When I moved from Tennessee to Colorado, it felt like everything happened all at once. I got an offer to buy the house while I was on the flight to my vacation destination. I was also in the final stages of interviewing for a job that would give me a 40% raise. I thought it would be easy to manage moving jobs and homes. I was an Army brat. This was move #21 of my life. Easy, right?
As much as I was an expert in moving, I wasn’t prepared for what happened next. The day before moving out, surrounded by boxes and family members that flew in to help, I got a call from the recruiter. I got the job. When I went to my inbox to find the paperwork, I saw that there were a few steps I needed to complete like a background check and assessments. Bad news? All of them had a deadline of the day before I was going to get to the new apartment in Colorado. I had to figure out how to do all of this in the middle of all this chaos. I still had packing to do.
The next morning, the movers arrived at 8 am. I sat in the middle of the big, empty living room in a dining room chair answering questions and shouting instructions in between like, “no not that, grab this first,” as I quickly tried to complete each question. I was so frustrated. Why didn’t anyone tell me I would have to do this?
Bad Expectations Add Up
From that day forward, I felt frustrated every time someone from the recruiting team contacted me about taking one more step whether it was delivering my computer or completing the payroll paperwork. Things were always more complicated than they needed to be, at least it felt like it. I would soon learn that was a feature of the company’s culture.
But the problem wasn’t that the steps were complicated. It was that no one ever communicated this step with me in the first place. As recruiters, we present salary ranges and work locations early because we don’t want to go through everything to find out the price is not right, they only want a remote gig, or any of the other million reasons candidates withdraw from a process at the last minute. Why wouldn’t we set expectations around background checks earlier to avoid losing great talent at the end?
Data points from across the candidate experience make a very profitable case for setting clear expectations. For example, when candidate expectations around daily tasks do not align with the job post or interview, about 27% of them will quit that job within the first 90 days. During the interview, there’s even more risk. 50% of candidates cite poor treatment as a reason to decline offers in a PwC survey. There are more data points that reach all the way from getting ghosted during the application process until post-hire. Bottom line? You can’t afford to skip setting expectations.
Candidate-Friendly Background Check Features
Just like we set expectations about money or rounds of interviews, we should use some of the same principles for clear, candidate-friendly communication with background checks. Now, legally? You always have to tell people you are doing a background check. That’s the law.
But technology can elevate that communication by taking us from a notification to an interaction. I’m talking about candidate-friendly background check features like:
- A tool that can give ETAs for when results are available: It’s not clear communication or good expectation setting if there’s no deadline. Make sure there’s a candidate self-service portal where candidates can check the status, upload documents, or initiate disputes. The waiting game is painful, y’all.
- Mobile (notifications and candidate portals): Not everyone has a functional personal computer and I don’t want to encourage anyone to use their work laptop to fill out a background check for a new job. Pretty much everyone you’ll hire has a phone. If you want people to get hired quickly, make sure the mobile option is easy.
- Support: If you’ve worked with people long enough, you know this: no matter how clearly we communicate something, people are going to have questions and want answers when something as important as a job is on the line. Pick a vendor that offers multilingual support and FAQs. Your alternative? Angry messages from hiring managers who are getting bombarded with questions.
Meet Our Sponsor: Checkr
In the spirit of setting good expectations, you should know this is the first of a 3 week sponsorship with my friends over at Checkr. Oh, and they have all the features I listed.
I spend a lot of time writing about candidate experience and clarity here, but the reality is that choosing the right background check partner is a make-or-break decision to set your candidates and team up for success. If your system is clunky, inconsistent, and rolling out bad results? You could be losing great candidates at the last step. I’m excited to learn more about how to get it right for the candidate and employee experience with a team that actually cares about people. Thank you, Checkr.
Be sure to subscribe here to be notified when the next post is available and of course, if you’re in the market for the right background check partner, click on the sponsor link here.