The Candidate Experience
JobAdder’s Breakfast Event yesterday morning was GREAT! It was particularly interesting to hear the views on both Agency and Internal Candidate Experience from four special guest speakers: Kat Docherty from Mayday Recruitment, Luke Shepherd from HubSpot, Karine Blanchard from AirCall and Annie Lam from Rezdy.
Here’s a few points I took from the discussion..
Every Engagement Counts
From the initial phone screen, right the way through to your Post Placement follow up call 6 months on, every engagement with your candidate is an opportunity to amplify your business in today’s competitive market. Karine Blanchard from AirCall emphasizes that throughout the entire recruitment cycle, your candidate is making a decision on your business just as much as you are making a decision about hiring them.
Transparency Is Key
HubSpot’s Lead ANZ Recruiter, Luke Shepherd, recommends transparency at all stages of the interview process, and the Interview Preparation stage in particular was used as an example to highlight the importance of transparency.
Interviewing can be extremely stressful and nerve wracking for candidates, especially if it’s an interview for their dream role… but even more so if a spontaneous sales scenario, or an on-the-spot pretend client call is thrown into the mix with no heads up!
These type of interview methods, often used in Agency-Recruitment or Sales assessments are of course designed to lure people out of their comfort zone, but letting a candidate know what to expect in advance will allow them to fully prepare so that they can perform to the best of their ability. You don’t have to give away the exact scenario details (that would be too easy!) but a kind, prior warning that this will be included will make a world of difference.
Feedback Is A Gift
Giving bad feedback is never easy, and as recruiters, we sometimes hide behind what Luke from HubSpot would refer to as ‘a common blanket response,’ to protect our candidate’s feelings.
So let’s just say you did fully prepare your candidates for the upcoming sales scenario, but they buckled to the ground when you asked them to sell you a bouquet of flowers. How should you relay the news without hurting their feelings? No, not by sugar coating their failure, but feedback with transparency! The good, the bad and the ugly, “warts and all.” Providing detailed feedback to your candidate including areas for improvement will help them to grow and develop their interview skills for future opportunities. In the words of Annie Lam (People and Culture, Rezdy) – “Feedback is a gift!”
Care Factor At All Times
Kat Docherty, Co-Founder of Mayday Recruitment (proud winners of the Recruitment Insider Award 2019) expresses that “Candidates are the forefront of our Business,” and emphasizes that “care factor” at all times is the way to give a stellar candidate experience. In Kat’s experience, providing timeframes and managing expectations for call backs, application response, final decisions (etc) and even giving back to candidates in the form of blog posts and fun competitions are things that contribute to the care factor that differentiates the Mayday Candidate Experience!
But how do we go about measuring ‘Candidate Experience?’ Mayday measure both candidate and client experience using Recruitment Insider software. Kat explains there is no better feeling than receiving 15 glowing testimonials about her Consultants. On the odd occasion, when an unsatisfactory review hits Kat’s inbox, she jumps straight onto it, using it as a tool to implement improvements. Similarly, Luke from HubSpot is all about ongoing developments to the candidate experience. Throughout the interview process, he asks feedback probing questions to find out how the candidate is feeling.
I think we can all agree that nailing the ‘Candidate Experience’ in today’s competitive Recruitment market is crucial for landing top talent.
How do you add value to your Candidate Experience?
