The Path

Role of
to Job
An Exceptional
Alerts In a Modern
Candidate
Recruitment
ExperienceMarketing
(According
Strategy
to Gerry Crispin)

Overview: The Five Drivers Behind Great Candidate Experiences

The world of hiring seems to be more candidate-driven than ever been before. Skilled
professionals are in high demand, and that means they’ve got options. The presence of options,
coupled with their rising bargaining power has catapulted candidate experience to the top of
most major companies’ lists of recruiting priorities. How can you attract, connect with and
convert talent if your candidate experience is weak?

Last week, we were lucky to have principal & co-founder of CareerXroads and founding
member of The Talent Board, Gerry Crispin, in the Jibe office discussing this very topic. You’re
likely familiar with the work he’s done on the annual Candidate Experience Research and
Awards. If not, check it out here—it’s incomparably good information on candidate experience
from both candidate and employer perspectives.

The Talent Board uses a version of Net Promoter Score (NPS) to score and rank companies’
candidate experience. In this context, NPS shows the likelihood a candidate would refer
another person to apply to your company. It’s a good indicator of the health of your overall
candidate experience (more detailed info on NPS can be found here).

Of course, there are tons of resources and strategies to tap into while improving your NPS,
and consequently improving candidate experience. But, as Gerry explained, over the years,
he’s seen five key themes stand out that seem to have a direct impact on how well a company
performs. We’ll discuss them below:

Set expectations
Gerry said, “If you set expectations, you will be rated higher.” He was adamant about the idea
of how clearly defining what will happen in each stage of candidate experience—from sourcing
and attraction, through the application, interview, hiring, and onboarding process—will
improve your net promoter score.

Expectations are often an afterthought, likely because few talent acquisition professionals ever
really go through and audit their own candidate experience. The result is they become blind to
the fact that their application or interviewing process leaves their candidates feeling powerless
and without information.

We live in a world of technology-enabled expectation setting. You can watch the icon of your
Uber car as it travels toward you or track the status of your food order on Seamless as it’s
prepared and delivered or—name any other awesome consumer experience.

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Talent acquisition teams need to be mirroring that to some degree in the various phases of
candidate experience.

A few examples Gerry provided for setting expectations include:

• Providing an estimation of how long the application will take up front

• Letting candidates know how long it will take to make a hiring decision
• Letting candidates know when you will stop taking applications for a position
• Showing candidates how many other applications were submitted
• Detailing who candidates will be speaking with and when during the on-site interview
process

Gerry also provided some input on the psychology behind expectations. He discussed an
example of a job board that shows the probability a company will respond to you. He said,
“When you see two companies side by side and their response rates, which one are you going
to apply to?”

As you can see, there are many opportunities to set expectations. The Talent Board noted that
71% of companies do not list the average expected time required to complete an application at
the beginning. That’s a quick win right there.

Gerry said it’s important to try new ways of setting expectations in an iterative, experimental
fashion, so you can run a multitude of tests simultaneously and then measure the impact to
your net promoter score.

Listen to your candidates

According to Gerry, giving candidates both the opportunity to be heard and provide feedback
will improve your score and candidate experience.

There’s not much worse in the job search process than feeling like you’re just one person
among millions trying to find a job. The online application process can easily make someone
feel that way.

As Gerry explained, to get past that or at least ease their mind, you’ve got to let candidates
know they’ve got a voice and that you’re listening.

One example of listening is to not just provide an email address on your site for more
information about jobs, but to actively encourage on-the-spot engagement via chatting. He

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said, “Just try to search the Dell website for a laptop. You will be prompted multiple times to
chat with an expert. Why should a company that badly needs to fill a position not provide the
opportunity for job seekers to chat with a recruiter?”

Examples of listening to candidates include:

• Chatting: As mentioned, having a chat pop-up may help make candidates feel like they
have a voice. You may also consider doing something like a weekly Twitter chat. There’s a
chance no one will show up, but you never know when that hard-to-find candidate will
come out of the woodwork.
• Responsiveness on social media: When a job seeker tweets a question directly to your
Twitter handle or posts on your Facebook page, someone should be instructed to respond
to them. An easy-to-deploy solution would be to just thank them for their interest and
then provide an email address to which they can inquire.
• Providing contact information: To let candidates know they have a voice, some
companies will actually provide contact information of the recruiter who is handling the
requisition. That way, they can reach out as needed.
• Offering the option to reply to automatic emails: Delivering an auto-response email
that says “Do not reply to this email” makes the process seem very one-sided. It also
makes it difficult to receive potentially useful feedback or to answer questions that would
improve your NPS. It’s advisable to reconsider barriers that have been in place for years.

Just think, a small improvement to your listening could improve your candidate experience
and drive more candidates to your jobs over time. 71% of candidates said they might or would
share their experience publicly. So whether you like it or not, you’re getting some good or bad
word of mouth advertising.

Many companies have compliance hurdles stopping them from ever getting to this point—or
at least, perceived compliance issues, where talent acquisition teams will never attempt to
pursue such a listening strategy. That is a shame, because there is the opportunity to make
minor tweaks to your process that could add up to major NPS and candidate experience
improvements in the long run.

Exemplify fairness
Again, talent acquisition has to be in tune with the fact that candidates understand there are
many people applying for jobs. This can easily make it seem “unfair” when they apply without
ever hearing anything. As Gerry explained, a process that seems fair from the candidate’s
perspective will receive a higher NPS than others.

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In many ways, the first two points around setting expectations and listening play a role here. If
candidates know what to expect and they feel like you’re listening to them, those two aspects
intrinsically foster a sense of fairness.

Examples of making recruiting and hiring processes fair include:

• Properly aligning job descriptions to application and interviewing processes

• Asking applicable questions during any assessments (if you ask irrelevant questions or
ones that don’t align with the job description, candidates will view it as unfair)
• Asking relevant questions during the interviewing process with the hiring manager
(otherwise, candidates will leave thinking “there’s no way they’ll hire me”)
• Properly setting expectations for the application and hiring process
• Providing the opportunity for candidates to have a voice by requesting feedback

The Talent Board revealed that at least 59% of candidates in 2015 were never asked to provide
feedback (another 22% couldn’t remember if they were given the option).

Working to improve fairness helps you to break through the one-sidedness of the recruiting
and hiring processes.

Provide closure
Gerry explained, “There’s absolutely no excuse for not telling someone they didn’t get the job
or thanking them for applying. You’ve got to be able to do that—and, at the very least,
technology makes it easy to automate this.”

Thanking candidates for applying and telling them they didn’t get the job will improve your
score. In addition, Gerry noted companies that perform better than others in NPS provide
feedback.

As shown in the 2015 Candidate Experience Research data, a vast majority of companies that
received a one-star rating gave no feedback to candidates. Many candidates expect
feedback—applying and interviewing is a very transactional experience, and it seems unfair to
receive absolutely nothing in return.

Examples of how to provide feedback and closure include:

• Thanking every candidate for their time, every time (use recruiting automation software
if necessary for high volume)

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• Following up with recommendations on what can be improved upon

• Ending with positive comments about the situation no matter what—whether the
candidate was chosen or not
• Again, do not just give feedback, ask for it as well to create a sense of fairness at some
point

“There is absolutely no excuse” for not providing some form of closure. Taking a moment to
ensure that every candidate will receive something in return for their time and interest—even
if it’s automated—will deliver long-term benefits to your candidate experience.

Demand accountability
Gerry said, “You’re accountable for your life and everything else, so why not be accountable
for the candidate experience you’re giving? Recruiters, by and large, who are accountable for
candidate experience are rated higher, which will drive up the company’s overall candidate
experience and net promoter score.”

For many talent acquisition leaders, the answer to improving candidate experience is right in
front of them—make recruiters more accountable. That is easier said than done, though.
Demanding accountability requires creating a process for measuring performance,
incentivizing performance, and enabling an environment of continuous learning.

If you are providing a short survey when the recruiting process ends, the first step toward
accountability is simply tying candidates’ responses back to the performance of the recruiter.
From there, leadership needs to set up a schedule for reviewing that performance on both an
individual and team level, as well as a set of rewards for meeting goals—monetary, in-kind, or
both.

Leadership must be able to synthesize the information and provide feedback to recruiters on
areas for improvement. Gerry explained, this will improve your NPS, your candidate
experience, and go as far as improving your organization’s financial performance.

The Takeaway
Leading companies approach improving these aspects of candidate experience in their own
unique ways—ways which tend to reflect the culture and resources available to them.

Gerry said, “Every year, I see something interesting and new.” And then he explained how one
company has started incorporating simulations into its assessments, so both candidates and
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hiring organizations can actually see if the position is a good fit right off the bat. That type of
interesting recruiting process can lead to better scores.

You don’t necessarily have to create a simulation or invest in something over the top. The
point is to look at the five buckets listed above and identify areas where you can experiment
with ways to improve, measure the performance, calibrate, and then move forward. Many
small adjustments to your candidate experience can add up quickly.

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