Job Applicants Are Your Customers
The top 5 things your candidates think you should fix in your recruiting process
The Candidate Experience
Companies are all competing for top talent, and as a company focused on helping companies recruit effectively, Pomello knows how hard this can be. That said, it’s easy for companies to forget the definition of recruiting.
Re·cruit (/rəˈkro͞ot/) — to persuade someone to do or assist in doing something.
So how are we doing with this persuasion concept? I’d argue that most employers are doing a pretty poor job at creating a good experience for their job applicants. Too often we talk about recruiting and hiring as if candidates are just resources moving through a pipeline. We extract information at each step of the way, discarding some applicants and keeping others. It’s all about us, what we need a candidate to do in this job, and how we expect them to demonstrate to us that they are qualified, motivated, and excited about this opportunity. The focus isn’t on the candidate experience, and it shows.
In focusing on ourselves (the employers) too much, we lose track of the fact that candidates are real live people with hopes and dreams and lives of fundamental importance. When you are recruiting, job applicants are your customers, and how you treat them matters, regardless of whether you hire them or not.
At Pomello, we interact with not just our own job applicants, but candidates for jobs at companies large and small. What we’ve found in our conversations with job applicants is that employers are failing their customers — the job applicants — during the recruiting process in several fundamental ways. Here are our top 5 things for companies to fix when structuring their applicant experience:
1. The process takes way too long — commit to and communicate a quick process for every candidate
As a job applicant, managing multiple months-long processes, is exhausting, demoralizing, and confusing. A candidate might start out really excited about a company, but even the most sincere enthusiasm wanes when it feels like the company isn’t that interested or engaged.
Of the candidates that you are interviewing assume that at least a couple are going to be fantastic hires. Your goal as a company is to identify those people and persuade them to join your company before they are snagged by another company or resigned back to the status quo of their current job. When you drag out your recruiting process, you are allowing some of your best candidates to go elsewhere. Worse, you are ensuring that everyone who interviews with you is going to complain about this when their friends ask what their experience was like.
Your total process should ideally take 2–3 weeks to get to a decision for every candidate. This requires the commitment of everyone involved in the hiring process: recruiters, hiring managers, interviewers. Everyone needs to feel like this is an essential part of their job. If everyone projects excellence during the recruiting process, your company will attract excellence.
2. Interviewers are often lazy — make interview feedback about candidate performance, not the resume
When everyone has a say in the job requirements for an open position you end up with a search for a person who does not exist (see earlier article on this topic). Interview feedback should be about how a candidate did in the actual interview, not a review of their resume. Unfortunately, what’s tempting to do as an interviewer is the following: Go into the interview unprepared and fail to take notes. When your manager asks for your feedback, you pull out their resume and say something like, ‘I worry they don’t have enough experience.’
The only person who should have a say over specific requirements for a position is the hiring manager. If you are interviewing someone who is going to be dinged for not having the right experience, it seems self-evident that you’ve already made a mistake. I’d even go further and suggest that interviewers not be given access to a full resume. Instead, they should know only enough to ask the relevant questions. This ensures that the resume isn’t used as a crutch. Interviewers should be held accountable for specific feedback on the qualities you look for in an interview e.g. logical thinking, cool under pressure, empathy etc.
3. Last minute additions to your process are an ambush — say what you do, and do what you say
We can’t count the number of times candidates have told us they’ve been surprised by an addition to the recruiting process midway through. In our first fix, we highlighted the need to have an efficient and timely process and that it be communicated upfront. Adding interviewers last minute or not telling a candidate if and when they might need to complete a work sample, violate both of these principles. If you don’t treat their time as valuable, candidates will assume that you might not treat their time well as an employee.
Job applicants should be given an overview of the various steps and timing of the recruiting process once they have made it to a phonescreen. They should always know what the next step is, and when they should expect to hear whether they made it.
4. Applicants don’t get good feedback — help candidates understand where they can improve
Candidates who make it to the interview stage are often left wondering why they weren’t hired. Employers often fall back on generic feedback if any. Phrases like, ‘we decided to go with someone who has more direct experience in this industry,’ are pervasive. Now, this may actually be why you didn’t hire someone, but it is not particularly relevant to the candidate to hear that someone is more experienced than they are.
Instead of the above description, the recruiter could instead say something like, ‘we felt that your limited experience in this industry would be challenging with regard to X, Y, and Z aspects of this role.’ This gives candidates valuable information, which they will appreciate. It’s also a useful exercise to coherently articulate why someone shouldn’t be hired, because it will clarify what you are looking for from the person you eventually do hire.
5. Rejection calls are often delayed —just do it
Rejection calls take about 3 minutes total. But because they are not a priority for recruiters and hiring managers, they are usually delayed. For candidates sending multiple emails to schedule a 3-minute call feels like an elaborate prelude to a pretty big let down. These candidates walk away from your recruiting process with a highly negative impression of your company.
Just like the beginning of your recruiting process is about commitment and excellence, the end should be as well. Never delay a rejection call, make time for it whenever the candidate is available (afterall it doesn’t take long). Candidates should feel that you gave them your full consideration and attention. If you accomplish this, even rejected candidates will become a powerful recruiting tool.
You Can’t Manage What You Don’t Measure
Before changing your recruiting process, we suggest surveying a significant sample of recent candidates. Think of this as a baseline for creating a better applicant experience. The survey can be very short — Pomello’s is only 3 questions. We want to understand whether a company successfully targeted the right candidates, communicated their process well, and if the candidate came away from the experience with a positive impression.
You can use the data you gather to create your recruiting NPS score. As you implement changes to your recruiting process you can track how your NPS score changes over time to see your progress.
Say hello@pomello.com to find out more about your recruiting NPS
