Exclusive: 1 in 3 job postings result in no hire

The world is on the brink of a recession – inflation has reached a 40-year high in many global economies. Despite this, employees are still quitting in droves; the so-called ‘Great Resignation’ is not slowing down.

Hiring is expensive at the best of times, but it is particularly important that companies can successfully recruit the right people in a tight labor market.

Therefore, it is very worrying that Datapeople’s analysis of 150,000 active job postings and found that 35% did not result in a hire. This figure excludes only internally facing jobs, and those that only had one or no applicants.

The data also found that three in four companies failed to hire more than 20% of their open jobs, while half had a 30% no-hire rate.

“Unfilled roles can have a huge impact on businesses” – in fact, “inability to hire has curtailed the profitability of small businesses and even led to the entire close of these businesses”, Maryam Jahanshahi, co-founder and head of research and development at Datapeople, tells UNLEASH.

Bringing the HR practitioner perspective, Stacey Olive, Medidata’s vice-president of talent acquisition and employer branding, adds that hiring failure wastes resources, and can cause reputational damage with candidates who have taken the time to apply for a job that doesn’t ever get filled.

Looking beyond candidates, hiring failure is also a waste of HR teams’ valuable time. Datapeople’s research found that the median time to close a no-hire job is 26% longer than those where they are only looking to hire one person.

How to reduce no-hires

These statistics beg the questions, what causes hiring failure?

According to Datapeople’s Jahanshahi, there are two main reasons why no-hire jobs happen.

“First, recruiting has not evolved to have the data and benchmarking tools needed to effectively operate in a dynamic and changing talent market”. As a result, “recruiting teams are often flying blind”.

“The second reason is that recruiting and HR continue to operate at the fringes of the modern enterprise, unintegrated into core business strategy and decision making”, adds Jahanshahi.

This means that there is often a lack of alignment between departments that need to hire and the HR team, usually resulting in “overqualified roles, mismatched expectations and off-market pay bands resulting in lost time and candidate frustration”.

Ultimately, hiring failure suggests that recruiting remains an inefficient process in many organizations – how can employers fix this?

While it is not a silver bullet, better recruiting data and analytics could be part of the solution. This can help HR and those hiring in the business identify issues, and then collaborate more effectively together to avoid hiring failure.

“The number one thing companies can do is align stakeholders. Often companies rush into hiring for roles within thinking through the role, the process, the salary range and the market conditions”, states Jahanshahi.

“For alignment to happen, talent and HR leaders need to have visibility over the entire talent process”.

On the topic of not rushing into hiring, another solution is thinking very carefully about whether the organization actually needs to look recruit externally for a role at all.

While there may be some essential recruitment (particularly to replace those who have left key roles), but for other roles, upskilling and promoting from within might be a better solution.

This is the view of Medidata’s Olive. This has the added benefit of improving retention rates in your organization – one of the leading causes of the ‘Great Resignation’ is a lack of career development opportunities.

By nurturing your internal talent, rather than always looking externally, businesses create loyal, motivated employees who will be committed for the long-term.

If this article caught your interest, you can find more on talent acquisition here. Enjoy!