have these things [phone] right here next to us, but we ignore them. But we ignore emails and we shouldn’t be making people chase us quite that hard. So I think that’s one of the reasons ghosting happens. I believe also again too long-winded process. They’re not sold on the opportunity was another big one that came up. If you haven’t got the information from the hiring managers then you can’t sell them on the opportunity. But the other thing is actually, maybe they just too scared to tell you.

5:12
Anyway, that’s my five minutes up already. My goodness, that goes so fast. I will be back tomorrow. Fingers crossed, at the same time with another five minutes for you. See you tomorrow.