No shows and low attendance rate at assessment centres and interviews can be a huge pain – going through the process of selecting the best candidates before preparing a day of interviews or exercises is time-consuming.

It’s all well and good putting valuable time, energy and resource into an engaging recruitment experience, but if you are losing candidates and have low attendance rate during the final, most crucial stages in the process, then does it really matter how great it was?

Measures of success for recruitment campaigns should include the attendance rate at assessment centre and interview stage. After all, a recruitment process is designed to transform an applicant into a new hire – and by having a high attendance rate at assessment centre, you’ll be giving your organisation the best chance of recruiting the right talent.  

We help Kuehne + Nagel achieve at least 90% attendance rate at each of their assessment centres – here are our tips on how you can achieve the same.

• Increase touchpoints of communication

Are you communicating with your candidates regularly? When was the last point at which they received contact from you? If you’re struggling to answer either of those questions, it’s imperative to understand that communication is the first step of building a relationship with your candidates – and they might just become a future employee if you maintain a positive impression.

Effective touchpoints allow both the organisation and candidate to form a bond, making the candidate feel like the company is familiar to them, before they have even joined – but this also allows greater opportunity to identify if a candidate may withdraw or have difficulties attending the assessment centre or interview – providing you with another opportunity to better improve the quality of candidate experience.

• Be motivating

Candidates feel more engaged with every aspect of the recruitment process if they believe you want them to succeed. At the end of the day, candidates will always remember the way in which they were treated throughout the recruitment process.

Encouragement and motivation can help to minimise the rate of drop outs and have a positive effect on the level of performance at assessment centre or interview stage.

• Taking the right documents

Speeding up the pre-employment process if they are successful is one thing, but if candidates know exactly what to take along to their assessment centre or interview with enough time to prepare the documents they are increasingly likely to attend. If they do not have the right documents or feel flustered about attending the next stage in the process, they are more likely to raise concerns and inform you if this would sway their decision for attending the next stage in the process.

• Know exactly where your candidate has also applied

Particularly since competition for candidates is at an all-time high, it is likely they are in the recruitment process for more than one organisation. In order to gain the upper hand, you must understand the likelihood of the candidate accepting another offer of employment whilst they are going through the recruitment process.

So, not only is it important to strengthen your employer brand, it’s essential to know if candidates are in the application process for another role and if so, which stage they have reached to prepare for the worst-case scenario in which you lose a fantastic candidate to a competitor.

Whilst this can be a difficult and off-putting question to ask, you can be tactful. Simply asking “How do we weigh up against other opportunities that you are considering right now” can be a good way to approach this.  You’ll be surprised what you might learn about how your organisation is viewed, who you are competing with and of course who you are competing with.

• Manage cycle times efficiently

With recruitment campaigns in general, it’s important to manage the time taken for a candidate to go through the recruitment process.

Volume recruitment campaigns are no exception – in fact, in volume recruitment employer markets are deemed to be even more competitive and volatile when recruiting for a high number of roles or in a particular area where skills levels do not match the needs of the employer.

It is because of this, that an organisation must seek to take candidates through the recruitment process swiftly and efficiently to have the best possible chance of hiring the right talent for their business.

Combined with the risk of candidates being picked by competitors, a shorter cycle time is more engaging for the applicant – add a fantastic candidate experience into the mix and your organisation should have no problems improving the rate of attendance in the later stages of the recruitment process if you follow our top tips.

If you’d like to find out more information about how you can run a great recruitment campaign, why not check out our seven steps to the best recruitment campaign ever?