How to Prevent an Interview No Show

There are a lot of good things about being a recruitment consultant. It’s a privilege to be able to help people move their careers forward and to provide solutions to bars, restaurants and hotels when they’ve had so much difficulty recruiting. Like any job though, there are certain aspects to being a recruitment consultant that aren’t good and can at times be rather frustrating. One of the big ones? The interview no-show.

Thankfully, it’s not a problem that we have to deal with much thanks to the fact that we work with wonderful clients and only ever work with candidates that we believe in. So how do we minimise the number of interview no-shows? It’s quite simple really:

We only put forward candidates who have a good chance of securing the role on offer

One of the biggest bugbears that businesses across sectors have against recruitment consultants is that many of them will just flood them with CVs in the hope that in amongst them is a suitable candidate. This is something that we have never done. Our belief is that for one role, it’s better to get three CVs that are fully suited to the role than 50 that are only partially suitable. This also ensures that candidates show up for interview because it is a job that is relevant to them and suited to their skillset.

We fully explain the interview process

Interviews can be intimidating to some people and even those people who are highly suited to the role can talk themselves out of turning up simply because of their nerves. To combat this, we fully explain the interview process to them so they know what kind of interview it will be to take away the pressure. This makes sure that they’re furnished with the facts about the interview ensuring that their nerves aren’t getting on top of them and letting their imagination run wild. We even help them with the directions to get there.

We explain the consequences to them of a ‘no show’

We pride ourselves on the service that we give our clients which means we have to have 100% trust in our candidates. We do this by being thorough in everything we do, such as in background checks and referencing. The other part of this is that just as our candidates should expect us to do the very best for them, then we expect 100% commitment. We only work with the best, so if any of our candidates let us down like not showing up for an interview, then we will not work with them again.

We keep in contact

We call the candidate the day before and on the day of the interview just to make sure everything is OK and that they will be attending, as well as calling them after to see how they got on. This kind of personal touch and attention to detail is what sets us apart from many of the other recruiters out there.

Yes, sometimes the inevitable does happen and a candidate doesn’t turn up for interview, but more often than not this will be down to something completely out of their control, such as a sudden Tube breakdown. Whatever the reason, it’s a relatively rare occurrence and as you can see from the measures that we have in place, one that we do absolutely everything we can to avoid.