June 2018
A quick recap of what’s trending in the Candidate and Employee Experience world.
How Chatbots are Reshaping Online Experiences
Just as we enjoy the instantaneity chatbots offer us in our personal consumer interactions, so do candidates with your recruiting processes. Your online experience to find and engage top talent needs to match the way candidates prefer to interact with your brand and this could mean implementing a chatbot. This isn't just about products and services, it's about hiring the best talent when and where they want to engage, during their application process, on your career site or even your social media channels. Consumers want to be able to use chatbots to surface information and get answers quickly and easily...so do your candidates. And if a chatbot doesn’t have all the answers, they would like it to be able to connect them with a human who can. Read the full 2018 State of Chatbots Report. While the research is geared towards consumers, you will easily see how it maps to your candidate experience as well.
The Far-Reaching Impact of Candidate Experience
The Research team at IBM's Smarter Workforce Institute put together another great report that talks about the need for employers to no longer consider candidate experience a "nice to have" initiative inside their Talent practices. They explored the candidate experience of more than 7,000 recent job applicants to put together their findings on the importance of candidate experience not only in terms of hiring outcomes, but also with respect to employer reputation and potential sales. You can download the full report here. A few key takeaways include:
- Regardless of whether they get a job offer, applicants who are satisfied with their candidate experience are more than twice as likely to recommend the hiring organization to others, compared with those who were not satisfied (62 percent vs. 28 percent)
- People who are satisfied with their candidate experiences are 38 percent more likely to accept a job offer
- Experiences are amplified: the majority of candidates (over 60 percent) talk about their experiences with friends and family
- Candidates who are satisfied with their experience are twice as likely to become a customer of the hiring organization compared to unsatisfied candidates (53 percent vs. 25 percent)
Make Your Candidate Experience Mobile Friendly
Consider the fact that 200 of the Fortune 500 still don't provide the capacity for candidates to apply from their mobile devices. From a marketing perspective, any company that doesn't allow purchases via mobile would likely go out of business. The talent market is at a 50-year low and the onus is on the company to sell their organization. Start with making it easy to apply, when and where candidates are looking...and the research shows that's likely on their smartphone, even more so with Millennials. Read the full Forbes article to better understand why Recruiting should adopt a marketing mindset when it comes to candidate experience.
Calculating the Cost of Your Candidate Experience to Your Bottom Line
Think you might have some candidate frustration in your process? Most of us do, and being perfect isn't possible as you are rejecting the majority of those that apply. But you can do it in a way that doesn't damage your brand or your business. Thanks to the team at HireRight, they've put together an easy Candidate Resentment Calculator (in partnership with The Talent Board) to help you pinpoint exactly what your candidate experience may be costing your company. It's a great way to get additional budget to focus on tools and initiatives to increase your candidate experience satisfaction -- and a great way to communicate the numbers to your CEO to take notice. You'll likely need to work with your CFO or CMO to get some of the figures, but it will give you insight into the figures to justify your initiatives. Many will see that doing nothing ends up being a high price to pay for most organizations.
Finding the Magic Number of Interviews to Increase Candidate Experience Satisfaction
Another critical measure in your candidate experience journey is your interview process. Understanding how it impacts your brand with each candidate interaction is key to your reputation. Nothing is more disappointing or frustrating to the candidate then to invest time in doing 4-5 interviews only to hear nothing back. Even worse, how about 12? Google's original hiring policy was to have 12 interviews per candidate which not only meant hundreds of hours for Google employees, but a huge impact on their candidate experience. The Google People Analytics team conducted a deep dive analysis to validate the success of this policy. They now have the rule of four. Do you know your magic number to predict success in your organization?
Shawna Berthold
Co-founder and EVP of Marketing & Operations
