ABA therapists have a tough job. The hours are long, the pay is modest, and the nature of the work takes an emotional toll. It leads to a remarkably high turnover rate of 65% according to the 2022 ABA Compensation & Turnover Report.
In such a job market, it can be easy to find applicants, more difficult to find applicants qualified and credentialed to do the job, and even more difficult to get them to stay at the company for the long term.
We’ve written lately about ways to lower turnover for ABA therapists and strategies to reduce time to hire, but so far, these articles focus mostly on the hiring process. Here we want to highlight the importance of a candidate engagement program in the effort to reduce turnover and secure the best applicants on the market.
A company’s hiring process describes the structure, the steps, and the objectives in hiring, while a candidate engagement program is more about the style. It describes how the company approaches job applications, screening, interviewing, and overall communication. Candidate engagement analyzes the hiring process to find opportunities for better communication and interaction at each step. The goal is to develop a hiring style that builds rapport with the applicant during the process, so they are more likely to accept the offer when it is provided.
Glassdoor found that candidates are 38% more likely to accept the offer if they are satisfied with the application process. Furthermore, the 2023 Candidate Experience Report from Criteria found that 54% of candidates surveyed have abandoned a recruitment process due to poor communication from the employer.
Clearly, there is an opportunity to find an edge in the hiring market. Read on to find best practices to build up your hiring culture and find the best candidates on the market.
Best Practices for a Better Candidate Engagement Program
Record the Right Metrics to Measure Improvement
First and foremost, we cannot measure improvement if we do not have a baseline. You must record a set of key performance indicators that give a sense of how efficient and effective your hiring process is currently. As you implement other best practices in this list, you should begin to see positive impacts on these metrics.
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The metrics you should be recording include:
Time-to-Hire
Measures the amount of time between the moment a candidate submits an application to the point at which they accept the job offer. This is an important holistic metric that informs the overall efficiency of the hiring process.
Applicant Completion Rate
Measures what percentage of applicants who begin filling out a job application complete the application and submit it to the organization. A low Applicant Completion Rate usually indicates an overly-complex, high friction application process. Structure your application to be as straightforward as possible. Solutions like Apploi Hire can enable you to build a one-click mobile-friendly application, which does not require candidates to create an account.
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Candidate Drop Off Rate
Similar to Applicant Completion Rate, this measures the percentage of candidates who begin but do not finish the hiring process.
Source of Hire
Measures from which channel a new hire originated in the application process. This is a useful strategy for ABA therapist recruitment, because you can use it to determine which channel yields the most qualified, credentialed candidates. You can then focus your efforts on the channel with the best return.
Offer Acceptance Rate
Measures what percentage of job offers are accepted. As your candidate engagement program goes into effect, you should see improvement on this stat specifically.
Provide a Hiring Timeline and Keep to It
It is important to try to reduce your Time to Hire overall, and using an applicant tracking system (ATS) is an effective strategy to accomplish that. For example, Apploi Hire can reduce your Time to Hire by 71%, thereby creating a much faster, more effective hiring process.
During screening or immediately after receiving an application, provide an overview of the full hiring process including the steps involved, any personality or performance tests, the number of interviews, and similar information.
If you are setting expectations for the applicant, it is important that you live up to the set timeline. When an applicant expects to hear a response on a given day and doesn’t, they are likely to assume that they have been passed over in favor of another applicant. When the process takes longer than expected, it hurts the candidate experience and lowers your Offer Acceptance Rate.
Get Candidate Feedback
Feedback is key to improving any process, and the candidates who have gone through it are your best sources of information. Develop a feedback survey that you can issue to all new hires as part of the onboarding process. In addition, send the survey to those candidates who were interviewed but not selected for the position. Not all of them will fill out the survey, but their insights are just as valuable as those who accepted offers.
Use these insights to drive further change in your candidate engagement. Did someone feel ignored? Perhaps additional automated follow ups would be useful. Did someone feel like there were too many interviews? Perhaps you can restructure the process to include panel interviews.
Maintain Frequent Communication
The foundation of any relationship, whether personal, romantic, or business, is clear and frequent communication. The same is true in the hiring process. 70% of candidates believe a lack of communication is the most significant red flag in a hiring process. To improve your Applicant Completion Rate and your Offer Acceptance Rate, build in more touch points between the hiring team and the applicant.
The communication does not need to be lengthy or require much from the hiring team. Automated SMS text messages using an ATS, such as Apploi Hire, can keep your company top of mind for the applicant as they interview for various open positions. Moreover, they provide an opportunity and designated channel for the candidate to quickly ask questions and receive answers. You can also use this opportunity to share information about the company culture, important news, and updates to their candidacy.
Some example touch points for communication include:
- Reminders or confirmation of an upcoming interview
- Thank you message after receiving an application
- Messages to announce the candidate has moved on to the next phase
- Condolences if the applicant was not selected
Selecting the right ATS is key to facilitating this process. Find a solution that offers unlimited messaging to clients rather than those that bill per message. Additionally, robust ATS solutions will include message templates to make it easier to draft and send communications.
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Use Video Interviews over Phone Interviews
Many hiring processes are becoming entirely digital and exclusively use tools like Zoom, Google, or Microsoft Teams to conduct interviews. There may still be value in hosting in-person interviews at the office, but phone interviews are now obsolete.
Phone interviews were previously valuable as it saves the hiring team’s and candidate’s time. They don’t need to coordinate an office space, and the candidate doesn’t need to travel. The team can conduct more interviews in less time.
All of this is true about video interviews with the added benefit of a visual component. You can see each others’ faces and get a better sense of the applicant. It also provides an opportunity for your hiring team to promote the company brand with branded background images on the call.
You get the same convenience of a phone call with a much better sense of the candidates’ personality and cultural fit.
Streamline the Hiring Process for Better Engagement
The best way to reduce Time to Hire is to require fewer steps in the interview altogether, but this is also a useful strategy to improve the candidate experience. The shorter the process, the faster an offer can be delivered. The better the candidate experience, the more likely that candidate is to accept the offer.
You want to build an interview process that gives an informed sense of the candidates’ qualifications, temperament, and abilities in as few steps as possible. Trim excess calls and interviews. Combine single interviews into panel interviews. Conduct an initial screening with a recruiter to weed out unqualified candidates or misunderstandings.
Finally, an obvious but overlooked advantage to a shorter hiring process is that it is simply easier to manage. Fewer steps means less time out of the hiring team’s day to execute.
Summary
Your hiring process is the beginning of your professional relationship with a new employee, and candidate engagement is how you get a strong start to that relationship. Find better applicants, hire top talent, and do it all at a lower cost by focusing on refining your process and boosting engagement.
Learn more about Apploi Hire and how it tracks the metrics you need to improve your hiring and engagement process.
