Candidate Experience matters, it can directly hit your bottom line.It has never been easier for individuals to have a voice. Social media, blogging and review sites are now widely used across all industries. Whole businesses have been built upon great reviews, while others have almost been ruined by poor experiences being shared. While this has now become commonplace in consumer markets, changing buying behaviours forever, the recruitment industry is only just starting to fully understand how this can affect the candidate space. The cost of a poor customer experience is often very clear and tangible - loss of sales - but a negative candidate experience is often harder to quantify. However, if you dig a little a worrying picture starts to surface.Let’s take a look at the ways poor Candidate Experience affects your business.
Sharing experiences has become the norm. Taking to sites like Tripadvisor for travel, Feefo for products and Glassdoor for workplace reviews has become commonplace. More importantly, nowadays job seekers actively search for reviews in the workplace, ensuring you company culture is a good fit. Negative reviews about your hiring process and candidate experience on these social platforms will adversely affect your employer brand. 34% of job seekers with a bad candidate experience will share it online. Each negative candidate experience your company creates has a ripple effect in the market. Candidates are talking to their friends, family, and network about their personal experience with your company.
Remember that in the case of inhouse recruitment, candidates could be your customers and in staffing, they are your biggest source of referrals. 50% of people would not buy a company's product if they received a bad candidate experience, so a poor hiring process can be a costly mistake. If you don't make sure your candidates have a pleasant experience, there will be serious consequences to your bottom line. Virgin Media, a mobile phone company in the UK made a review of the Rejected Candidate Surveys to find out the correlation between candidate experience and their revenues. The company was shocked to explore how many would cancel their Virgin mobile subscription when they were rejected for a job. It turned out that 18% of these were Virgin customers and two-thirds claimed that they would move to another provider. They worked out that this could cost the company $5.4 million in revenue!
We all know that just because someone isn't a fit for one role, it doesn't mean they can't be suitable elsewhere. However, it stands to reason, if candidates have negative candidate experience, they are less likely to re-apply for another role with that company. In fact according to Career Builder, 42% of job seekers because of bad experiences may decide to steer clear of your future job opportunities. On the other hand, 64% of candidates that had a good experience would apply again. Hence, you should be paying attention to providing a positive candidate experience; otherwise, there are risks that you might lose your top talent.
The cost of your hiring process can be looked at in a number of ways: job posting, staff time to search, agency support, lost time of not having someone in the role, etc. So ensuring the shortest time to hire is important for both businesses and agencies alike. A good candidate reputation can help reduce this greatly. If potential candidates avoid the company, then it reduces the talent pool available to you.
As the time to hire increases, so does the pressure to fill roles. Should this be the case, inevitably the pressure will lead to rushed hires and the less qualified candidates being placed in a role. The cost of a wrong hire could be huge to a business (cost or training, less productive, less productive team, wages and ultimately re-hiring). So much so Calco estimated it could be up to £132,000. Also, it is time-consuming. Why? You’ll need to take the time to set up the entire hiring process again to attract the right candidate.The Candidate Experience is something that is often hard to equate because so many of the costs are not easy to calculate, but it clear that they are very real. The candidate experience can be directly related to business success, much like customer experience and staff experience. Successful businesses will take all three of these areas seriously and in part two of this blog we will explore how you can do this to good effect. Once you've come round to thinking about the negative impact of poor Candidate Experience - time to consider the ROI positive impact of good Candidate Experience.
