These days, hitting your hiring goals is more challenging than ever—moving candidates through the hiring process can often feel like trying to carry water in your hands. Sure, you may start with a lot, but by the time you get to where you need to go, somehow, so much has slipped through your fingers, leaving you with almost none.
Think about candidate drop-off like that water slipping through your hands. You’ve built a good hiring pipeline, but when you reach the date at which you'd hoped to have an offer out, somehow the majority of those candidates have slipped through your fingers. Candidate drop-off is the percentage of candidates who enter your hiring process through sourcing, inbound application, referrals, etc. but do not make it through to the offer.
Candidate drop-off happens at various stages of the hiring process for many reasons, including:
The tight labor market and competition for top talent have only magnified this trend, with recent estimates claiming 28% of candidates have skipped an interview or stopped communicating with a company during the interview process, and a further 10% declined a job offer even after signing a written offer. Drop-off like this takes a financial toll on the organization and an emotional toll on everyone involved in the hiring process, as sourcing and recruiting efforts have already been invested in every candidate who leaves your process.
To illustrate this, let's look at aggregate passthrough rates from Gem’s Recruiting Benchmarks Report:
For context, “Application Created” means the person was entered into the organization’s applicant tracking system (ATS)—either as an active applicant or as sourced talent who expressed interest in moving forward with the conversation. This is important because it means your talent acquisition (TA) team has invested time and energy into every candidate that makes it into this funnel.
It’s also important to note here that not all candidate drop-off is bad. By design, not all candidates who enter the hiring process will make it to an offer; in fact, most roles demand that you pick only one out of tens or hundreds of potential candidates. Candidate drop-off at the very top of the funnel is a good thing—it means you’re weeding out candidates that aren’t right for the position without investing too much time and resources.
However, if you’re seeing low talent engagement, poor offer extend/accept rates, missed diversity hiring targets, etc. candidate drop-off rates can provide critical insights about key sticking points within the hiring process that may be causing these issues.
Below, we look at some key stages in the hiring process where candidate drop-off occurs and why you might be seeing drop-off at these stages. We’ll also offer some strategies you can use to minimize drop-offs in your own process.
In a perfect world, every time a candidate dropped out of the interview process, you’d be able to know precisely why it happened and how you could adjust your recruiting strategy to address the issue moving forward. Unfortunately, this is the world we live in:
If you’re currently tracking candidates on spreadsheets, it’s probably easiest for you to see drop-off at the offer-extend and offer-accept stages, while the top of your hiring funnel is more of a mystery. Without insight into exactly where and why candidates are dropping out of the process, your recruiting team is flying blind with no actionable information on how to change their processes to better serve candidates (and if this is you, check out how Gem’s Talent Engagement platform can change that).
However, if you currently use Gem, you have access to all the data you need. You might just need some insight on how to operationalize the data you’re seeing. In that case, read on!
Here are some common candidate drop-off points and some explanations for why you might be seeing these patterns.
Pro tip: with Talent Compass, you can require hiring managers to list reasons they rejected candidates, making it much easier to identify and address any issues. In addition, Gem users can slice and dice data by demographics (gender, race, ethnicity) alongside other filters like role, location, or hiring manager to observe where bias might lie in specific hiring pipelines.
Pro tip: with Gem’s Diversity Recruiting Insights, you can track the drop-off of different demographic groups. If you're seeing that women are dropping out of the process at higher rates than men are, or Black candidates are dropping out at higher rates than anyone else, you may want to examine the demographics of your interview team. If candidates don't see folks who look like them reflected at the company, they may be less likely to join.
Peter Drucker once said: “You can’t change what you can’t measure”—a sentiment we couldn’t agree with more. That’s why we created Talent Compass, a platform that gives you end-to-end visibility into your hiring pipeline and promotes a better, more efficient candidate experience.
Talent Compass Pipeline Analytics feature pulls in data from Gem and your ATS to give you a bird’s eye view of candidate trends across roles, hiring managers, locations, demographics, and more. A color-coded system for passthrough rates makes it easy for you to identify bottlenecks in your hiring process and know what funnel stages you need to address. This means unparalleled insight into the health of your hiring pipeline, empowering you to identify and resolve any candidate drop-off points throughout your hiring process.
For example, if only 15% of Black candidates are passing from phone screen to onsite interview for a backend engineering role, Gem alerts you to that disparity. Then, using steps 3, 4, and 5 from this list, you can identify the sticking points and resolve them—making your hiring process a well-oiled (and equitable) machine once again.
In addition, Gem’s Talent Pipeline feature allows you to dig in by role and see how long specific candidates have been sitting in each stage of the funnel, which candidates are on track to close, and which ones need immediate attention. Clicking into each tile, you can easily message a candidate, reject an application, review interview notes, and more—creating a one-stop-shop for talent management.
In today’s hyper-competitive hiring landscape, you need all the help you can get when it comes to identifying and reducing candidate drop-off throughout your talent acquisition process. With Gem on your side, you’ll have all the data you need to identify candidate drop-off points and what you can change to resolve them.
If you’d like to learn more about how Gem can improve candidate drop-off, improve recruiting workflows, and make your TA team happier, book a demo, and we’ll show you how!
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