Why it is worth analyzing the reasons for the lack of response from applicants
Placing a job advertisement and inviting applicants who have responded to a vacancy for interviews is an easy and least time-consuming way of recruiting. But if applicants do not respond to a published job, there is reason to think about the reasons for the lack of responses.
Perhaps a hiring announcement is unattractive from the point of view of job seekers, or the publication of a vacancy for some reason should not be seen as an effective way to find and select future employees. Some of the reasons listed below can be easily eliminated by correcting the text of the published vacancy, some require a revision of the very approach to recruiting.
In this article, I will discuss the reasons for the decline in the number of responses to hiring advertisements, the logic behind their analysis, and how to eliminate them.
The salary specified in the announcement is not competitive
This means that offers from other employers seem more attractive to job seekers than yours. Therefore, other employers are called and sent resumes, but you are not.
How to understand if the lack of competitiveness of salaries is the reason for the ignorance of your proposal by applicants?
It’s not difficult – you study the labor market, determine the average market salary and find out what place in the array of proposals is occupied by the remuneration you offer to applicants. There are different tools for this – simple and not so.
If you need an accurate estimate, read about How to estimate the cost of a job in the labor market and master the Salary Calculator. Correct your proposal and wait for responses. Not ready to adjust – reconsider the requirements for applicants and expectations regarding the timing of recruiting.
The working conditions offered are unattractive
It seems that you also offer a good salary, but employees work 6 days a week for 10 hours, or the place of work is located where public transport does not reach and personal transport does not reach.
This, of course, is too vivid an example, but, you must agree, the location, schedule, and mode significantly affect the choice of the place of work. This is probably why, other things being equal, applicants do not choose you.
We study the labor market, compare the conditions you offer with those of your competitors – are the conditions you offer really so significantly inferior to those of your competitors. What if the work environment really doesn’t allow you to get enough feedback?
Compensate for the lack of attractiveness of your offer with other attractive conditions. Higher wages, transportation, free meals, fare, and other “goodies” can convince those who doubt that they dream of working for you.
Jobseekers manage to receive offers even before they apply for vacancies
A case in point is the labor market for programmers with high qualifications. Such professionals begin to receive invitations for interviews from the moment their resumes appear on work sites.
Many of them do not have time to view and respond to job advertisements – active employers themselves offer them jobs. Open the resume databases, compare the number of resumes of the candidates who are suitable for you and the number of vacancies, estimate how quickly the candidates find work. Try calling those applicants who you think should be interested in your offer.
If the job market in which you are looking for employees does not tolerate passivity when searching, contact the applicants yourself. Let the vacancy announcement be published – you can use it by sending an offer to the applicants you are interested in and wait for responses from those who hide their resume, preferring to apply on their own. But you definitely shouldn’t count on passive search as the main method of recruiting.
The number of applicants is comparable to the number of offers on the labor market
Example: car mechanics are always in demand. It may turn out that there are 150 applicants for every 200 vacancies. It is easy and simple to understand that all employers will not have enough applicants – do not be too lazy to open the databases of vacancies and resumes and count the number of applicants and the number of vacancies.
If supply and demand are comparable, you will have to come to terms with the fact that there will definitely not be a flow of resumes – you yourself need to be active in the search, work on the attractiveness of the offer and use the maximum number of channels to promote it.
Incorrect job title
If you named your position “marketing manager”, although, in reality, the job involves exclusively direct sales, then, of course, marketers who will definitely not send a resume will be interested in the vacancy.
Sales managers will not be interested in this vacancy – they are not marketers. Moreover, they will not even see it if they are looking for vacancies according to their profile, entering the phrase “sales” in the search bar.
If your colleagues know what the “senior teller” and “warehouse supervisor” are doing in your company, do not count on the applicants to guess that you are actually calling those who are called “warehouse operator “And” senior storekeeper”.
See what job titles are common in your area of business and change their titles so that they can be understood by job seekers. Tell us in an interview that job titles in your company differ from the generally accepted ones.
Unrealistic description of the content of the work
It happens that the company’s management initiates a search for a superhero. If you do not “get the moon” or “bring an unknown brand to the market leader”, then at least successfully combine the functions of an accountant, director, sales manager, warehouse manager, and a couple of other positions in your work.
If you offer job seekers a feat of labor instead of work, the number of responses is guaranteed to decrease. There is only one recommendation – keep your creativity in check and try to put yourself in the shoes of a candidate choosing a job. If the position of a superhero was not invented by you – bear with it and wait – such vacancies will eventually “dissolve”, since it is impossible to close them in principle.
The title of the position and/or the content of the work does not meet the requirements for applicants, the requirements do not meet the working conditions, etc.
Inconsistencies are possible in any combination. Examples – “I want an employee with the duties of a director for a manager’s salary”, “I want a secretary-dispatcher with three years of experience as an assistant and fluent English”, “I want a creative designer to typeset texts in ads.”
The only way to “close” any inconsistencies is to indicate high wages, for which applicants will turn a blind eye to your “oddities”. Otherwise, the flow of your resume will not threaten you. Recommendation – if you can influence the task director, influence and explain that he is wrong.
If you can’t, relax and hope that either patient and persistent candidates during the interview will explain to the task manager that he is wrong, or he will still choose one of the few candidates who are ready for difficult compromises.
There are no applicants on the market that match your requirements
The chances of finding a CMO fluent in Swahili and Chinese are not good. But a more prosaic example can be cited.
The owner of a retail chain of stores of building materials in the Leningrad region has replaced five heads of personnel serving in three years. The reason is that all the dismissed failed to cope with the task of staffing the staff with store directors with at least two years of experience working with a group of industrial products.
It is not surprising – if you look at the CV database for the Leningrad region, then it does not physically contain CVs of applicants who meet the stated requirements and live in the areas where the company’s stores are located. The logical conclusion is that if there is no resume and there has not been, it is pointless to publish vacancies and wait for responses. It might be worth considering other methods of recruiting.
“Everlasting” vacancy
It all ends someday. No one came to the rescue at the right moment to the boy Peter, who jokingly shouted “Wolves, wolves!”. If you are looking for a marketing manager in a multi-million dollar city continuously for a year and a half, this will strengthen your reputation as a “strange” employer.
If we consider the average duration of a specialist’s work in one place equal to 1.5-3 years, then at least half of the applicants will have time to send you their resume during this time, some not even once. There will come a time when people no longer pay attention to your ad. In this case, there is only one way to collect responses – specify a different company name and change the ad text.
Error in choosing the placement of the ad placement
Everyone knows which resource is most often used for recruiting qualified personnel. Nobody forbids experimenting, the main thing is that the result does not depend solely on the success or failure of the experiment. I have repeatedly tried to work with social networks, the performance, alas, turned out to be far from expected.
“Traditional” resume sources and job ad placements have proven to be more reliable and effective. It’s up to you to decide which resource is preferable, but you definitely shouldn’t rely on unconventional selection methods if the result is not guaranteed. See where your competitors are posting their vacancies and where applicants are posting their resumes – if the resource is popular, you can try to work on it.
Job anonymity
Headhunter has an option that allows a job seeker to close resumes from certain companies. To apply for an anonymous vacancy limiting the visibility of their resume, the applicant must go to their resume settings and change the visibility setting from “limited” to “visible to everyone.
Only in this case, he can send a resume to an “anonymous company”, mind you, without a guarantee that it will not be his current employer. How many applicants do you think chose not to risk and not change the availability of their resume for the sake of “anonymity”?
Requiring a cover letter and filling out tests
A cover letter is probably required by companies that seek to cultivate “European culture” in job seekers and to filter out “unnecessary” job seekers.
I don’t know about culture and uselessness, but I know that many job seekers are simply too lazy to insert standard rubbish like “I have always dreamed of working in your company … my experience, knowledge, and skills match … please consider … I will glad to be invited … etc.”
For some applicants, I know, this is just annoying, even though copying and pasting a pre-prepared universal accompanying sheet is a matter of a few seconds. So many people just skip this job and consider others … no convention. The same is with the tests, which are suggested to be filled out directly on the site.
Without a guarantee of an invitation to interviews, few are willing to spend time on them, especially since the content of the tests itself often spoils the impression of the employer even more than the content of the job advertisement. So consider if you want to use tests to reduce the response rate.
Errors in the ad text
Speech, syntactic, stylistic … even spelling occurs. They, of course, will not scare away all applicants from your company, but they will create a certain impression. At least about the employee to whom you entrusted recruiting.
If you are sure that this employee is a real professional in recruiting, and his only drawback is his poor competent written speech in English, help him not to spoil the impression of your company – read the finished advertisement before placing it.
Bad reputation of the company
Negative reviews from former employees of the company, publications in the media, information about inspections by supervisory authorities, consumer complaints – all these factors can also affect the activity of applicants.
And it may not be. Not everyone believes in the negative from former employees, not everyone watches TV and reads the news. Protecting reputation is certainly worth it, although this is more a marketing task than a recruiter.
Properly handled negative reviews about the company from laid-off workers, positive publications in the media, and information portals will help reduce reputation costs. It would also be useful to post vacancies on behalf of a company whose name is not associated with negative information.
Strict requirements for applicants
“Experience of at least 5 years in the last job in a position ***”, “must have experience with *** at least 5 years”, etc., etc., in some advertisements of employment even the word “strictly” is used, in bold or capsicum. It is easy to guess that not everyone who has the required experience, not 5, but 4 years will have the nerve to take away the time of a strict recruiter with their resume.
It is probably worth considering whether you should make uncompromising demands without being 100% sure that you will get enough feedback from those who have definitely “at least 5 years in one place” experience. Think about what you will do in a month when you realize that those whom you wanted to see did not respond, and the rest you scared away with your strict requirements.
