Busted No Show Reasons

“I met with an accident!”, “My best friend is hospitalized”, “I am unwell”, “My grandparent expired”, “important meeting at office scheduled and I got the update last night”, either the number which you try is not reachable or it is just switched off, list goes on. I always think “why all these happen to candidates on the day of Interview?” Few are just reasons which we cannot buy, while the others might be genuine which will get overshadowed.

We have different categories of people. One set of them sound dicey in the initial discussions itself for their availability on interview. Another set of them confirm every time and finally backs out. And few recruiters will schedule for the sake of numbers. Let’s play a fair game. List out candidates who are genuinely interested for the opportunity.

There will be a lesser amount of back outs in this case.

Reasons for No Shows: –

• Candidate is not keen about the opportunity.
• Candidate has multiple interviews lined up on the same day.
• Candidates may not be interested in Recruitment Drives.
• Candidate may have heard from his/her friends that interview process is hard/bad impression about company/may have read some reviews in social media etc…

Let’s analyze them: –

Candidate is not keen about the opportunity –

Candidate may say yes to the opportunity but it might not be the same as what s/he is looking out for. It is a duty of a recruiter to understand their interests and priorities. We often would want them to say YES to the opportunity irrespective of their interests. This will be one of our biggest mistakes if we do so. If candidate is not interested in the opportunity s/he will not definitely turn up for the interview.

Candidate has multiple interviews lined up on the same day –

If s/he is an active job seeker, it is obvious to have multiple interviews lined up on the same day. Your competitors may also conduct interviews on the same day. We can look upon different ways to make them prioritize, else we can always look for a backup as we could sense a chance of his or her No Show. Else we can schedule them some other day.

Candidates might not be interested in Recruitment Drives –

Recruitment Drives are apt for Mass hiring, vanilla requirements, entry level and mid-level positions where the talent pool is huge. We have few set of people who are not interested to spend their time in recruitment drives. Especially senior folks. Reasons may be *Number of people who are attending the interview *Time consuming *Different filtering process *a “mass game” *and not ready for written/online tests. We can try scheduling this set of people to off drives/scheduled interviews.

Candidate may have heard from his/her friends that interview process is hard/bad impression about company/may have read some reviews in social media etc…

What I believe is every organization has its own pros and cons, they can be unicorns or cockroaches or big brands. A wiser candidate would personally experience it rather than just listening to others. S/he may like something to work with them.

Perceptions may be anything but experience can change perceptions. It is one of our duties to give the best experience throughout the process irrespective of the results. To make sure candidates’ best experience we have to be responsive, continuous guidance, transparent process, and proper feedback. We often neglect candidates whose result is not positive. We are equally responsible to give them the feedback. It is not that if a candidate fails to crack interview at one place couldn’t crack anywhere else. Being transparent in giving feedback makes more sense.

To Add up: No shows are quite common in recruitment drives. As compared to recruitment drives, regular scheduled interviews have lesser number of back outs. There will be few exceptions where we can find very impressive turn outs and on the other hand it may be lesser than what we expect.

P.S.- The more you understand your candidates, the better chances for you to reduce “No Shows”.

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