How to Prevent Top Talents from Ditching the Job Offer

Acquiring the right talent for any given job vacancy is an arduous task for recruiters. So, losing the right talent during the offer acceptance stage makes all the hiring efforts of the HR team go to waste and this will impact the overall hiring time and cost. In the long run, this would affect the business as well as the market share and acceptance. Having said all these, along with the other challenges organizations and recruiters face while hiring, it is crucial to prevent top talents from turning away during the offer acceptance stage.

Candidates consider every factor before choosing an organization. This includes remuneration, employee benefits, job nature, work culture, etc. Top talents know their value and negotiate based on their skills, experience, and offers from other organizations. Thereby it becomes a competition to acquire top talents and losing them might cost you a sum as you might be giving them away to your competitors.

Now, without much delay let's find out how we can conquer this situation with potential hacks.

What is Talent Retention?

The organization's propensity to minimize employee turnover while holding on to top talent is known as Talent Retention. Visionary organizations implement and upgrade their talent retention strategies and programs according to the recruitment market trends to overcome employee turnover. As an outcome this ensures long-term growth and success of the HR team and the respective business. The success of a talent retention strategy relies on the employee turnover rate and is defined as the percentage of employees who quit the organization over a particular period.

Formula to calculate the success rate of your talent retention strategy:

Employees who left / [(Employees at the beginning + Employees at the end) / 2] x 100

Top Reasons Leading to Candidate Offer Rejection

• Negative reviews about the work-life balance and internal growth.
• Doubtful perception about the reputation of the workplace.
• Unattractive pay package and incentives.
• Limited employee benefits.
• Bad candidate experiences from previous applicants.
• Bad employee experience.
• Delay in offer receival.
• Offers from competitors.

Calculate the Offer Rejection Rate

Just like calculating the success of a talent retention strategy employers also need to keep track of the offer rejection rates. The success of a talent retention strategy relies on the employee turnover rate and is defined as the percentage of employees who quit your organization over a particular period. Similarly, you can also calculate the offer rejection rate. This indicator helps you assess your company's work culture, brand, and recruiting strategies. You can calculate this on a quarterly or yearly basis.

To get the percentage of offer rejections keep track of:

• The number of candidates who did not accept the job offer.
• The number of candidates who received the job offer letter.

Formula to calculate percentage offer rejection:

(No. of candidates who did not accept the offer / No. of applicants who received offer letter) x 100

Benefits of Retaining Top Talent

The fact that any organization wants an efficient and growth-driven team to achieve the desired organizational goals makes it inevitable to retain top talent. Especially, retaining top talents using your talent acquisition strategy has numerous benefits and here are the major ones that we have identified.

1. Improves company culture and diversity.
2. Enables positive candidate experience leading to word-of-mouth promotion.
3. Build a positive employer branding.
4. Enables top talents choosing you over others by which you can stay ahead in a competitive talent seeking market.
5. Helps maintain the expected hiring cost.
6. Enables positive client experience.
7. Fuels the success journey of the organization and accomplishes significant growth in terms of revenue.

6 Appealing Strategies to Retain Top Talents While Hiring

Entertain the Remuneration Curiosity Early

It is undeniable that the remuneration and incentives are the most crucial driving factors for talents which raise curiosity amongst employees. This is why you need to entertain it early. A delay in discussion regarding the pay package or bad compensation might make you lose your top talent to your competitor.

A transparent and professional conversation will let you know what is going on in the remuneration market. This also gets you to the fact that how much salary an experienced talent is expecting and deserves in the current scenario. This step helps you exceed the employee expectations as well as to compete with the market.

Highlight the Work Culture and Diversity

Candidate wants to see a picture in advance of what it is like to be a part of your work culture. The best way possible is to use your current employees to project the work culture to the candidates. It is very important to display the culture because after the question of compensation gets resolved, another decision-making factor for employees is the work-life balance. Diversity is also an important criterion to make the candidate feel that his/her new team is going to be like a new family.

Offer Appealing Perks

In addition to the desirable compensation, consider offering appealing perks to retain talent such as paid time off, parental leave, travel allowance, food coupon, free snacks, remote and hybrid work options, etc. The perks should be such that they motivate your employees to improve their efforts and also make them feel positive and valued.

Mention the Scope for Training, Rewards, and Growth

To retain best-in-class talent, you often need to effectively convey your candidates’ potential and chances of growth within the organization. Mention about the relevant training and development programs that you will offer so that candidates are convinced that they will grow personally as well as professionally on choosing the job offer. Also, give an idea about the rewards and recognition you offer to keep themselves high on morale and increase their willingness to choose you over others.

Ensure Talent Engagement Including Exit Surveys

Lack of proper engagement with the candidates will result in candidate ghosting and negative candidate experience. Therefore, ensure that you are engaging with them and taking feedback whenever necessary, and also act on them. Conduct exit surveys for the candidates who are rejecting the offer so that you can be watchful in retaining others and improving upon it. You can make use of a Candidate Relationship Management tool for the same.

How can Recruitment Solutions increase talent retention?

Recruitment solutions offer candidate retention strategies with the help of both technology and HR experts. There are recruitment management systems that offer a transparent recruitment process in which engaging with the candidates is an exclusive component. Candidate engagement includes communication with candidates wherever necessary. Communication is mainly enabled by means of personalized emails, WhatsApp and text message notifications, phone call verification and background checks, chat bots, etc. This makes the candidate engagement process streamlined thereby improving talent retention rates.

Final Thoughts

To ensure that the right talent pool is ready to join your team and desist their intention of rejecting the job offer requires tweaking your recruitment strategy with certain hacks. Reworking on the compensation and working on candidate engagement wherever necessary helps improve candidate experience and reduces the percentage of offer dropouts cum rejects.

Above all, getting the right talent has become highly competitive, hence it is better to meet the candidate's expectations rightfully. Here, make sure to study what are the strategies that your competitors and experts in recruitment business are implementing to attract and retain the best talent and try offering better value and motivating experiences consistently.

Fill this form by populating the Template Name with “Talent Retention Calculator” to get a calculator that helps you arrive at your talent retention rate and offer rejection rate.