Hiring Journey

A hiring process describes what the organisation does: raise a requisition, screen, interview, decide, offer, onboard. A hiring journey describes what the candidate experiences: notice a role, decide whether to apply, apply, wait, prepare, attend, wait again, receive an answer, decide, resign elsewhere, join.

The two cover the same period and feel entirely different. The organisation experiences a series of tasks with owners. The candidate experiences a series of waits punctuated by demands on their time, most of them unpaid and many of them during working hours they have to account for elsewhere.

Mapping the journey separately surfaces things the process view hides, principally how long the gaps are and how little information the candidate has during them.

The first row is where the largest absolute numbers sit and it is mostly a design problem. Application completion falls with each additional screen, each account creation requirement, and each request to retype a CV that was already uploaded.

The last row is the one organisations manage least and lose most to, because the hire is treated as complete once the offer is signed.

Ask candidates what was wrong with a process and the answer is overwhelmingly that they did not hear anything.

This is worth taking literally. It is not that decisions were slow, though they often were; it is that nobody said the decision was slow. A candidate told they will hear in three weeks and who hears in three weeks has had a better experience than one told a week and who hears in ten days.

• Acknowledge applications automatically, with a realistic timeline rather than an optimistic one.
• Tell people when the timeline slips, before it slips rather than after.
• Respond to everyone who was interviewed, individually, and give a reason where one can be given.
• Name a contact the candidate can actually reach, and answer when they do.

None of this requires the process to be faster. It requires it to be described honestly, which is a different and much cheaper intervention.

In India this gap is frequently long, because notice periods of one to three months are common. That is a substantial window in which an accepted offer can evaporate.

What happens during it determines a good deal of the drop-out rate. The candidate is resigning, being counter-offered, managing an exit, and often being courted by other employers who know exactly when they are available. Meanwhile the hiring organisation, having closed the requisition, frequently goes quiet.

• Stay in contact through the notice period, at a stated cadence rather than sporadically.
• Involve the hiring manager, not only the recruiter, since the relationship that matters after joining starts here.
• Send joining details, equipment arrangements and first-week information early rather than the day before.
• Expect the counter-offer and talk about it in advance rather than discovering it at the point of withdrawal.
• Track the drop-out rate between acceptance and joining. Most organisations do not measure it and are surprised by it.

The last is the practical starting point. A rate that is not measured cannot be improved, and this one is frequently high enough to change how a team plans its hiring.

The useful discipline when reviewing a journey is to ask of each step whether it assesses something the organisation does not already know, or gives the candidate something they need.

Steps that do neither are common: a fourth interview covering the same ground as the second, a form collecting information already in the CV, a stage that exists because a stakeholder wants to be consulted rather than because they will change the decision.

Each such step costs candidate time, extends the timeline, and increases the chance of losing someone to a faster process. The candidates most likely to be lost are the ones with alternatives.

Removing a stage is usually resisted on the grounds that more assessment is safer. It is worth testing that: where a stage has never changed an outcome, it is not assessment, it is delay with a meeting attached.