There is significant competition for high-performing talent with in-demand skills, particularly when it comes to digital and tech talent. Speed is a critical factor in remaining competitive when the talent being recruited has multiple opportunities to consider.
During early workshops with applicants, Talent Cloud heard that top talent responding to job advertisements would potentially leave the competition if they were not contacted within 2-3 weeks of submitting their application. This was also true for each successive step after the initial screening process (e.g. assessment/testing, interview, reference check, final offer). Applicants expected no more than a few weeks to pass between key stages, and no more than 2 months overall from application to offer.
Workshop participants listed three top reasons for withdrawing from job processes they had applied to (government and other). These were:
In all three cases, the slow speed of the average Government of Canada staffing process would be a significant hindrance to securing high performing talent, particularly if that talent was motivated to find a new position and was applying to multiple potential employers.
The hypothesis for this part of the research was fairly simple: we thought top talent would drop out if processes ran long. What we didn’t know was how quickly processes would need to move in order to keep a sufficient number of top applicants in the process to ensure that managers could get an optimal hire (notably, one of their top choices of applicants). We decided to test the self-reported claim from workshop participants that processes needed to advance in no more than 2-3 week intervals per stage, and that the total process needed to take less than 2 months (at least until a verbal offer was in place).
To test the impact of time to staff on the ability of managers to retain applicants, we compared the percentage of applicants who dropped out during the application screening phase, while also tracking the speed at which the process was moving forward.
While we observed that applicants dropout of hiring processes at all phases, during this period nothing beyond the application has been asked of the applicants. This helps to avoid including unqualified candidates who drop out when they see the assessment tools, such as a test.
For a small subset of the jobs advertised on the Talent Cloud platform, the team conducted additional qualitative analysis, tracking the manager’s top choices of applicants at each stage, and following up with them about their decisions and the impact of speed on their final decision to accept or reject an offer.
Data collected during the pilot confirmed what we heard from applicants during our early workshops. When the applicant screening phase took less than two weeks the average dropout rate was 8%; when it was two weeks or more, the dropout rate rose to 13%.
Talent Cloud then interviewed managers to see who, exactly, was dropping out. Where possible, Talent Cloud also contacted applicants to find out why they had withdrawn their names. There was a consistent trend in the qualitative research showing that high-performing applicants with other offers on the table were the most likely to drop out of a process that was moving more slowly. Unfortunately, in cases where managers moved very slowly, sometimes they didn’t realize for a month or two that their top choice of applicant was already long gone. This caused a lot of frustration for managers.
Notably, this improved significantly in processes posted more recently to the platform, when Talent Cloud had released additional features, and was able to provide more guidance about exactly how fast managers would need to move in order to keep their top choices. In the most recent jobs posted to the platform, managers were able to attract and retain a significant amount of top talent, with 4-14 strong, fully qualified applicants from an initial group of ~40-50 applicants. These processes averaged ~40 days from job advertisement close to verbal offer (followed by time for security clearance). Speed did indeed seem to help with ensuring the Government of Canada was the first employer to arrive with an attractive offer.
In workshops and interviews, applicants said that the need for speedy processes applies at all stages. This indicates that to keep top candidates in the applicant pool, managers should move through screening, testing, interviews, references, and finalization of offer in no more than three week intervals. In our sample, just over half of dropouts occurred during the initial screening phase, which could be interpreted as applicants becoming more invested as the process continues.
When processes moved more slowly, this often gave the current employers of top applicants the chance to propose and finalize promotions internally. A majority of top applicants who declined positions (in our very small sample size) did so to remain with their current employer. The remainder were offered a position by another organization sooner than the Government of Canada was able to finalize an offer, and elected to take the firm offer that was before them. In all but two cases, applicants confirmed that if the Government of Canada had been the first to arrive with a firm offer in writing, their decision would likely have gone the other way. (In the remaining cases, the absence of a manager profile on the job advertisement proved to be a significant factor in the applicants’ final decision about accepting an offer elsewhere, citing a mismatch with the fit-to-team as influencing their decision.)
To make the Government of Canada more desirable to high-performing talent with alternative employment opportunities, the Government of Canada needs to have a competitive time to staff - not just overall, but at each of the many stages of screening and assessment. To determine how fast exactly hiring managers must move, a larger research study, with a larger sample size, would be required.
Think you have months to screen applicants? Think again.
After several failed staffing and contracting attempts at finding rare talent for a specific role, a manager came to Talent Cloud with a very specialized need. We knew it was going to be tough to attract someone from the private sector to join the Government for that role, so we emphasized to the manager that speed would be an essential component. The manager delivered a staffing process that took less than six weeks to arrive at a verbal offer, but even at this speed, it was almost not fast enough. Here's a quote from the top applicant who ended up securing the job.
“It took almost a month for me to hear from anyone about the position I applied to... that was a long time to wait and I assumed I wasn’t being considered. When I saw an email from Talent Cloud in my inbox, I assumed it was a ‘better luck next time’ note but was excited when I read that I had made it to the second stage in the hiring process.”
There are, however, things that hiring managers can do today to make their position more attractive to candidates. Keeping candidates in the loop during the hiring process, even if it is to check in and let them know that things are taking longer than hoped, may help managers retain their top candidates throughout the hiring process. Developing assessment plans in advance, and sticking to a screening plan, can also be significant aids to keeping the hiring process moving swiftly… and keeping high performing talent engaged.
