How is this not at the top of your company’s board level agenda?
One more Lost Customer!
Back in Feb this year I penned an article The Candidate Experience – What detail lies behind the Hype?” In this post I provided a simple definition of what ‘the candidate experience’ actually is:
“– A direct measurement scale relating to the value every candidate type receives from every possible touch point in the attraction, acquisition, and recruitment process -”
Although analysis should be taken across all interaction points companies have with people from all relevant talent communities so Talent and HR teams can make strategic and informed decisions on all communication, recruitment process, sourcing process, brand marketing actions they take.
It is still unbelievable to me how ill informed the majority of businesses are in relation to ‘the candidate experience’ and that they are as a result negatively impacting on their Employer Brand profiles and ultimately their revenues.
What is totally mind boggling; if they knew this stuff they would actually be contributing to the bottom line of the business and be able to prove it at Board Level!
This Infographic from MysteyApplicant.com can shed some light on it for you:
The Candidate Experience Infographic
- Almost half of every person who becomes a job applicant rates there experience as poor or worse!
- No one in this survey rated the experience as excellent
- More than 80% of these applicants will tell friends and family about this poor experience and nearly 65% will let the world know via social media
- Almost 40% of these applicants would not recommend the company to others and the same again would not buy a product or service from them as a result of their bad experience.
- All this negativity and only 11% of the companies surveyed actually ask candidates on what their experience was like!
And that’s just surveying prospect talent when their status is that of a Job Applicant; what about all the possible experiences when they are not job applicants? Like when they are passive, when they are unknown to you, when they are internal talent prospects… If you don’t know or care about the most obvious interaction data when a person is in your recruitment workflow, regarding their experience with the company and brand; how will you begin to measure across all the other touch points?
Just so it’s clear, let’s put this Infographic in to perspective: Example Company “Alpha Bravo Charlie Ltd” on average hires about 125 people a year of which half is growth and the other half attrition. They know that the average application per job is 30 applies. They sell a one off product and its average order value per unit is £350.00.
Using the survey stats you get the following:
- Over 12 months Alpha Bravo Charlie Ltd will have 3750 people apply for a job
- About 1875 of these will have a poor or worse application experience
- Nearly 1220 will tell the world about that bad experience on social media, if the social media stat is believed and you agree each person has about 250 social connections on average, the these applicants will get your poor experience and negative brand message to over 300,000 other people. (Are your talent communities big enough to handle this volume of negativity)
- 750 of these applicants will not recommend this company to anyone
- The company will lose out on an approximate £250,000 of potential sales revenue from those applicants who will never buy anything from the company
Think of this as though these people are not job applicants but consumers looking for a new car, they have choice, some cars are more ideal for some individuals and some for others. They all have the tools and resources to search and match one car option they like to others they are interested in. They will filter their list of prospect car purchases using a variety of criteria and hone it to a favourite list of say 10 to 30 cars. At this point they will do what? They will read every review written about each car – the current car owner/garage reputation, they may even do a registration check. So now think of them as prospect talent again and ask yourself, if like you, they choose a car in this way, what will your prospect talent be doing when they become active and seek a job /career change?
Conclusion
Many businesses are seeing an upturn in their business fortunes and many more are predicting a positive growth in their business plans running throughout 2014 and 2015. The mood is positive for growth across all the economic indicators. Finding new talent resource to support this growth is already being impacted on by changes in our population index, the speed of change in digital technology and communication. It’s not hard to see how these elements are seen as outside influencers that cause difficulty in hiring people. This is the same for all business and needs consideration but for goodness sake, you must focus on what you can control and influence. What is more in your scope of control than the experience you deliver to your talent prospects – even if you just start with the resourcing and application touch points you will be rewarded in ways that will directly impact the bottom line of your business. So what are you waiting for?
Professional Summary: I am a Recruitment & Talent Solutions Specialist in Digital Web and Social Media Technology, who has been working in this sector since February 1990. I have seen and championed many changes and experienced lots of sector ups and downs in that time My experience includes traditional recruitment and talent attraction delivery successes and more recently, projects and job roles have added competencies in web, mobile and cloud-based marketing and communication solutions since 2005. For more information, please review my Full Profile on my LinkedIn profile page.
shaw64blog 
It’s amazing that companies who are all about keeping the ‘customer’ or ‘client’ happy don’t see that candidates and disgruntled employees can drag their corporate image through the mud just as easily, especially in these days of heavy networking.
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Hi job hunter, it’s unfortunate that we know this. Because it seems too easy to know! There are too many examples of bad experience that are being herd but not acted upon! We must ask the question why? Could it be that in reality the words “employees are most important resource” are just that WORDS! The value of shareholder profit payments is so far removed from the reality of performance, they don’t actually care! Or is that too cynical?
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Oh, I don’t think you are being cynical at all, just realistic.
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Cheers for that, too late for me right now, uk time and a bit tipsy, we should follow up in a few hours time. Getting in a bit of paloma faith n ed shearon right now! My view is; board are too far removed from the reality of company hiring.if they were closer they would see more that 50 %of every applying candidate experience is a negative one. How mad it that? Catch up soon M
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Ps love the advitar!
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Reblogged this on The Recruitment Percolator and commented:
Another great blog about the importance of the candidate experience. Thanks for sharing Martin.
If we could only quantify and allocate a $ figure to this, perhaps boards will take more notice. The challenge is convincing the shareholder’s who most boards report to.
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Thanks for the re-blog, as for allocating a cost – there are a number of financial calculations that should be used to prove value to change for company decision makers!
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