Candidates dropping out of the hiring process is a perennial source of anxiety for almost any hiring team. Especially now, as businesses struggle to find quality candidates amidst a workforce shortage, applicant dropout is a significant concern for most organizations.
HR practitioners assume applicant dropout is caused by the process being too long and tedious, but that likely isn’t the case.
Like almost any other aspect of hiring, applicant dropout can be systematically identified, analyzed, and understood. All of our clients worry aloud about applicant dropout at some point in our relationship with them. So because completion rates are essential to our clients, they are imperative to us.
This white paper examines:
- How to define completion rates
- Why we care about them
- Assumptions about why candidates drop out
- The real reasons candidates drop out
- Why hiring teams can relax knowing some dropout is good dropout
We first undertook scientific investigation into this issue several years ago after we discovered a lack of scholarly research on the topic, and dove into it to help our clients better understand it and provide them with data to help educate stakeholders on best practices.
We know a vendor promoting their own research might be met with skepticism. But not only do we mean it when we say our scientists are committed to advancing the field of selection science, but we are practically obligated to help create best practices because of the unrivaled amount and quality of our hiring data. Our pre-employment assessments were taken by almost 30 million applicants over the last two years across various roles and industries. Organizations rooted in research and practice like Modern Hire are best able to take a broad view of a topic like completion rates.
We share our work in peer-reviewed outlets such as journals and at academic conferences. Since we started researching applicant completion rates we have published our findings in the Journal of Applied Psychology, the International Journal of Selection and Assessment, and as a symposium at an annual conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP).
