What’s the recruitment industry saying about Candidate Experience?
In our partner Bullhorn’s 2018 report on Staffing and Recruiting Trends there are two very interesting findings with implications for CandE. Among the HR and recruitment specialists surveyed:- The talent shortage ranks as the #1 challenge for staffing professionals in 2018.
- Candidate referrals rank as the #1 source of high-quality candidates.
Whose responsibility is Candidate Experience?
The Bullhorn report also raised a crucial question relating to responsibility. Who is responsible for the way your candidates experience the hiring process? The jury is out. Forty-eight percent said individual recruiters are responsible, and 45 percent say it’s a shared responsibility. Bullhorn said they side with the 45, arguing that “delivering a truly rewarding Candidate Experience is something the whole firm contributes to, regardless of who’s on the front lines with candidates.” Here at Starred, we’d tend to agree. What’s interesting to note here is that if there’s no clear consensus on who is responsible for Candidate Experience, the risk of fingerpointing becomes high. Improving Candidate Experience cannot start and end with the one person a candidate is familiar with. In consumer industries, the idea of measuring and improving Customer Experience is already years ahead. Using metrics such as Net Promoter Score and Customer Effort Score, and then finding the drivers of that score, allows for data-driven improvement. Feedback is essential to know if you’re on the right track with your customers. Recruiters need to catch up. A solo recruiter can’t implement a firm-wide feedback solution that benchmarks candidate satisfaction (and also client satisfaction!).Making a success of Candidate Experience: being systematic
Recruiters need to be systematic to find out what’s going right and wrong in their Candidate Experience. Get feedback and make sure it’s automated. All you need to do is ask – which applicant in your funnel worth their salt isn’t going to take the opportunity to respond when asked for their opinion? They want a job! They’ve taken the time and effort to apply and go through your process. There’s no need to run giant surveys and dangle Amazon gift vouchers in front of your candidate. Feedback can be bite-sized and directly relevant to Candidate Experience at any particular stage. The insights you’ll earn will tell you in whose shop the improvements need to be made. That way you’ll avoid finger-pointing – if Candidate Experience is as serious an undertaking as all the reports say, and the business impact of not acting on it is as costly as the Virgin case paints it, then there’s only one way forward: turn candidate opinion into data and act on it. One of our clients Altus Staffing – a successful recruitment company – now runs training for their consultants based on feedback data. This way trainings can be hyper-specific to an individual recruiter and how they can improve Candidate Experience. Smart thinking. What’s your opinion on this? Where does the buck stop with Candidate Experience? What are the Recruitment Trends going to show next year?Read more about Candidate Experience on Starred: Why feedback is the gamechanger in building a great Candidate Journey How to apply NPS to Candidate Experience