In today’s competitive hiring market, hourly candidates have their pick of jobs and often juggle multiple potential opportunities at once. Given this, candidates are increasingly “ghosting” recruiters – meaning they completely stop responding, rather than letting the employer know when they’re no longer interested in a role.

A recent survey from Indeed found that 76% of employers reported they were ghosted by candidates in 2021, while 57% said job ghosting is more common than ever before. On the candidate side, 28% of job seekers admitted they have ghosted an employer.

How ghosting impacts recruiters

When candidates ghost recruiters, this has a negative impact on the overall hiring process. Ghosting leads to recruiters spending time and resources on candidates they can no longer hire – time that could have otherwise been spent on candidates who are eager to join the team.

In some cases, this means taking candidates as far as the offer stage in the hiring processes only for them to stop responding, or even candidates accepting offers only to not show up on the first day.

Ghosting wastes money, too, as recruiters need to spend more of their recruitment budget to attract additional candidates once they’re ghosted. It also extends the overall time to fill open roles, which can lead to lost productivity and overworked current employees.

If your team has experienced hourly candidate ghosting, this blog post includes key reasons candidates ghost, and solutions to keep candidates engaged throughout the hiring process.

3 reasons candidates ghost – and solutions to avoid it

1. Lengthy hiring process

The average time to hire is 23.8 days and the longer the hiring process, the more likely candidates are to get frustrated and disengaged. Employers with lengthy hiring processes tend to prompt candidates to fill out time consuming applications, are slow to respond, and require several unnecessary hiring steps.

When a hiring process takes too long, not only can this cause candidates ghosting because they’re frustrated, but candidates are also likely to drop off because they received another job offer. In fact, 59% of job seekers have received two or more job offers simultaneously when applying for jobs.

The solution: AppyHere is a hiring solution designed specifically for hourly candidates. Through the app, candidates can apply for jobs in less than two minutes, and your team can extend offers in as little as 40 minutes.

With AppyHere, intelligent hyper-automation helps pre-screen and rank candidates, and automatically schedules qualified candidates for interviews. Background checks can also be completed within 15 minutes, rather than several business days. This can help your team hire the best candidates quickly and avoid the negative impact of ghosting.

2. Ineffective communication

If your team’s communication is disorganized, this only lengthens the hiring process further, and leads to candidate disengagement. Ineffective communication can include not responding quickly enough or not answering specific questions candidates have along the way. Nearly 63% of candidates report being dissatisfied with the level of communication from most employers after applying.

Another way communication complicates the hiring process is when recruiting teams use outdated forms of communication, such as phone calls or emails. Not many people answer phone calls from unknown numbers, so candidates are likely to miss your calls. And with traditional email, you risk candidates missing key communication in a cluttered inbox.

The solution: AppyHere’s hourly hiring solution helps your team communicate with hourly job candidates seamlessly and confidentially. Without having to share contact information, your recruiting team can connect with candidates via integrated text messaging, phone calls and video conferencing directly on the app. This enables more seamless communication and helps your team avoid challenges related to candidates missing calls or overlooking emails in their personal inboxes.

3. Disorganized interview scheduling

Many hourly candidates are balancing other jobs and priorities such as family commitments. In today’s tight labor market, it’s important for your recruiting team to be flexible with your interview scheduling and make it easy for candidates to confirm a time that works for them. If you go back and forth with candidates and can’t nail down an interview time, they might ghost for another job opportunity with a more seamless interview process.

The solution: With AppyHere, your team can stop spending time chasing down candidates and scheduling interviews manually. Simple and automated interview scheduling is available for in- person, phone, video, and group interviews.

The app also saves your team time and eliminates candidate frustrations related to going back and forth to confirm availability. All you have to do is add your availability in the app and interviews can be scheduled automatically.

Don’t get spooked by candidate ghosting – partner with AppyHere

AppyHere is your all-in-one hourly hiring solution, which streamlines the application experience, candidate communication and hiring process, helping your recruiting team avoid candidate ghosting.

Leading recruiting teams trust AppyHere to fill all of their hourly positions, and our solutions help each team member recruit up to 50 candidates per week.

Learn more about how AppyHere can be your complete solution for seamless and engaging hourly hiring – schedule a demo today.