Employees no longer willing to wait through lengthy hiring processes: report

Job seekers are no longer willing to go through lengthy hiring processes for the job they want, and are instead more likely to choose a different job with a quicker process.

Almost half (44%) of respondents to a survey by Workpro are not willing to wait more than a week to hear back from an employer after a second interview. And of those, 37.5% were 25 to 34 years old, followed by 23.2% aged between 35 and 44.

“Companies must adapt, accelerate their processes, and prioritise the candidate experience to remain competitive in today’s dynamic job market,” said WorkPro founder Tania Evans.

But how else should HR teams manage the challenges in recruitment?

Challenges with recruitment

Peter Holland, professor of human resource management and director of the Executive MBA at Swinburne University of Technology, highlighted that the current generation are maybe not prepared to stay in a job for a long period of time.

“When I talk to my students, I say, ‘If you had the perfect job, how long would you stay there?’” he said. “[If you] talk to your grandparents they’d say ‘For life’; your parents might say, ‘Oh, my 40s’. These kids, they would say, ‘Well maybe five years and then I have to move on because I have to keep my skills up to date and develop them’.

“So there’s an attitude about what they call a psychological contract, that they have loyalty to their own careers, not to an organisation, which ironically is generated by organisations 20 or 30 years ago when they started sacking people and saying, ‘We can't guarantee you a job for life’. So they've created their own problem here.”

In a very tight labour market, people aren't necessarily going to hang around, said Holland. And if an employer has been making a potential candidate wait for two or three weeks, or doesn’t get back to them, then “there's a gap there, a perception that this isn't a good company or ‘I can go and look for another job.’”

What hiring trends mean for HR

During the year ending February 2023, 1.3 million people changed jobs in Australia. That equates to a 9.5% job mobility rate, which Australia reached for the second time in a row — and the highest job mobility rate it’s seen in a decade. 

Organisations, particularly HR teams, may consider themselves a “fortress,” said Holland.

“You get inside and you stay in the organisation until you leave or they open the door and let you go,” he said. “But organisations are more like sponges now. People move through organisations, they get what they can. They're very conscious, this generation, of building skills and developing skills and moving on.”

And younger generations, particularly digital natives, are more comfortable searching for jobs online.

“They're comfortable moving, they don't have any loyalty to anyone but themselves generally,” Holland said. “So I think you've got those combinations, and it's a very, very tight labour market, the tightest labour market since 1974. So, understandably, people don't feel they have to hunker down in a job.”

A call for flexibility from jobseekers

In August, job vacancies went down for the fifth straight quarter, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).

"Demand for workers eased again in August for the fifth straight quarter. This coincided with an increase in the unemployment rate over the three months to August," ABS head of labour statistics Kate Lamb said in a statement at the time.

"While these indicators are no longer at historical levels, both are still showing that the labour market is tighter than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic."

And speaking of the pandemic, it’s another factor that has impacted recruitment practices.

“People have realised that they want more flexibility in their work,” Holland said. “That will be another factor, possibly in all of this, where you’ve got old-style management, meeting young-style worker.”

He added that in a tight labour market, employees can negotiate better terms and conditions. So for HR teams, an important question is, what benefits do you offer post a pandemic?

“One of the benefits people are looking for now is that flexibility in work and particularly the work from home or work from anywhere,” he said. “So if they don't offer it, then I think they lose the potential of attracting key people.”