Candidate experience. Building Ikea furniture. And what they have in common.
People love Ikea. You go to the store floor and you see all the cool things you CAN do with your rooms. You see a bunch of great things you didn’t even know you COULD do with furniture. And you end up leaving with a shopping cart full of a bunch of things you didn’t even know you needed (and even possibly a monkey).
But people hate building Ikea furniture. There’s a bunch of bizarre parts and pieces. The instructions are often confusing. You need to bring your own tools. And it seems like an incredibly daunting task.
In a lot of ways, candidate experience is very similar to that of Ikea. You visit a bunch of careers pages and see all the cool things you can do with your candidate experience. You see a bunch of great things you didn’t even know you could do with your candidate experience. And you end up finding a bunch of ideas you didn’t even know you needed to add to your candidate experience.
Building the candidate experience is a lot like building Ikea furniture. There’s a bunch of bizarre parts and pieces. The instructions and steps are often confusing. You need to bring your own tools. And it seems like an incredibly daunting task.
But the truth is, once you get everything sorted, figure out the necessary steps, and start building it… It’s a breeze. Why? Because once you start tackling it piece by piece — it’s really not that hard to do. And what you’re left with is a solid piece of furniture. It does exactly what it is meant to do. It looks great. And you’ve got a sense of accomplishment and sore thumb after screwing in the 500th screw with a tiny Allen key.
Like Ikea furniture, once you figure out the steps, building a winning candidate experience is really not that difficult at all. Here are step-by-step instructions on how you can start to build yours.
Step One. Put yourself in your candidates shoes
This is the most important step in the entire process. Often times, the function of talent acquisition/recruitment can become so busy that it falls out of touch with what matters most. Connecting with candidates. Majority of language on careers pages are written like Ikea instructions. They make A LOT of sense to the person who wrote it. And make absolutely no sense to the person reading it.
You want to take a step back and really take a look at your candidate experience from an objective point of view. How smooth is your candidate experience? What are your candidates thinking throughout the process? Are there any hitches in the candidate experience? The best part. This information is so easy to obtain. Just ask some of your candidates, or ask other people in your organization who were recently hired. We’ve talked before about how important it is to build consistency throughout your candidate experience — so make sure you’re taking a deep dive into what you’re currently offering to your job seekers.
Step Two: Identify the pieces you already have
After you’ve taken a step back to look at all the moving parts of your candidate experience. It’s time to start organizing these pieces and doing a tally of what your current resources are. I would argue that there are very, very few companies who are doing candidate experience poorly. But I would also argue that almost every company can do candidate experience better.
Take an objective look at your candidate experience and identify what you currently have. Identify the language, context, multimedia, tech and workflow that work, and the pieces of language, context, multimedia, tech and workflow that don’t work. Set the great things aside and celebrate those. The key is to start looking build context and transparency for your candidates. Context and transparency are the secret ingredients that convert a passive job seeker into an engaged candidate.
Step Three. Identify what you need
The good thing about Ikea furniture is that you always know what the end goal should be because there’s a convenient line drawing of what your finished piece of furniture should look like. Your candidate experience is the exact same. However, often times you look at the final picture of the end goal without recognizing that you’ve already got 95% of the things necessary to get there.
This is where you should identify what you need to change or add to get to the end goal. Just like in step two, maybe you’ve got some of the tools that can speed up the process. Maybe it might be helpful to send a call for help and involve other members of your team or organization. It’s always useful to find organizational synergies that’ll positively impact your employee experience and your employer brand simultaneously!
Sometimes in your build you might find that there are missing pieces or tools — but there is always a solution. Think of your recruiting tech stack like a toolkit. If you’ve got a problem at any point in your candidate experience build — there’s a tool that’ll bring you closer to the line drawing of where you want to be.
Step Four. Find your tools
As I mentioned in the last step, technology is an absolute game changer when it comes to building Ikea furniture and also building candidate experience. Mechanical advantage and technical advantage are incredibly similar in that it only takes a few pieces of great tech to make a major impact on your candidate experience.
Need guidance in scripting the language in your employer brand? Check out Textio. Want to involve AI bots to help streamline the process? Check out what Johnson and Johnson is doing with Shine. Want to measure your candidate experience by providing your job seekers with a voice? Check out Net Promoter Score. Want to transform text-based job postings into interactive experiences? Check out what we’re doing here at Ruutly.
The point is, the Allen key that you’re provided with when you build Ikea furniture is not the only tool you have (or need) to use. Apply this same practice to your candidate experience build. There are countless tools that are purpose-built to fill whatever gap you might have.
Step Five. Build it
The final step is assembling the pieces, using your tools and building your candidate experience. The good news is, the instructions I’ve provided are far more clear, concise and easy to read than Ikea instructions. You’ve got four actionable steps that will help you build a great, consistent candidate experience and also a sturdy piece of Ikea furniture.
Step Six. Optional
Have your candidates build Ikea furniture in the interview.
