Why do Candidates turn down offers?

It’s no secret that lately, it’s become a lot more common to hear a rejection to a job offer. Often times due to a mix of factors that sometimes just can’t be remedied.

Securing a candidate to join your team is a stepping stone in building a partnership between what our Recruitment Partners can do and what your in-house onboarding team or hiring managers can do. In our years of working closely in partnership with various companies, all of which have encountered rejections at some point in their time. We have found a few trends over the past 15 years for why a candidate turns down a job offer.

Speed and length of application

Candidates have a lot on their plates, applying for multiple jobs whilst maintaining other areas of their life often leaves them in need of work that is stable and quick to secure. This causes a lot of applicants to lose their momentum during the application phase. Usually due to lengthy forms that need to be filled in in order to proceed, followed by various stages of interview. Often times candidates lose interest around 3 days in to the application process if the role doesn’t truly appeal to them. This is somewhat beneficial as much as it is sore, because it shows that the employee may not have had what was required for the role.

Salary offered

Salary has become a massive focal point in recent years, even more so then usual. Many businesses will not see the talent they need if their salary is under the average for that role and industry. It’s incredibly important that businesses offer competitive, modern wages that can help deter people from wanting to decline the offer. It’s not just so you can avoid rejections at the offer stage, it’s about being visibly different from other businesses on the market. You will stand out in a bad way if you’re offering a wage that is outside of what is normal for the industry and role. Many recruitment agents have to know salary brackets for roles and industries and will often times be able to directly consult a business on what the right thing to do is for that businesses salary budget.

Direction of the company

Many talented candidates often reject offers due to the actual direction of the business itself and its management style. That’s why it can be damaging for a business to have no clear, illustrated career path explained at the interview stage. A good business will have the direction it’s going in be clear and well explained, either through their website or through their interviews, where the hiring manager will, or should, explain how people progress through the company and what the companies vision and mission statements actually are.

Alongside these issues, other deterrents of this kind that can hurt a business is if there’s no real clear training, if the employee is left to train their self with no guidance or input from their colleagues or team mates, it’s easy to imagine what that could result in. So a lot of businesses counter this by having well explained and thoroughly walk-through the training process to ensure it’s up to standard and easy to understand and execute.

Contract issues

Many potential employees reported issues with their contracts. Many different types of issues came up, but the most common ones involved logistics of the contract and lengthy processes.

This meant that the employee couldn’t continue with the job as their contract hadn’t been formalised, or they’d been hired on for a role different from what they’d interviewed for. However these issues were too significant and in many cases caused issues for the employee which would make them reject the business in the end.

Not having clear start dates explained or available has been an issue for some when starting work. Sometimes businesses make the costly mistake of processing a new employee and doing all this work just to forget to inform them of the start date, or have it be wrong from their internal system. Mistakes like this can cost a business so much. To avoid this have a runthrough of the systems you use to hire and make sure it’s all operating to standard and not leaving information out.

Our director Rick at one of his jobs early in his career, he got a “welcome to the team” card posted to him prior to starting. This was a fantastic example of great onboarding, the personal approach during the notice period. At this same job, on the onboarding day, at lunch time, all the new starters met the Senior Management team for a 2 course lunch. This was a fantastic way to make a new starter feel welcomed.

Our team of recruiters can support you with onboarding your team, as well as our finders service, we do have a extra “bolt on” service that can support your team to onboard your team. Please reach out to ask our team for details about the onboarding service we can support with in addition to the finders service. Getting onboarding correct is so important.  

HtE Recruitment News & Insights

This news and insights page has been written by Josh our Recruitment & Marketing Coordinator. HtE Recruitment take no responsibility for this post.