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Turn candidates you don’t hire into eager promoters.
Have you ever rejected a candidate, only to have that person turn around and refer the role to a friend?
This rare achievement happens when the impression of a stellar hiring experience overcomes a candidate's personal disappointment for being turned down. Such recommendations carry immense weight for the recipient.
At Ibby we call them Bounce Referrals, and we track them as a key success metric when applying our Pipeline Improvement techniques to a customer's hiring process.
Even if you never experience a Bounce Referral, leaving a great impression can only help! Aiming for Bounce Referrals can position a company to benefit from a variety of positive downstream effects. For example:
A LinkedIn survey found that 87% of candidates say a positive interview experience can change their mind about a company they once doubted.
Employees with a positive candidate experience are 38% more likely to stay with the company for three years or more, according to ResearchGate.
Candidates are more likely to share their positive interview experiences on social media and employer review sites, which can enhance the company’s reputation and attract more high-quality applicants.
It’s also a great way to push back against potential negative outcomes. According to Shortlister, 80% of candidates who experience an unsatisfactory recruitment process revealed that they openly tell people about their experience, and a third of these candidates will do so proactively.
Here's a few of the key mindsets, practices, and behaviors that we build and cultivate with our clients leading to strong Bounce Referral outcomes.
Always lean & efficient
At first glance, the job-hunting process appears to naturally favor the company. A halfway decent posting will garner hundreds of applicants a week, with candidates scrambling to meet the expectations and approval of the hiring team.
However the competitive landscape for top-tier candidates often turns this orderly, preconceived notion turns on its head.
High demand skills are attractive across a variety of companies and roles, added to almost a hundred other company applicant pools each week. That ideal application is buried in a sea of low-quality application noise, waiting to get picked up by the first discerning eye.
In other words, while the company looks for a lone needle in the haystack, the top candidates are simply sifting a pile of needles, and the outcome is clear: the first company to find and land the candidate wins.
Ibby Recommendation: First go fast
The raw time (in hours/minutes) it takes for each action is the primary concern.
Treat all other considerations as secondary.
Ibby coaches companies to define the entire hiring pipeline in terms of speed. For example, take the relatively simple act of posting a new position. A speed-oriented mindset is going to handle that differently:
Do you have the right words? - There is no “right,” get close enough and post it. Adjust it tomorrow, based on results/metrics.
Is the job title optimized? - Use the most common industry terms, and refine the title later based on early applicant feedback.
Did we include the latest disclosures from HR and/or Legal? - No, in fact let’s drop it completely because (a) there’s nothing binding about reading a job listing, and (b) it makes parsing the listing even faster for the reader.
Are we prepared to manage applications as they come in? - Resume review requires no candidate interaction, and initial screening can be performed by almost anyone in the organization. Open the posting and start reviewing applications immediately to build momentum and gain insight into the applicant pool.
This can be a challenging mental shift for some teams, but making speed a cornerstone hiring principle has tremendous benefits:
Super-easy to spot and remove wasted effort: with no room for bloat, any activity that doesn’t directly drive towards the outcome stands out.
Catch candidates you would otherwise get miss due to market competition,
Candidates that experience a swift pipeline become inversely more forgiving and sticky if (and when) speed bumps occur.
You already need it! Most open positions are seeking immediate fulfillment.
Remove extra steps from the application
Speed and efficiency start at the beginning, namely with the application. So avoid utilizing functionality in your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that requires or "gently encourages" applicants to reenter their resume data in order to better match the system's search criteria. You know who you are.
Studies consistently show that longer application processes lead to higher abandonment rates. For instance, Glassdoor reports that the average time to complete a job application is 34 minutes. Additionally, they observed that significantly longer applications correlated with much higher dropout rates.
These findings complement another report from the Talent Board’s Candidate Experience Research, which states that 60% of job seekers abandon online applications due to length and/or complexity.
Ibby Recommendation: No Step 2
An optimized job application can and should take less than 5 minutes to complete.
Companies that streamline their application process and demonstrate respect for the candidate’s time can stand out in a competitive job market. This can enhance the company’s reputation and make it a more attractive destination for top talent.
Hiring teams also benefit: building an application that performs in the top end of completion averages leaves no room for waste. It’s a strong forcing function that gets everyone rowing in the same direction by narrowing their focus onto the content and tasks that truly matter.
Provide (and follow) a clear, consistent timeline
When candidates enter the process, your introductory email should include an outline of all interview steps, with accompanying timeframes.
For example, the first line should read something like:
Next 1-2 business days: Hiring Screen with HR Judy, 30 min
Once you prep and deliver your schedule, stick hard and fast to that schedule! This is (unsurprisingly) the important part that most companies miss. Candidates are extra appreciative when the process contains no surprises. Plus, defining all the steps up front makes it easier for both candidates and staff to plan accordingly.
This is a great tool for self-reflection and improvement! If the process seems too long, candidates will undoubtedly consider it lengthy and drawn-out. If you have trouble putting time boundaries around certain steps, those become targeted opportunities for improvement.
Ibby Recommendation: Plan 2, Expect 4
Design processes to consistently finish the entire application cycle for a candidate within 2 weeks.
Parkinson's Law says that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion, so plan for that inevitability. A 2-week plan will naturally stretch towards a month, but maintaining a focus on efficiency works to keep total time under 30 days. This is far more desirable than a scheduled 4-week plan stretching out to 6 or 8 weeks.
Closing the position allows everyone on the affected team to return to mission-critical work faster. The short timeframe forces hiring teams to hone in on weak spots, eliminating any effort that is not absolutely crucial to the decision-making process.
After adjusting for a 2-week expectation, if candidates continue to remain in the hiring pipeline for a month or longer, there’s a good chance of wasted cycles somewhere in the system.
Limit (or ideally eliminate) assigning "homework" and “quizzes”
The best processes allow a candidate to "just show up" and answer your questions. Personality and IQ tests have risen in popularity as application volumes increase, but we find they work against their intended effect: the best candidates avoid applications that demand busywork.
A study by CareerBuilder found that 60% of candidates abandon online applications due to their length or complexity, particularly when faced with personality and IQ tests. This problem favors more attractive, top-end talent: research by SHRM indicates that 67% of high-quality candidates are more likely to skip applications with extensive assessments, preferring companies that value efficiency over prolonged testing.
The ones who commit to such hurdles are usually the most desperate. A Harvard Business Review study noted that applicants who complete cumbersome testing procedures are often less confident in their job prospects, correlating with lower quality hires.
Ibby Recommendation: Lead with the team
Use the department with the open position as the first and primary source for validating candidate fitness. Everything else is noise.
Tests, take-home projects, and other school-style activities have not proven to effectively filter applications. They often as not screen out great candidates and fail to catch weak ones. It’s a drain on time and resources with no compelling benefit.
Drop the security blanket and use what works: the people who interact with this role day-in and day-out. Tight coordination between hiring staff and teammates around the open position will always be more efficient and effective than time spent administering and reviewing any formal test framework.
Leaning on native understanding of the job requirements, they notice important strength (and weakness) more acutely. With good partner support coming from the hiring team, individual contributors can make candidate assessments faster and more accurately.
This does not have to mean the team is flooded with excessive interviews and other time-consuming tasks. For example, hiring teams can work with department staff to review resumes before moving them into more time-consuming interviews. Hiring teams have a key part to play in this exercise, as everyone is not equally skilled at interpreting nuance of resume content (we also help engineering and hiring folks parse technical resumes better).
Screen for technical skill, not memorization
At-home tech screening has the same drawbacks as other test paradigms. In order to keep tests reasonably short, the questions are usually too simple to evaluate anything beyond coding basics. A study by Codility found that 64% of technical recruiters admit that standard coding tests fail to measure candidates' real-world coding skills effectively, often because the tests focus too narrowly on fundamental concepts.
Meanwhile, putting a real challenge in front of the candidate will earn the same "respect my time" rejection logic as IQ tests. A LinkedIn report revealed that 50% of candidates find coding assessments too simplistic and feel they do not accurately reflect their abilities, leading them to disengage from the hiring process.
Ibby Recommendation: Utilize the Ibby Interview Process
We built a technical interview paradigm based on years of collective experience by fellow engineers conducting interviews. Get consistent, numerically quantified results.
Tests, take-home projects, and other school-style activities have not proven to effectively filter applications. They often as not screen out great candidates and fail to catch weak ones. It’s a drain on time and resources with no compelling benefit.
Drop the security blanket and use what works: the people who interact with this role day-in and day-out. Tight coordination between hiring staff and teammates around the open position will always be more efficient and effective than time spent administering and reviewing any formal test framework.
Leaning on native understanding of the job requirements, they notice important strength (and weakness) more acutely. With good partner support coming from the hiring team, individual contributors can make candidate assessments faster and more accurately.
This does not have to mean the team is flooded with excessive interviews and other time-consuming tasks. For example, hiring teams can work with department staff to review resumes before moving them into more time-consuming interviews. Hiring teams have a key part to play in this exercise, as everyone is not equally skilled at interpreting nuance of resume content (we also help engineering and hiring folks parse technical resumes better).
Bounce Referrals are a strong indicator that your hiring process is top-notch.
When referrals start flowing in based on others’ experience within your pipeline, you can be confident that the best candidates will take notice, and seek you out.
Ready to bounce?
All Ibby engagements begin with a free 15-minute consultation and assessment meeting