How a poor candidate experience can harm your brand

With a lot of emphasis focused on getting the right people for the role, the risk of what a poor applicant experience can do to a brand is often overlooked.

This specifically includes applicants who are unsuccessful at any stage of the process.

A candidate’s experience through the hiring experience, whether successful or not, will impact the brand of an organisation. If it is a positive experience, even if the candidate doesn’t ever move through to any stage of the application, the perception of the brand that person may have would most likely stay intact. A brand can suffer commercial damage if they give applicants a bad experience, through reputation in the least, to losing a customer in that person and the potential revenue of that.

Smaller brands with occasional roles to fill may not feel this as much if it’s a single person, happening more sporadically. However, given enough roles to be filled and a large enough number of applicants with a poor experience, the number of people (who are also potential clients lost) grows, as does that figure in lost revenue.

How can you spot it in your own business?

Do your job advertisements talk about being a people-centric organisation, only then to say down the bottom “only successful applicants will be contacted”?

This is a great values check on the operations of your organisation. It’s impossible to be truly people-centric while having policies that demonstrates disrespect to those who are applying to work there.

Some hesitancy in taking action on this might be due to the concern of any negative feedback on staff contacting unsuccessful applicants, both from a mental health and liability perspective. If you have a fair, measured and objective assessment, the backlash should already be minimised in the process of informing someone they’re not progressing in the hiring process this time.

Steve Gard from The Circle Back Initiative recommends the use of tech solutions to make applicant feedback and updates more efficient, especially in the case of higher volumes.

“If someone doesn’t get past the initial screening, it can be an email set up through an automated system. But if you meet a candidate, either live video, Zoom or face-to-face, they should get a call with that feedback and outcome.”

With the availability of automation tools around, it’s easier than ever.

The argument made here is that giving a positive candidate experience to all applicants is the most ethical thing to strive for. Yet, if nothing else motivates you enough, let the optics of your brand lead you to it.

We have a whole podcast episode on this topic, with special guest Steve Gard from The Circle Back Initiative. Have a listen here.