Reducing post offer candidate drop-offs with POFU.io
Designing for a personalized post hire engagement experience that candidates just won’t forget
Background
Meet Gilfoyle.
Gilfoyle is an incredibly skilled Software Engineer in the job market, and your company has just made him an attractive offer.
But Gilfoyle is evaluating offers from other companies as well.
The big question: How do you ensure Gilfoyle picks your offer amongst them?
What was the problem?
Last year, in a candidate-first market, tech companies were facing an issue where candidates would not show up post offer acceptance. Hari, co-founder and CTO at HackerRank had spoken to a bunch of companies in the tech space and reached out to us about the opportunity to build something. If a candidate (like Gilfoyle) does not show up after accepting an offer letter, it can be frustrating for the hiring team and can cause delays in the recruitment process.
Few companies had drop off rates as high as 70%, while a fair share of companies were in the 50–60% range! 📛
To throw some more light on the above statement:
If a company wanted to hire 3 SDEs, they would have to roll out offers to ~10 people, which implies they would have to interview hundreds of people. Simply put, we can call this — A SOURCING NIGHTMARE.
Problem statement: How might we reduce candidate drop-offs post offer acceptance?
The bigger picture
As a company in the HR tech space, HackerRank was catering to almost every stage in the developer life cycle.
There was one untapped region though — the post hire experience. Usually, an offer being rolled out is considered the last step of the hiring funnel. Spoiler alert: turns out it’s not. We set out to solve for this pain point of recruiters and hiring managers, and hence — POFU (Post Offer Follow Up) was born.
How did we approach this problem?
It’s impossible to have one design process for every project. You ride where the problem takes you. But in hindsight, this was a rough outline of how we approached this problem:
- Interview users to validate assumptions
- Ideate
- Define requirements and design goals
- Execute
- Measure impact
Validating hypotheses
Even though we were building POFU for companies who were having a hard time retaining tech talent, it was essential for us to understand the candidate mindset as well. They were 2 sides of the same coin. I was curious to know why a candidate wouldn’t show up after accepting an offer. I had some hypotheses from my end, but I wanted to validate them. After talking to tens of candidates and recruiters, here’s what I learnt:
What did we learn from interacting with users?
Defining requirements
It was almost eye-opening talking to recruiters and candidates to uncover their thoughts on the post offer stage. We got one level deeper and slightly altered our problem statement:
How might we instrument continuous and personal candidate engagement during the post offer phase?
The easiest way to stay in touch with candidates is via email. But to take this one step higher — think of an email builder that could be automated into a pattern to suit a company’s hiring workflow, catering to the exact necessities of a recruiter that solves their post offer problems.
Candidate ghosting is a growing issue, that can be addressed with candidate delight. There’s a need to measure candidates’ happiness and monitor red flags that lead to dropping an offer
We put together a high impact-low effort graph with potential solutions on personalized candidate engagement:
Introducing POFU.io
- Automate the post-offer flow, from congratulatory emails to a handwritten welcome note from the CEO
- Delight your candidates with our recommended actions — for example, a storybook delivered to their doorstep
- Monitor your candidates’ “happiness” based on their speed of response, open and click rates of emails and other relevant factors
Step 1: Login to POFU.io
Step 2: View all your candidates’ info, including their Happiness Index
Step 3: Have a detailed view of each candidate’s post-offer flow
What is a candidate workflow?
A workflow is a chronological flow of events that is applied to a candidate. It comprises of several actions such as emails, shipment, support etc. Every action has a date assigned to it.
Step 4: Customise the workflow with actions to suit your needs
Step 5: Tweak settings if needed
If our recommended templates don’t align with your brand’s tone of voice, you can always customise your communications:
Delight your candidates at their doorstep with:
Bingo! Using POFU.io, you implemented a highly customised and engaging post-offer flow for Gilfoyle.
He has had a great experience, feels valued and is excited to join your company!
Impact
- POFU was demoed to a bunch of enterprises, and is currently being used by orgs ranging from 100–1000 employees who are scaling rapidly
- Companies saw their drop-off rate reduce drastically. Out of 40 uploaded candidates, only 3 drop-offs were seen
- Most common actions used — Welcome email, physical gift, welcome video from hiring managers, candidate intro videos
What are recruiters and candidates saying?
“POFU is a great product to execute and track your post offer connect program, I love the automation part to complete the actions on defined timelines. Team is extremely supportive at each stage!“ — Hiring Lead at an enterprise software company headquartered in Boston, with over 1000 employees
“Got a thank you note from a candidate so thought to share it with you all!! POFU platform is making our life easier. Thank you so much team for running this!!” — Senior Talent Acquisition Partner at a leading skills assessment company
A huge shoutout to Siddharth Simharaju, Aditi Chandrasekar and Harishankaran Karunanidhi for all the lovely collaboration we’ve had throughout this process! 🚀
Thank you for reading!
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