Candidate Experience – the good, the bad and the getting better (Part Two)

In Part One I talked about what candidate experience actually is and the impact this can have on a business – positively and negatively. Here in Part Two I throw some ideas around on what constitutes a bad and good candidate experience. I’ll also talk about how we can make it better.

What is a bad candidate experience?

With anything that has no concrete definition, there are different elements that make up what a bad candidate experience looks like. I think it ultimately boils down to the attitude where a candidate is seen as a commodity. In other words, where the process is a binary transaction rather than a concerted step to invest in an individual to grow within your company. This results in a candidate feeling they’re a skillset or a product rather than a person.

There are many different touchpoints of candidate experience – the job description, application process, setting up a screening call, the screening call, the process of setting up an interview, the interview etc. – I won’t go into detail on each step of the process but the point remains the same across each step of the process.

The candidate needs to be engaged, informed and be told the truth.

Job descriptions/adverts are one of my favourite areas of discussion in the recruitment world and often the first part of a candidate’s journey when entering into a hiring process. Chances are if you get this horrendously wrong, the rest of the process probably won’t be great either. One of my pet peeves is around uninspiring job descriptions, where there’s a shopping list of requirements that a business needs and play a game of what I call ‘buzzword bingo’. I’m talking about things like ‘fast-growing’, ‘VC-backed’, ‘exciting’, ‘fast-moving’, ‘dynamic’… ad nauseam…

Job descriptions need to talk more about what it’s actually like at your business and what actually makes you stand out. Yes, you need to talk about your tech stack is or what industry experience would be relevant but talk about this in a way that it offers something to the prospective applicant – i.e. a person not an object. That’s before we even get to actually applying…. making it essential to include a cover letter, clunky systems where you have six pages of questions, you know the thing. Make this bit easy and your number of applications will increase. There was a study whereby 60% of job seekers didn’t finish off their application forms due to length or complexity. That is shocking!

Another thing I’ll highlight is something I think we’ve all been guilty of, myself included. That’s 'selective' good candidate experience. By that, I mean a candidate will receive a better experience in candidate-short markets rather than candidate-rich markets. For example when you’re dealing with a software engineer the stops will be pulled out because you know they’ll have lots of potential suitors. On the flipside with an entry-level sales role for example, candidates probably won’t get as good an experience because there’s an abundance of applicants.

It goes without saying that there needs to be a unifying experience regardless of deemed skill or the type of role.

What is exceptional candidate experience?

An exceptional candidate experience is difficult to define but I think it boils down to treating a candidate as a human – this involves transparency, efficiency and personalisation as much possible. Being realistic, you’re not going to be able to deliver a perfect experience every time – things happen. Illness, winning or losing a client or an unexpected resignation might put you off your stride or change a requirement. However, if you’re honest about it, that will go a long way to ironing out any frustration from being slower with progressing than anticipated or a role being put on hold for example.

For me, getting candidate experience right starts with having a clear understanding of what a business is looking to drive with a hire and getting all moving parts in sync (yes - this explains the NSYNC photo...). This includes job description, application form, phone screen, ensuring decision makers are aligned on what they’re looking for, looking ahead to holidays, releases, conferences or whatever the pressures may be.

By the time a candidate has had an initial call with a business, both parties should be aligned on whether it’s worth the time investment to meet face-to-face.

There’s been some interesting research on interviewing and the difference between doing it badly and well. According to LinkedIn, 83% of talent say a negative interview experience can change their mind about a role or company they once liked. On the flipside, 87% of talent say a positive interview experience can change their mind about a role or company they once doubted.

Therefore, if you can make sure your objectives from a hiring process are clear from the start it makes it so much easier to be transparent, objective and efficient. This applies to either advancing candidates through the stages or when you need to reject a candidate’s application at different stages of the hiring process.

What can we do to make it better?

Now the tough bit. We’re aware of what we’re doing wrong, what bad looks like and what your candidate experience should be, but now we need to put the time and (maybe) money to make this tangible. What I’m about to say is by no means exhaustive but hopefully provides some food for thought.

At the event I mentioned in 'part one' of these ramblings (Occupation People – Candidate Experience hosted by Zinc), Ben O’Mahony talked a great deal of sense around bottlenecks in the hiring process. If you have a bottleneck it will cause a delay in booking an interview, processing an offer, responding to an application, getting feedback to a candidate – i.e. all of things that can contribute towards a negative candidate experience.

These bottlenecks could be all manner of things. Ben used the example of only having a few spare hours of meeting room space to conduct interviews. He also mentioned that a key decision maker had only one or two hours a day spare to meet candidates. When you start looking at the numbers and ratios needed to successfully hire a candidate, you realise how much of an issue it is. You might need four people at final stage interview to be confident of securing a candidate. An interview might be an hour and half and if there’s only four hours of meeting room space or five hours of a manager’s diary time, you’ve got a problem.

Your solutions? Drag out the process (risking losing a candidate or providing a worse experience) or change the status quo (making your process more effective).

In short, identify what’s stopping you having a good candidate experience and work with the business to remove that barrier. It will make the rest easier.

Another key thing to have in mind is the difference between hiring velocity and hiring speed. As with many things I’ve talked about this is a big recruitment topic and deserves an article of its own. That said it’s important to understand the distinction. Hiring velocity (or time to hire) means understanding all the moving parts of a successful process and being able to work backwards to have a process that ensures that candidates have a positive experience. For example, you might be hiring five software engineers for your team with broadly similar skillsets and in theory it will make it easier… often this isn’t the case. To hire five candidates, and these are plucked out numbers, you might need to phone screen 30 people, interview 25 people to get 20 people to final stage. How much time is that going to take?!

In short, be realistic and prioritise quality over quantity. If you do that, you’ll make sure candidates get a more personalised process because you can commit more time to do that.

You may think on the face of that the following statement is paradoxical: “An increase in automation can help to increase personalisation in candidate experience”. In short, it’s not a paradox if done properly. Automation should be used to reduce the time spent on the more time-intensive and mundane tasks – calendar scheduling, room booking, update emails etc. – to enable more time to spend on the parts of a hiring process that make a difference which means a candidate feels they’ve had more of a personal experience.

Without going into too much depth (this is another topic all by itself), I’ll give an example of some work I did via Troi at Teamtailor. They build an ATS with a particular focus on candidate journey, experience and branding. One of their clever innovations is their emphasis on triggers throughout a hiring process. To give some context, a candidate can apply for a role and you receive an email telling you more about the company and then a follow up in a couple of days with a blog. Later on in the process when a manager wants to meet a candidate, this can be set up automatically so a candidate can pinpoint a diary slot that works both ways. Should a candidate be successful and accept an offer verbally, a trigger is set off to get the paperwork moving. It’s slick and removes the ‘lag time’ that can ruin a successful hiring process and, therefore, candidate experience.

There’s a plethora of tools you can purchase that can have a positive impact on your time commitments. Though, as with everything, a tool is only as good as the people using it. It won’t solve everything.

What it ultimately boils down to…

As I mentioned earlier, 60% of candidates who start an application process don’t bother completing it (because of how complicated it's been made). To be perfectly honest, I’ll take that ratio for people who started reading this article and stuck with it to the end….

To ‘The 40%’…

It’s been a common theme throughout my ramblings, but for me the whole idea of candidate experience boils down to the fact that, we’re all people. We’re not commodities, we’re not involved in a transaction, we’re people and we have lives so we need to be treated better. This needs to be at the forefront of any candidate experience process you have.