The First Company to Respond Wins the Candidate's Attention

Your recruiters are losing candidates before they even dial the phone.

A candidate applies at 11pm. Your recruiter sees it at 9am. Reviews it at 10. Calls at 11am. Fourteen hours have passed.

In those 14 hours, the candidate has applied to 4 more companies. Maybe gotten a call from one. Maybe lost interest entirely.

This is not a motivation problem or a training problem. It's a physics problem. Candidate intent decays with time. The data is brutal.

In production across thousands of candidates, when we called within 10 minutes of application, every single candidate picked up. Not most. All of them.

The overall pickup rate was 85%, against an industry benchmark of 30 to 40% for recruiter calls.

The lesson is simple: the first company to respond wins the candidate's attention. Not the best brand. Not the highest salary. The fastest response.

Most TA leaders are optimizing job descriptions, employer branding, sourcing channels. All important. But none of it matters if your first contact happens 24 hours after the candidate already chose someone else.

This is why we built Gia.

Further reading

• The Two-Day Rule of Recruiting — Workable
• Need for speed: 80% of candidates want faster response times from recruiters — HR Dive
• The Short Life of Online Sales Leads — Harvard Business Review

More from Gigin

• Speed of Outreach Directly Predicts Whether a Candidate Picks Up
• Your Recruiters Are Losing Candidates Before They Even Dial the Phone. I Know Because I Built the Teams That Lost Them.
• The Fastest Company to Call Wins the Candidate. Not the Biggest Brand. Not the Highest Salary. I Learned This the Hard Way.
• A Nurse Applied at 11pm. Your Recruiter Saw It at 9am. She'd Already Accepted Another Call. This Is the Problem Nobody Talks About.
• The Recruiter Phone Call Is Dying. Most TA Leaders Haven't Noticed Yet.