How to Recruit Talents using Employee Experience (Part 2: Hiring Talents)
How to make sure that our candidates go through a positive experience.
Imagine you already have an idea about what kind of attracting strategy that your division will use. You’ve understood your company’s strategy, you’ve identified the corporate’s culture, and you’ve defined your Employee Value Preposition that you want to use as a part of branding strategy. Now all you need is a pool of candidates that would send their resumes or CVs to your company, before you start to sort them one by one and pick the most appropriate one…right?
If you answered yes, then, you are fundamentally correct; that is what a typical hiring process looks like. However, we sometimes — oftentimes, even— neglect this process. You’ve heard the story: late or lengthy interview process, unclear “silent period” treatment, discriminative questions, and so on. In other words, we are giving a potential employee a negative candidate experience.
What is a Candidate Experience and Why is It so Important?
A candidate experience is every perception your candidate develops when interacting with your company’s recruiting process. When candidates discover your company and apply to any available job posting, they will develop certain perception, expectation, and reaction on your company — including how they are being handled during this recruiting process. Of course, positive experience will lead to them being satisfied with your company, and the same applies with negative experience. In fact, according to TalentLyft, 95 percents of candidates who experienced good candidates experience will apply again in the future to the same company given the opportunities.
Candidates are also more than willing to let their peers know about a company’s hiring experience. According to 2018 Talent Board North American Candidate Experience Research Report, 77 percents candidate will share their positive experience with their inner circle, and 55 percents will share their negative experience. The figure is lower with online sharing (61 percents for positive experience and 33 percents for negative experience), but nevertheless, it is still a big number. Some candidates will take it further; they will not only tell their circles about the bad experience, but they also will actively discourage others from applying to that company, practically diminishing its talent pipeline. Some will even stop buying products from certain company simply because they had a negative experience during a recruiting process.
As we can see, positive experiences will bring positive images, and they can enhance the possibility of other candidates getting attracted to a company. On the other hands, negative experiences will bring negative images, which will dispel potential talents from submitting their applications to our company. So, what does positive candidate experience look like?
Some Charateristics of Positive Candidate Experience
There are various opinions about what constitutes a positive — and negative — candidate experience. However, The 2018’s Candidate Experience Award Winners tend to excel in two aspects accross the overall attracting, applying, and hiring process: they put more effort in designing the hiring process and in providing a continous communication/feedback.
In the first factor, designing, companies that won Candidate Experience Winners give more emphasize to their brands and employee’s value prepositions in their job advertisements. Candidates want a clear insight of why people want to work in a company and what makes them choose to stay. This includes a glimpse of work culture and environment — and also what kind of people they will be working with.
Next, these companies put more understanding on how to make candidates easier to apply. As most of their candidates want ease and simplicity when applying for jobs, they invest in more recruitment channels, especially through mobile-friendly application. They also shorten the time of the whole hiring process and personalize the interaction with candidates.
Next, they give a more detailed agenda and brief to the related employers prior to the interview during the screening process. They provide a guide of what kind of interview processes or questions are acceptable, fair, and useful — and which ones that are not.
The next factor, clear communication of the recruitment process, is cited to be one of the most defining factors of the positive candidate experience. Companies that won Candidate Experience Winners provide more explanations about what kind of steps will be conducted during a hiring process and how long it would take to complete the whole process. Candidates want to understand the progress of their application, and it is always helpful to provide an information about the hiring process. A clear and understandable guideline will help candidates develop a better grasp of what to expect in a hiring process (and for how long), which, in turn, will help them prepare for the process.
Next, these companies provide clear feedback about whether they will be moving on with certain candidates or not — especially after an interview — in a timely manner. They even tell the candidates about the next milestone of a process, and when they reject a candidate, they encourage him/her to apply for another job. This gives the candidates a sign whether they should give up on a company’s hiring process instead of being left hanging cluelessly.
Next, these companies also ask for feedbacks about the whole recruitment process to any willing candidate. They ask both their finalists and the candidates they rejected about the candidates’ overall perception and impression of the hiring process.
Now that we had gotten a basic understanding of several characteristics of positive candidate experience, here are some steps that you can do enhance your hiring process:
1. Know What You are Looking for from the Candidates and How to Get it
As I mentioned earlier, design and preparation is one key that can contribute to a positive candidate experience. Knowing what you are looking for from the candidate—or the requirement for a job — is crucial when designing a hiring process. Now, if your companies are like most other companies, you must have possesed a job description of each job at your disposal. A well-written job description can help you develop what kind of hiring methods are required to assess a candidate’s knowledge and skills.
Google, for example, does not only seek for a candidate’s specific technical skill, but also their cognitive ability, their leadership skill, and their “googlines” — or whether they share similar values with the company. Every company has its own organization-wide requirements, division-wide requirements, and position-wide requirements. Identify those important requirements and build the appropriate methods to assess them.
One of the most popular methods of assessing candidate’s skill is by doing job interview. This is also one of the most defining — if not the most defining — moment when a candidate evaluates their future employer. On-site interview provides an opportunity for a candidate to experience how their future’s workplace would look like, and a negative experience might make them disinterested with the upcoming hiring step.
One way to make sure that a candidate experiences a good interview is by preparing it beforehand and by creating a structured interview. This is also what is done at and recommended by Google; namely, the interviewers ask the similar questions for different candidates and rate them using a standardized rubric or matrix. The questions asked should consist of two elements: behavioral questions, which focus on a candidate’s past experience in dealing with certain situations, and hypothetical questions, which focus on a candidate’s future ability in adjusting to potential conditions.
In addition to interviews, recruiters can also use various assessment tools, such as reference check, cognitive test, personality test, and work-sample test. However, Harvard Business Essential’s Hiring and Keeping the Best People suggested to be cautious when using psychological measurements. Inappropriate testing selection or procedure might result in misleading decisions — or even potential lawsuit. If the tests are used appropriately, however, they may predict success on the job and minimize bias more than any other measurement method. It is recommended to make use of multiple tests and avoid relying on the tests alone in making a hiring decision.
2. Provide Clear Information about the Job and the Hiring Process — and Ask for One
Maintaining open communication with potential candidates is a touchy subject. One one side, letting candidates know about the progress of their hiring process will increase their positive experience, but on the other side, recruiters and organizations are more often than not get both of their hands tied to notify candidates about the result of their interview. This might lead to a rising phenomenon known as “ghosting”, where recruiters decided not to provide a feedback or notification of the hiring result to the candidates. (It worked both way, as a lot of candidates are now ghosting the recruiters).
Despite the potential benefit of providing clear information, survey shows that only a few organizations provide appropriate feedback during screening process. About 57.8 percents of candidates receive no feedback after the screening and interviewing stage,and 43.9 percents receive no feedback after being rejected during the screening and
interviewing stage. The reasons vary: the higher-ups have more urgent tasks to tackle, the hiring managers require longer time to decide, or the recruiters are simply preparing a reserve just in case the main finalist refuses the offer.
Let us see one example of a company that did it right: Johnson & Johnson. This medical goods company acknowledged the importance of clear communication during hiring process, so they launched a new Applicants Tracking System that enables candidates to monitor their progress throughout the recruitment process. According to J&J, this decision will “reduce the chances that anyone gets lost in the shuffle [of the recruiting process] , while showing off J&J ‘s technology as the company recruits against (and from) tech titans like Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn”, which, hopefully, will become its distinct competitiveness. They also hired consumer marketers, website designers, and even psychologists — all to make sure that candidates can understand and track their position in the hiring process.
A system-wide solution is always nice, but we know that not all companies — most even — have the available resources to do so. However, you do not need to be discouraged; there are several approaches that you can examine to make your candidate experience better. One of them is by making use of various available pre-made e-mail templates to give candidates feedback. These follow-up e-mail templates for Linked In, for example, give you multiple templates that you can save and use for different occasions, such as when you’re still considering a candidate, extending the role, or rejecting the candidate. Pair it with a reminder or notification so that you are less likely to forget. Even a simple step like that will leave a positive taste to your candidates.
In addition to giving candidates feedback, you can also ask for their feedback pertaining your hiring process. Asking candidates for feedback will make them feel that their opinion is important to your company, and thus make them feel more involved. It also can be used as a tool to enhance your hiring practice in the future.
3. Encourage Mutual Trust with Candidates through a Fair and Accountable Transactional Contract
Perceived fairness is amongst the key differentiator in a candidate experience, and it especially becomes more important when you are making an offer to your candidates. This is because, during this period, both you and the candidates are engaging in what Tracey Maylett called on her book Employee Experience a “transactional contract”, or “the mutually accepted, reciprocal, and explicit agreement between two or more parties that defines the basic operating terms of the relationship”. Transactional contract requires mutual trust, fairness, and equality between two parties, and that would mean avoiding vagueness or anything that can be interpreted as a hidden agenda.When creating a transactional contract, you will take various things into consideration, especially the ones that have to on with legal aspect.
Making sure that your contract does not have anything against the law is a good start, as the law is usually made to ensure that employees are treated fairly and equally. If your contract has a lot of legal loopholes, or if it becomes so vague that there are a lot of potential breaches, then employees might not develop trust with your company. Having a legal team or someone with a knowledge in national Labor Act will minimize potential violation in the future.
Final Note
When we want to apply employee experience for the recruiting — especially hiring — process we should focus on the positive candidate experience. Candidates who are well-informed and feel that they are treated fairly might be more likely to develop positive experience. Hiring campaign and process is famous for its up and down, but, eventually, having a well-designed and well-prepared campaign will pay off.
Written by Herjuno Tisnoaji for Human Talent. This article is part of the Employee Experience series that is be published periodically at Human Talent.
This is the second part of my entry of employee experience. If you would like to read the first part, please visit the link below
