What is candidate experience and why does it matter?
Very simply, “candidate experience” is the measure of how any job seeker perceives your company, from every single contact touch point ranging from their user-experience on your website careers page, a simple phone call with a recruiter, the issue and content of an employment contract or the decline of their application. A poor candidate experience can result in:
a job seeker withdrawing themselves from contention, thus your loss of potentially great talent
a job seeker accepting your employment offer but without being fully committed heart and mind (thus not fully engaged and productive) and starting with a disconnect to your promoted company values
a job seeker sharing their negative experience with their family, friends, community (and now global network thanks to social media) thus impacting the interest of other people in your company as an “employer of choice”
an overall hit on your company brand which in turn can impact on customer spending habits, vendor partnerships, and ultimately business profitability
We’ve known for years about the importance of a positive candidate experience, but time and time again, companies of all sizes, all around the world, spectacularly fail in protecting their brand during each and every hiring and recruitment process.
I'll share some examples with you.
Consumer goods company with globally recognised household. Failed to deliver timely feedback and kept candidates waiting for weeks between interview stages with no explanation or apology. Candidates who made it through to “final” stages were left hanging and after repeated attempts to contact anyone within the company, finally assumed that the role had been filled or cancelled.
Result - candidates who have had a poor hiring experience and won't buy the products again AND will refuse to be considered for future roles AND who have been very vocal with their networks in sharing their bad experience (who in turn are likely to be deterred as future candidates, and deterred as customers given they have the luxury of product choices)
Market leading technology company. Engages 3 contingency recruitment agencies as determined by the global procurement department, to find candidates for the 1 role. The agency consultants were given job descriptions but no time to brief with the hiring leader. Each consultant was relatively inexperienced, clearly ill-informed, and they tripped over each other in sourcing candidates. Some of the candidates were contacted by 2 or all 3 from each agency and received mixed message. Given this was just one of the 40+ recruitment assignments that each consultant was working on through a “no placement, no fee” arrangement, they didn't expend effort on candidate engagement, and limited their search for talent to a very fast search on their databases. Somehow despite the muddle a hiring result was achieved for company client.
Result - candidates who been confused and have generally had a poor hiring experience and won't utilise the tech products again AND will refuse to be considered for future roles AND who have taken the trouble to share their bad experience with others (who are likely to be deterred as future customers and candidates also)
Fast growing pharma company in a highly competitive market for globally scarce, niche skilled "talent". Failed to offer a transparent two way information exchange as part of the interview process and actually over-sold their role remit and company culture in order to make a "star" hire. They wound up securing a professional who immediately upon starting, learnt that the role/culture/agenda/challenges were completely different to what had been described.
Result - candidate promptly left for a new job elsewhere AND will refuse to be considered for future roles AND who has taken the trouble to warn of their bad experience with others (who are likely to be deterred as future candidates also)
Spot the recurring themes?
Who should own management of the candidate experience?
Simply, everybody within your company who has any kind of involvement with the hiring process.
The business hiring leaders - being clear on what skills and experience they need plus what they will flex on, for keeping an open mind and finding reasons to make the hire work rather than a focus on ways for it to fail, for being on time, being attentive, hosting a fair interview, and providing constructive feedback quickly.
The administrators, for making sure meetings happen in a timely fashion and all communications are professional, helpful and accurate.
The HR team - who should have a helicopter view of what is going on and be quick to dive in to course-correct, for giving all stakeholders the tools and training they need, for ensuring compliance is met, employment offer details and paperwork are issued on demand, for holding people accountable.
The internal Talent Acquisition team and/or external recruitment partners - who should do everything just as well or better than all other stakeholders noted here.
If you're serious about protecting your external brand, and ensuring harmony between the internal reality and external perceptions, then take a fresh look at your hiring processes. If we all take the view that every candidate is a potential customer and/or brand ambassador for our companies, I suspect it will change the way a lot of us do our hiring.
Brand protection for employer clients is a non-negotiable “must do” for our firm. But over all of these years, I’ve only ever had 2 hiring leaders ask me if and how we would do this which makes me wonder if HR and/or recruiting leaders don’t care, don’t understand the vital link between branding and hiring, don’t think the vendor can add this value, or simply assume that all vendors will automatically take this care (and you only have to do a quick peruse of online comments regarding the recruitment industry and its lack of excellence for the candidate experience!) I suspect it is a mix of all factors, especially when I think about the hiring leaders who have been surprised but pleased to hear that we’ll “close out” any unsuccessful candidates (which begs the question - if we weren’t doing it, and the hiring leader hadn’t thought of doing it, how would candidates hear the news?)
World class benchmark for positive candidate experiences
By comparison, here’s an examples of a hiring leader who gets it right, every time. We’ll call him G, and we’ve been his sourcing and screening partner for many years. We have also co-interviewed with him so have observed his techniques first hand.
He starts his candidate interview meeting by giving an overview of the company – product lines, revenues, headcount, immediate business priorities and challenges. He then moves onto an overview of his team, reporting lines, strategic and operational priorities and challenges. And then he highlights the scope of the role being hired for and what skills are particularly important to him. He is incredibly transparent about any issues being faced. Setting the scene like this gives the candidate some context to the bigger picture. Candidates immediately buy-in to the credibility and knowledge of G because of the detail he shares. They feel like they are being setup to succeed in the interview and this, combined with G doing all the initial talking helps settle any candidate interview nerves.
8-10 minutes in and G is ready to start his questions. Note that timing. Too many hiring leaders wind up talking for most of the candidate meeting and are then bemused as to why they know nothing about the candidate. And the candidate feels cheated of their chance to “shine” and views the hiring leader as self-absorbed.
Interestingly, G chooses to ask only 5 well thought out scenario questions. He takes the view that he’d rather deeply understand how a candidate has/would handle a particular situation, than try and cover too many competencies on a superficial basis. He focuses only on the skills that are absolutely critical to the role being hired for. The quality of his simple questions allows candidates to demonstrate multiple competencies within their answers and G rightly figures that anything missed can be covered by other people involved in the hiring process.
“A tip if you’re planning multi stage interviews - one of the biggest frustrations of any candidate is being asked the same questions over and over again by different people in the organisation. The candidate will think you don’t trust them, are trying to catch them out, your leaders don’t share information and/or your company is disorganised”
Now, here’s where G really stands out. If the candidate goes off track, G is more than happy to step in and get the candidate back on course. If they give too little information G will keep asking questions to extract what he needs. And if they give too much information G will coach them on what is really relevant to him, which allows the candidate to understand his thinking and deliver a snappier answer to the next question. Again, candidates feel like he wants them to succeed rather than setting them up to fail.
G gives candidates the chance to ask their questions at the end of the meeting, and lets them know the timing for any next steps and when they can expect feedback given he likes to reflect after every meeting. He always shares a specific piece of positive feedback from each meeting though, and often provides some unsolicited advice on where a candidate could develop their career and/or technical knowledge.
The result – a simply fantastic candidate experience. Whilst they don’t know yet know whether they’re progressing or not they feel like they’ve been treated fairly and with professional respect. They view his interview style as synonymous with his leadership style and they want to work with him. (There have been no exceptions in the 14 years we’ve partnered with this leader) Interestingly, they see him as representative of the company culture and they want to be a part of it.
Finally, G does reflect and provides detailed and balanced feedback within 12 hours of every meeting, and sometimes earlier. Regardless of the outcome, candidates just love the simple courtesy of timeliness, decisiveness, and detailed reasoning. Subsequently, they are vocal advocates of G and the company, even when they aren't being progressed for the hire. G’s whole approach is a powerful exercise of positive branding, with no financial cost to the company. And we’e emotionally vested in finding the very best candidates for G, because the strength of the candidate experience, unequivocally reinforces our own company brand and values.
As a hiring leader do your sourcing partners have that same confidence in you or, as a recruiter do you have the same confidence in your clients when it comes to providing an awesome interaction? Get your hiring process right, and every candidate can have a fantastically positive experience, regardless of whether they're successful in securing an employment offer from your company. Happy candidates means happy brand ambassadors, and a competitive edge that we can all utilise in business today.
Finally, maximising the candidate experience needs to be an objective that every stakeholder in the hiring process buys into - a candidate who meets 5 respectful and inspiring folks and then is kept waiting by the 6th who proceeds to show indifference and lack of professional respect; results in a knock to all the good branding work done to date. This exception may well prove the difference between securing the best candidate, or not.
About the Author
As one of the founder leaders of our firm, Dawn has vast networks across the HR community, globally.