Improving the candidate experience
in recruiting
© Dr.
John Sullivan
www.drjohnsullivan.com

Topics I will cover today
1. Defining the “candidate experience” (CE)
2. Negative impacts if you get it wrong
3. Action steps to improve your candidate experience
2

A quick definition of…
“the candidate experience”?
3

A quick definition
A quick definition of “the candidate experience”
1. A candidate’s experience begins with their
researching the company and its jobs
2. It then continues through every “touch point” or
interaction during the recruiting process
3. It ends after the decision is made with their
lasting memory of the total experience
4. The output of the candidate experience is…how
applicants now act… as a result of their
perception of how well they were treated
4

The benchmark firms to study
Benchmark firms
1. Zappos
2. DaVita
3. Microsoft
4. Facebook
What makes their candidate experience good? 5

10 characteristics of a great candidate experience
1. Rapid response
2. Flexible to your needs, not rigid
3. They don’t waste your time (a real opening)
4. They are honest
5. They listen
6. No unpleasant surprises
7. They solicit feedback and change as a result of it
8. They keep you updated
9. They explain why
10.A WOW you will remember 6

Why should recruiters and their managers
care about “the candidate experience”?
7

If you were applying for a mortgage loan, how
would you react if…
The bank… lost your application
If you called and… no one called back
If you showed up for the loan interview and the
manager… had not even read your application
During the interview the manager was distracted
If at the end it the interview you asked how you did?
And the only answer was… will see and don’t call
us we’ll call you
If you were rejected and… they wouldn’t tell you
what you had to do to improve
8

Do people remember a bad candidate experience?
A quote… how long do they remember a bad one?
I had an interview 20 years ago that I have never
forgotten. I was then offered the job and I turned it
down because even at 19, I knew that if they couldn’t
treat me well during the interview, they wouldn’t
treat me well as an employee.
Caron Osberg on ERE.Net
They never forget… and they also tell others
9

Candidates deserve to be treated like customers
The candidate’s investments in a job search
1. Hours researching your company and job
2. Hours spent in preparing the resume
3. Hours associated with actually applying
4. Hours of preparation for the interview
5. Travel time and costs
6. Lost work hrs, $ and family time for interviews
10

What is your estimate of the dollar value
of an applicant’s investment?
“I estimate that the average professional candidate
voluntarily spends or invests more than $1,000
worth of their own time and money in preparing for
and participating in an organization’s hiring
process.
Given that level of investment, they deserve to be
treated like good customers.”
11

“Applicants are volunteers. They are
volunteering and investing their time when they
participate in your selection process.
Smart companies realize that fact upfront and
thus, they “treat them like volunteers” throughout
every step of the hiring process.”
12

The key lesson to learn is that…
when any applicant makes a heavy investment in
a selection process…
you must proportionately raise the level of
customer service and the “candidate
experience”
13

Why focus on the “candidate experience”?
What % of your prospects/ candidates… are also
current or potential customers?
14

Now shifting to the possible negative impacts
of the bad candidate experience
Why should an individual recruiter
care about the candidate experience?
15

Reasons why recruiters should care
Impacts on individual recruiters may include:
1. The #1 reason why candidates reject offers is…
2. The loss of top candidates - the greatest impact
will be on those in the highest demand, including
top performers, innovators and game changers
that can simply remain at their current job
3. Mid-process dropouts – frustrated individuals
that do not see their “job switch criteria” being
met or that encounter one of their “knockout
factors” will simply drop out (lie to you why?)
16

Reasons why recruiters should care
Impacts on individual recruiters may include:
4. A loss of return candidates – finalists that would
have been hired (if a super strong candidate wasn't
in the final candidate mix), will likely never
reapply. Neither will “soon to be qualified”
candidates that were rejected merely because they
didn’t have quite enough experience
5. The loss of applicants due to word-of-mouth –
friends, family and colleagues of a poorly treated
applicant/ candidate will now never apply
themselves 17

8 reasons why recruiters should care
Impacts on individual recruiters may include:
6. Loss of referrals – you will see an increased
recruiter workload when many employees will
simply stop” doing some of your work” (making
referrals) once they hear how their highly
regarded colleagues were treated
7. Higher interview drop out rates due to
scheduling – because employed candidates can’t
easily schedule during normal work hours
18

8 reasons why recruiters should care
Impacts on individual recruiters may include:
8. More hiring mistakes – confused, tired ,
surprised and frustrated applicants just don't
perform as well during interviews. Bad hires
means that later on you’ll just have to rehire
for the position
19

Now let’s shift to…
broader impacts on the entire recruiting function
20

Reasons why recruiting managers should care
10 impacts on the recruitment function:
1. Employer brand image damage – “others” now
own your employer brand image. They can
easily spread rumors, stories and
recommendations against working at your firm to
complete strangers on social networks and sites
like glassdoor.com
2. Higher agency fees –you may need to use more
agencies, because of their advanced capabilities
for attracting and selling top candidates 21

Reasons why recruiting managers should care
10 impacts on the recruitment function:
3. You’ll need more recruiters – lower application
and higher candidate dropout rates will require
you to spend more on recruiters
4. You will lose quality recruiters – recruiters will
be frustrated and the powerful relationships that
your top recruiters built will be lost the minute
that the candidate experiences the abusive process
5. Higher website drop rates – they aren’t
authentic or designed around candidate decision
criteria 22

Reasons why recruiting managers should care
10 impacts on the recruitment function:
6. Fewer global hires – a fragmented process may
confuse those that are unfamiliar with Canadian
hiring processes (it may offend some cultures)
7. Managers and recruiters will aim lower –
because they won't really know the reason why
they are not getting hires, they may mistakenly
assume that “there are just no quality candidates
out there” and settle for poor quality hires
23

Reasons why recruiting managers should care
10 impacts on the recruitment function:
8. Loss of career counselor referrals – career
counselors at schools may stop referring
9. Loss of recruiting budget – when executives
hear of your negative impacts, they’re likely to
reduce your recruiting budget
10.As the power shifts, you will be forced to change
24

And finally…
the business impacts of a bad candidate experience
25

The business case for the candidate experience
Potential revenue and sales losses include:
1. Angry people mean lost sales among themselves,
family, friends & their network (Especially in retail)
2. It may also indirectly hurt your product brand
3. If they work in our industry, it may hurt B2B
sales
4. Loss of a competitive advantage – losing top
candidates to competitors means that they get
more innovation & new products, but we do not
26

Reasons for improving the candidate experience
Two additional negative business impacts
5. Decreased retention rates - hearing friends and
colleagues “badmouth” their firm will also
reduce their loyalty. Some new hires may take the
job because they need it but decide the minute
that they accept that they will continue looking
and leave at the first opportunity
6. A weakened corporate culture – because the
recruiting process conflicts directly with a firm’s
values (i.e. integrity, transparency and honesty)
27

Having a bad candidate experience could soon get
much more painful with sidewiki >
28

What if anyone could add comments
to your displayed webpage (sidewiki)
29

During what steps of the recruiting process
do most candidate experience problems occur?
30

Where do most CE problems occur?
10 areas where most problems occur
1. Job postings/ descriptions – they are painfully
dull and are purposely not authentic (worse than the real job)
2. The corporate website – overly corporate, not
authentic and no chance to ask questions
3. Application receipt – no rapid personalized
acknowledgment of every application
4. Applicant inquiries – “don’t call us, we’ll call
you” attitude, applicant or candidate calls are not
returned and questions are not answered
31

Where do most CE problems occur?
10 areas where most problems occur
5. Build a relationship - CRM software isn’t used
to periodically communicate with top prospects
6. Interview scheduling – candidate inconvenience
is not weighed heavily enough
7. Pre-interview education – candidates are kept in
the dark about the process… including who they
will interview with and why and what specifically
you are processing them on
32

Where do most CE problems occur?
10 areas where most problems occur
8. Interviews – one-way communications, too many
interviews and the same questions repeated
9. Tracking their progress -- they can’t call or track
the status of their application on-line
10. After the decision – slow rejection notifications,
no honest follow-up on how they did… or how to
do better next time
33

And finally, some things to do
34

There are 3 possible CE outputs to aim for
3 possible results of a candidate experience include
1.You created employer brand ambassadors – the
ultimate output, at this level applicants and
candidates become your evangelists and a referral
source
2.You created neutrals – At this level, they say little
& soon forget the experience
3.You created lifelong enemies – At this level, they
become a lifelong enemy and they proactively
spread the word against you 35

Some action steps to consider
Goals - set and measure these goals
1. To make each one a brand ambassador
2. To build and measure trust levels
3. To excite them
4. To sell them by making hiring a sales process…
as well as a assessment process
5. To develop processes that are designed to calm
their nerves and then measure whether it worked36

Some action steps to consider
Strategic action steps
1. Make an individual accountable
2. Calculate the cost of offending candidates
3. Involve customer service in the design process
4. Identify all touch points and the problems at each
5. Learn CRM and its related software
6. Use the Internet/ technology to save time/ money
37

Some action steps to consider
More strategic action steps
7. Use “interview Friday” to speed up the process
8. Capture their e-mail early on… so that you can
ask pre-application drop-offs “why?”
9. Consider a small gift for top candidates (Checking acct)
10.Create an applicant “Bill of Rights”
11.Negotiate service-level agreements and
responsiveness timelines with managers
38

Some action steps to consider
Limit the # of applicants that you must be nice to
1. Proactively reduce the number of applicants
that have no real chance (list absolute
minimums, list knockout factors, list success rates
etc.)
2. Prioritize jobs and focus on the critical ones
3. Search your own customer database to identify
which individual applicants are also customers
39
and then prioritize them

Some action steps to consider
Understand and listen to the applicants
1. Ask candidates what they expect during the
hiring process (also tell them your expectations)
2. Ask them for their job acceptance criteria and
“deal breaker” factors, and then provide
information on each of them
3. Realize that global experiences must vary
4. Have a process for asking questions
5. Have a process for anonymous complaints
40

Some action steps to consider
Individual recruiter actions
1. Develop and use a CRM/ CE checklist
2. Educate applicants about the volume, so they
expect less (Google and time to fill)
3. Ask them periodically what they need “more of”
and “less of ”
4. Convince managers to interview faster
5. Convince managers to avoid “death by
interview”
6. Thank them
41

Some action steps to consider
Metrics and information-gathering
1. Search social media and the Internet to find
negative comments about the customer experience
2. Search Twitter/ Facebook 30 minutes after their
interview to find out what they are saying
3. Survey them 6 months later to identify problems
4. Use mystery shoppers to identify problems (Publix)
5. Track and widely distribute ranked “CE”
metrics and reward those that exceed their goals
6. Do postmortems on all failures
42

The key lesson to learn is that…
When any applicant makes a heavy investment
your selection process…
you must proportionately raise the level of
customer service and the quality of your
“candidate experience”
43

If you were applying for a mortgage loan, how
would you react if…
The bank… lost your application
If you called and… no one called back
If you showed up for the loan interview and the
manager… had not even read your application
During the interview the manager was distracted
If at the end it the interview you asked how you did?
And the only answer was… we will see but don’t
call us, we’ll call you
If you were rejected and… they wouldn’t tell you
what you had to do to improve
44

Candidates deserve to be… treated like customers
Because candidates invest a lot in a job search
They spend
 Hours researching your company and job
 Hours preparing their resume
 Hours associated with actually applying
 Hours of preparation for the interview
Plus… travel time and costs, lost work hrs/ pay
and missed family time for interviews
45

During what steps of the recruiting process
do most candidate experience problems occur?
46

Where do most CE problems occur?
Areas where most problems occur
1. Job postings/ descriptions – they are painfully
dull and are purposely not authentic (worse than the real job)
2. The corporate website – overly corporate, not
authentic and no chance to ask questions
3. Application receipt – no rapid personalized
acknowledgment of every application
4. Applicant inquiries – “don’t call us, we’ll call
you” attitude, applicant or candidate calls are not
returned and questions are not answered
47

Where do most CE problems occur?
10 areas where most problems occur
5.The relationship building process - CRM
software isn’t used to periodically communicate
and build trust with top prospects
6.Interview scheduling – candidate inconvenience is
not weighed heavily enough
7.Pre-interview education – candidates are kept in
the dark about the process… including who they
will interview with and why and what specifically
you are processing them on 48

Where do most CE problems occur?
10 areas where most problems occur
8. Interviews – one-way communications, too many
interviews and the same questions repeated
9. Tracking their progress -- they can’t call or track
the status of their application on-line
10. After the decision – slow rejection
notifications, no honest follow-up on how they
did… or how to do better next time
49