August 2016 – Great Hires Blog

Candidate Experience Part III – Tools

In the first two articles of this series we discussed the role of people and process in the success of the candidate experience. Without getting alignment in your organization with these two components first, the tools you choose will have limited impact. The tools you choose for your candidate experience may already be part of the enterprise-wide solutions offered by your company, or point solutions you choose as a recruiter that match your personal best practices.

This article is intended to provide a framework for how to think about the tools you use to enhance your candidate experience. Very simply, we will parse looking at candidate experience tools into three parts:

Measurement – How are we doing?
Priorities to improve
Tools to solve the priorities

Note: Talent Tech Labs produces an excellent quarterly map of the recruiting ecosystem if you are looking for an overview of the key players grouped by segment in the talent acquisition field.

measuring hiring success

Measurement – How are we doing?

Benchmarking the current state of your candidate experience should be your starting point. To do so, you need to act like a marketer. Not only do you need to listen to your customers, candidates, but you also need to watch and measure their behaviors.

Listening to candidates is relatively simple and can be done qualitatively via follow-up interviews and anecdotal comments and quantitatively with surveys that include standardized measurement techniques like the Net Promoter Score. There are hundreds of vendors who offer a variety of survey tools (e.g. Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, Formstack etc.), the challenge is less about the survey, and more about a) getting it to candidates in a timely and automated way and b) aggregating and analyzing the data. Integrating the survey into your contact management tool with candidates, whether it is as simple as email or the auto-generated messages sent from your ATS is critical to capturing the data you are trying to collect. In addition, spending time figuring out what the data says about your people and process should be driving your priorities to improve.

Thanks to digital technology it is much easier to measure candidate behavior when it comes to talent attraction and the application process. By applying online marketing practices to these stages in your candidate experience, you can quantify exactly how effective your candidate experience is. The recruiting process is very similar to the sales funnel for an online service (e.g. ecommerce site or SAAS solution). Near the top of the funnel, when a candidate comes to your landing page (e.g. the job description), you should be measuring the click-thru-rate to start the application process. From there you can measure abandonment rate at each step of the application and your final conversion rate (completed applications). This is no different than what a marketer would do using Google Adwords to sell a specific product on an ecommerce site. There are a variety of tools to help measure and optimize click-thru rate and conversions. A few well-known vendors in this space include Mixpanel, Optimizely, Qualaroo and KISSMetrics and can be used for both desktop and mobile experiences. At the end of the day, if you are seeing very low application completion rates, it is very clear you have a problem, but at least you now have visibility about where to look to determine the root cause.

priorities to improve

Priorities to improve

Now that you have collected both qualitative and quantitative data on your candidate experience, you need to pick the opportunities to focus on first where you can get the biggest bang for your buck. This should not just focus on the talent attraction and application process, but end-to-end, including the other three phases described in the Candidate Experience report: Screening & Dispositioning; Interviewing & Selection; Offer, Onboarding & New Hire.

Tools are meant to solve a problem, so there must be specific problem you want to focus on. Your measurement techniques should identify them. Research shows the most common sources of negative candidates experiences are the following:

Job details don’t tell the candidate enough information
Application process is too long or complicated
“Did you get my application?”
Poor interaction(s) between candidate and the hiring team
Speed of decision making
“Where do I stand?”

toolbox

Tools to solve the priorities

If you are only using your corporate HR/Talent acquisition tools have made available to you, you probably aren’t winning the battle for talent. Whether you are using an old-school, clunky enterprise ATS or one of the new-wave of recruiter-friendly solutions, it is very unlikely your ATS offers a complete set of features needed to solve your high priority candidate experience problems. This creates the natural tension of using your integrated ATS solution vs. point solutions which would typically require double-entry of information and aggregating multiple sources of data for analysis. Unfortunately, this is the reality of recruiting tools in 2015, but a little extra effort on your point can differentiate both your candidate experience and yourself as a recruiter.

Now let’s review the tools to solve the most common candidate experience gripes:

Job details don’t tell the candidate enough information

This can be solved by both making the information easy to find and consume by making your job details . In addition to providing additional information about the job or company which can include videos and other types of rich media. There are a variety of ATS and point solution companies that can help with employer branding, job distribution and mobile recruiting (e.g. CEB, Jibe, Smashfly).

Application process is too long or complicated

We previously discussed optimizing the application process to only focus on value-added activities when applying. The challenge is usually in the lack of flexibility of your online application form tool or a “corporate recruiting tax” that requires all applicants to supply information that really isn’t needed at this stage of the process. Take the time to figure out which steps/fields truly add value to the application and update your tools accordingly.

“Did you get my application?”

This is really about people and process and making sure your ATS (or whatever tool you use to manage your applicant database) has the ability to respond automatically to a submission, but also provides additional information about the full hiring process, the company and what to expect next. This is pretty standard stuff and should be considered table-stakes for your application management tool.

Poor interaction(s) between candidate and the hiring team

Depending on the types of challenges you find, it can be anything from interviewers showing up late, poorly prepared interviewers who don’t know enough about the job or candidate, or ask poor questions during the interview. Beyond email and embedding calendar event with pdfs and blue links, there are various interviewing tools already available in your ATS and there are others that can help with scheduling and interview guides. Another source of a bad candidate experience are hiring team member who basically exhibit behaviors the lead the candidate to believe that they just don’t care – this is a people problem that no tool can solve.

Speed of decision making

The data you collect about your complete candidate experience should reveal the causes of delay in decision making. A couple of the more common sources of slow decision making are firstly, slow compiling of interview feedback from the hiring team. Typically, less than 30% of interviewers submit digital feedback whether by email or completing a standardized form. Mobile friendly feedback forms and automated nag reminders from your interview management tool are simple ways to accelerate decisions and reduce time-to-offer. Secondly, delays can be caused by the natural timing challenges that occur when you have multiple good candidates in parallel processes with but one candidate is a week or two ahead of a second. The first candidate typically does not enjoy stewing while they wait on you to figure out if you like the other candidate more than them. A specific tool likely won’t help solve this challenge, rather your people and process should kick in. Engaging with the candidate that is on hold to give help with transparency and also to make sure you keep you in synch should they may move on to another opportunity while you play the waiting game.

“Where do I stand?”

Having a good candidate relationship management tool to track exactly the status of each candidate is the only way to make sure they are getting a personalized experience. In an ideal world your ATS would be make this super-easy. However you may need to find a point solution of your own if your specific candidate management needs aren’t being met. Instead you may consider more generic CRM tools like Salesforce, Sugar CRM, Zoho or Avature. These tools tend to be easier to use and you can configure the various fields and notifications to match your own recruiting practices.

There are literally hundreds of tools available to help you with your candidate experience. Some designed specifically for recruiting, others designed for sales or marketing that can be applied to your process. What matters most is that they solve a high priority need and give you bang for your buck. Given the many self-service solutions now available, trying them out for 30 or 60 days will give you enough data to see if they are worth your investment of time and energy.

Great Hires – Candidate Experience Software

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About the Author: Ray Tenenbaum is the founder of Great Hires, a recruiting technology startup offering a mobile-first Candidate Interviewing Experience platform for both candidates and hiring teams. Great Hires was named as one of Entrepreneur Magazine’s Brilliant Companies of 2016 where it was ranked #2 in Business Tools. Follow Ray on Twitter @rayten or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Candidate Experience Part II – The tip of the iceberg

Part I of this series focused on the people aspects that drive the Candidate experience. Now we will discuss the processes that drive the Candidate Experience. Managing the processes to deliver a great candidate experience is a balancing act of competing needs where you try and strike the right balance between the candidate and organizational priorities.

The most fundamental question to ask yourself is: ‘Is the candidate at the center of each of the recruiting stages of your candidate experience?’. What does it mean to put the candidate at the center? It means that you are optimizing for the candidate throughout the process by either a) finding creative ways to meet both the candidates and your needs or b) you are making a tradeoff that prioritizes the candidate’s needs over your organizational needs.

Here are some of the top complaints by candidates about their experience:

Your career site isn’t mobile friendly
You didn’t provide all the information I want to know about the job (e.g. salary range and benefits information) before I take the time to apply
Your application is too long
Did you get my application?
When will you let me know about your decision? Is the job filled?
How long will it take to get me the offer, because I need to give an answer to another company?

caniddate waiting

Great – we’ve identified the most common sources of negative candidate experience. Whoop-dee-doo. These are well known complaints. But why do these things keep happening? No one intentionally wants to create a bad candidate experience, do they? What is driving these outcomes?

Well… it’s complicated, right? At least that is how it can be rationalized. What the candidate sees is just the tip of the iceberg compared to what is actually happening during the recruiting process. Beneath the surface company values, compliance, talent acquisition philosophies, the job details and hiring team behaviors drive what the candidate sees and experiences.

Candidate Experience Iceberg

Why would you collect more information than you really need during the application process? Is it for compliance reasons? Is the data being collected just in case it is needed during the screening stage you would want that information already available? Is it to help your recruiters do less work during the screening process – then you are shifting costs that your recruiters could absorb to the candidate.

For example, if you click on the ‘Apply’ button for a Fortune 50 company, this is what you will see:

What a great way to begin the candidate experience with this company. Or not. Creating an account with a company just to apply for a job seems doesn’t seem like it solves for the candidate.

As a recruiting organization, does your company prioritize cost-per-hire and time-to-fill over quality of hire and candidate experience, then very likely you have a large range in how candidates will be treated because you are more focused on making filling the role quickly and making the hiring manager happy. As a recruiter, how much time do you spend keeping candidates informed on their status. Do you make yourself readily available and respond to their inquiries in a reasonable amount of time? Or do you just invest your time in the most promising candidates and ignore the ones on the backburner until it suits your needs? One well-known technology company we work with aims for their rejected candidates to have the same Candidate Experience Net Promoter Score as those they will make an offer to. This mindset and measurement dramatically changes recruiter behavior and the process they follow to engage every candidate they bring in for an interview.

So how can you take a systemic approach to your candidate experience process? To start, map the end-to-end candidate experience. Specifically only look at the world from what the Candidate sees, by stage, and by decision status (yes, no, maybe, not reviewed). Look at each activity (or inactivity – e.g. not following up with every candidate).

How much of the process that candidate’s experience is due to the internal demands of the iceberg? How much is due to limitations in the tools you use?

hiring process

Once you have mapped the process look at all the sources of friction that the candidate experience. Whether forms to fill out, periods of ‘where do I stand’ or gaps in information required to be well prepared for an interaction. Collecting data on each of these sub-experiences allows you to apply lean manufacturing principles to the candidate experience. Basically, evaluate if each one is adding value for the candidate and how can you only focus on activities that add value to the candidate experience and reduce candidate experience waste.

Finally, many aspects of the candidate experience are driven by the tools you have available. Part III of this series will dive into the details on this subject, but in a nutshell there are two ways to look at tools. The first are the set of tools that enable the process which both candidate and hiring teams work with. The reality is that all tools have their limitations and they may not have the flexibility to perfectly align with both candidate and your organizational needs. So figuring out where automated tools fall short and how to the hiring team can close those gaps is key to candidate success.

digital tools

The second is to look at the tools which measure the process. Whether it is something as basic as measuring your candidate experience Net Promoter Score or more robust, like applying digital marketing techniques to measure abandon and conversion rates at each stage of the application process. Without measuring the process effectively you cannot optimize and improve. Instead you are working with anecdotal data and cannot properly apply lean manufacturing principles to reduce friction in the end-to-end process.

Once you examine you candidate experience from the candidate’s perspective and understand the internal and externals factors the drive the each activity in the process. From there, you can begin to making optimization trade-offs. With the tidal wave of recruiting tools now available, next up we will explore how to deal with all the noise to ensure that the ‘people’ and the ‘process’ align to your technology choices to deliver a great candidate experience.

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Candidate Experience – Do You Really Care?

Recently I met with the head of talent acquisition at a 200-person startup with about 40 open reqs and asked him how important the candidate experience was to him and his company. He said it was important but not high on his list of priorities because they already do a good job on the candidate experience. I asked him what measurement he used to make this conclusion. He told me the main source of feedback was by asking new employees about their hiring experience soon after they started at the company. This made me realize that there is a large spectrum of what it means to really care about the candidate experience.

I have spent quite some time analyzing the Talent Board’s Candidate Experience 2014 report. As you probably know, the survey compiles very detailed, behavior based data from 95,000 candidates who applied to approximately 140 companies. It is clear these companies are trying to transform their recruiting process to be more candidate-centric. Like any business improvement initiative, in order to have a great end-to-end experience, a company must successfully align their people, process and technology. However getting each of these components to effectively deliver for both candidates and the company is no easy task.

This is the first of three part series that focuses on each of these factors which drive a successful Candidate Experience capability for your organization, starting with ‘People’. What is clear from the CandE report, that behind the numbers are all the people involved in each stage of talent acquisition that drive the bus – and without whom, process and technology don’t really matter.

The question is, when you start peeling back the candidate experience onion, what are the key components to set your regular employees and recruiting teams up for success? From what I have seen the major drivers are: company values, empathy, rewards and being tech savvy.

why I should care

If your company doesn’t really care, why should you?

Many companies state that “people are their greatest asset”, but is that reflected in their behavior? If your company has a high unwanted turnover rate, then it is not easy to sincerely tell a candidate that the company is a great place to work. How involved in the selection process are the leaders of your organization? How do they measure recruiting success beyond financial metrics? The companies who truly care have Quality at the top of their recruiting Key Performance Indicators with Cost-Per-Hire and Time-to-Hire a fair distant behind. As a result, these companies understand the importance of the candidate experience starting at the top of the funnel. All you need to do is go to the Zappos , Capital One or Enterprise career pages to see how much they care about their people and who they hire. An excellent contrast would be Mass Mutual , a Fortune 500 company, who is ranked #1 for the least loyal employees. It is impossible to even see a list of job postings on their career site unless you complete a form with your personal information.

It is apparent which companies who have ‘attracting and retaining great talent’ in their DNA from your first experience with them. If you are a recruiter who works at a company where people are secondary to other priorities, then you are probably facing challenges getting the leadership focus and resources you need to be successful. It is hard to expect a recruiter to a deliver great candidate experience if their company doesn’t truly support them in their efforts.

frampton

Empathy: Do you feel like we do?

Do you treat candidates as you would want to be treated yourself? That is essence of a recruiter who really cares about the candidate experience.

Here are some basic questions to compare yourself to some of the best practices of CandE award winning companies:

Do you pretend that you are a candidate and apply to your own job to see how easy it is to apply?
Do you set expectations (whether directly or indirectly through via your job posting) and meet those expectations – such as calling a candidate when you said you would.
How much time to do you spend with a candidate helping them through the interview process by either explaining the end-to-end process or prepping them for the people they will be interviewing with?
Do you decline candidates who came in to interview directly by phone or with a form email? Do you provide any feedback?

Displaying these types of behaviors really differentiate top candidate experience recruiters from those only focused on filling job reqs.

The effort required by recruiters requires a significant time investment and tremendous attention to detail. If you have 30 open reqs assigned to you, it is nearly impossible to give the attention needed to all candidates. So, either you care and are willing to go the extra mile, or you are going to skip steps and short-change candidates so you can focus how you are measured and rewarded.

say do ratio

Rewards – aligning the Say/Do ratio

The bottom line is, what gets measured gets done. Recruiting metrics need the right balance between short term operating metrics such as Cost-Per-Hire and Time-to-Fill and long term balance sheet metrics like Quality of Hire and retention rates. If companies aren’t measuring and rewarding quality metrics related to the Candidate Experience, then they are ignoring the impact it can have on both recruiting KPIs and corporate financial metrics. The latest Candidate Experience report states that 24% of candidates are more likely to buy from a company if they have a positive experience while CareerBuilder found that 69% of interviewed candidates are less likely to buy if they had a bad experience.

However, let’s not forget that recruiting costs time and money. A recruiter with the right incentives can’t do it all themselves, they need the right balance of workload, tools and cross-functional support. Companies that measure and reward both talent acquisition and hiring managers based on quality of hire may have above average candidate experience metrics but they typically also invest disproportionately more in their recruiting and retention programs.

techsavvy

Tech Savvy – Your personal competitive advantage

There are a lot of great tools to help recruiters and the candidate experience – some need to be implemented by the company, but there are many point solutions any individual recruiter can use on their own. Whether it is as basic as Google Docs or using email tools like Tout or Yesware to improve your candidate management – the options are out there, but it requires you to figure out which ones actually work and have real candidate impact. Your company probably already has tools that you can use to help you be more successful, however there is a good chance they are not dead simple to use and require you to invest in both getting set-up and learning how to use the application in a way that works for you. Your average recruiter would just give up and stick to their existing behaviors. A recruiting innovator (or even an early adopter) is comfortable learning new technology and testing what works best for them so they have a competitive advantage in converting top prospects.

When it comes to the candidate experience, it all starts with people. Without an engaged recruiter with the right incentives, no fancy process or tools will magically make your company a CandE award winner.

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