A personal commitment to share more about our journey toward reinventing recruitment

Last year, I wrote an article about our mission to take a more consumer-centric approach to recruiting at Johnson & Johnson and then a follow-up piece to provide an update on our progress.

I feel honored (and a little overwhelmed!) by the level of response: more than 1,000 likes, 346 shares, 211 comments… and still counting.

It seems we all agree, from both personal experience and from talking to those around us, that the recruiting process is based on principles that date back to the 1980s and it’s long overdue for some re-imagination. There are frustrations on both sides – recruiter and candidate.

Your feedback and responses have been so helpful and encouraging that I’ve decided to dedicate more time this year to sharing how we’re revamping our recruiting function here at J&J. 

As many of you will appreciate, driving change at this scale (we fill approx. 20,000 positions every year) takes time but I’ll share with you what we’re discussing as a leadership team, what our latest initiatives are and fill you in on our successes and failures. 

At the start of 2017, we're putting more structure around pro-actively collecting feedback from candidates throughout the hiring process. And, from a personal perspective, these are the three areas that are front of mind (and purpose) for me:

Listening builds trust

Collecting feedback sounds simple but it’s a critical first step. Plus, we’re going about it in a slightly different way to ensure what we learn is actionable and relevant.

This quarter, all J&J candidates around the world will receive short surveys at key stages throughout the hiring process. These surveys ask for ‘in the moment’ feedback about the experience so far, enabling us to course-correct. The key point being that changes can take place while someone is still within the process. 

If you’ve applied to one of our open positions, or are considering doing so, please take a few minutes to share your feedback. This isn’t just words. I’m ensuring that every survey response gets read.

What gets measured gets done

We’ve decided to measure our candidate experience through a Net Promoter Score (NPS). Although the metric has its flaws, it’s one way for us to understand how people evaluate their J&J experience at the end of the process (whether the outcome is positive or not). We hope that by providing our recruiters with their own NPS scores, they’ll gain real-time insight into how to refine their approach and provide an even better candidate experience.

Once we have a few months of data under our belt, I’ll share our initial insights with you. 

Coming soon, more transparency… 

We’ve decided to build a transparency app to provide candidates with more control and better communication throughout the recruitment process. Our aim is to clearly communicate what the steps are in the J&J process and how to best prepare for what comes next.

For anyone that shares my passion for bringing more transparency to the recruiting process, I’d love to get your thoughts on critical use cases and functionality while it’s still in development.

I’d also love to get your feedback once I have something more concrete to share.

Some skin in the game

Creating an experience that feels right for everyone is almost impossible, especially when it comes to something as personal as applying for a new job. However, if you’ve been disappointed by our candidate experience I’d really like to hear from you directly, and I’ll do my best to respond.

You can email me or connect with me through LinkedIn or Twitter. Although I’d love to hear from you whenever, the earlier you contact me the greater the likelihood that we can course-correct – especially if you’re currently going through our recruiting process. 

A few caveats

To make sure I have time to learn from your feedback and respond to as many people as possible, I need to try to keep this manageable. So, here’s some things to consider before you get in touch:

Help me help you: the more specific you are the easier it is for me to help you. Let me know what job you’ve applied to and which recruiter (if any) you’re in contact with.

Do some research: I get a lot of requests to provide feedback on resumes and although I’d love to help individually there are some great resume writing websites out there that you can learn from. I like the advice here and there’s a wealth of useful info here. (I might write something about my own preferences later this month.)If you’re interested in working for J&J but don’t know where you best fit, please research our recruiters on LinkedIn and reach out to them for advice.

Lastly, I’m dedicating time every day this year to personally connect with candidates in our process, which I hope will help a few. I also hope it signals how serious we are about re-imagining recruiting at J&J.

It’s a journey that will take time but I hope to have you on our side.

Happy 2017!