1-click applications are a godsend for recruiters and candidates, right?

They give top talent a fast-forward button to your vacancy, meaning you don’t miss out on those stellar candidates too busy being brilliant to complete an entire application form from scratch. Convenience for candidates and a steady flow of engaged applicants into your ATS (not to mention greater resource efficiency) for you.

Another win-win layer of hiring automation. Trebles all round!

Except it isn’t so straightforward. Like so many steps in the march to automated recruiting, 1-click applications present a precarious trade-off between efficiency, employer branding and candidate experience.

It’s a basic tenet of motivation: the easier something becomes, the less commitment it requires and the lower its perceived value.

If you see a job you really want, you’re willing to run through walls to get it. When you’re offered a one-step, no-hassle way to apply, it suddenly feels cheaper, less worthwhile. “Who’s to say,” thinks the applicant, “that an army of unqualified candidates isn’t right now blindly clicking in their application, swamping the process in mediocrity?”

As a qualified candidate, maybe that will work in your favour, maybe not. The one thing you do know is that you’re in an unedifying numbers game for an employer you now respect slightly less.

Even worse, automated hiring turns all of those unqualified 1-click chancers into potential critics. An unsatisfactory response, whether it’s a terse and cursory automated email or their application ending up in the notorious ATS black hole, casts a long shadow over your employer brand.

In other words, you’ve ended up making naysayers of people who should never have been anywhere near your employer brand in the first place. On the bright side, at least you’ve inflated your ATS with the details of a few more irrelevant applicants you’ll never so much as glance at again.

Sarcasm aside, we have genuine concerns about the payoff between process efficiency and reputation management of automated hiring systems like 1-click application. Likewise automated ATS email responses and artificial intelligence in online video interviewing.

Recruitment is an innately human business, probably more so than any other. A candidate’s suitability for a role is ultimately determined by a nuanced set of intangibles: ambition, worldview, accomplishments, confidence, rapport, cultural fit and so on.

Humans simply do not miss these critical factors in the way that automated processes (what Liz Ryan dubbed “inhuman systems of recruitment” in her epic Forbes takedown of recruiting technology) all too easily can. Meanwhile your goodwill as an employer is being eroded every time a candidate rubs up against the blank void in the automated process where human interaction would otherwise be.

This is a long way from saying that technology plays no role in enhancing recruitment. It’s simply to caution that every automated step added to a hiring process diminishes its humanity and increases its fallibility.

Most jobs are worth more than a single click.

Those in the know, share. If you think your network would find inspiration in this post, we’ve made it really easy for you to tell them using the LinkedIn Share button below. (And yes, we fully appreciate the irony in the context of this post.)

Image © R.E.M. Automatic For The People, Warner Bros. Records

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Answering the thorny question of why your company is in business is not easy. It may require the dissatisfied curiosity of persistent pre-schooler. But it’s a major step to hiring more motivated, loyal and productive employees.

Why?

Because it connects you over purpose, and purpose is one of the most powerful motivators in the workplace today.

Why purpose matters

Where purpose is present, performance soars. A benchmark 2016 report into workplace purpose, by Imperative, cited research demonstrating that:

• 85% of purpose-led companies showed positive growth
• 42% of non-purpose-led companies showed a drop in revenue

Even more dramatically, a Harvard Business School study found that over a ten-year period, values-driven companies outperform non-purposeful ones by a factor of 12 in their stock price.

How purpose helps

Why does purpose make such a difference? In short, because purposeful companies are more likely to have purposeful employees. And in just about every metric that matters, purposeful employees make better employees.

We touched on this in our infographic on the Emerging World of Software Engineers, which cited job satisfaction and loyalty as two characteristics of purpose-oriented employees. But according to the aforementioned Imperative report, such employees are also more likely to be:

• Good colleagues
• In a leadership role
• Net promoters of their employer

Defining purposeful

If you want to understand what makes purpose-oriented employees perform so effectively, you only need to consider what it actually means to be one.

To be purpose-oriented is to see work as a path to personal fulfilment, strong relationships and a positive wider impact. An employee with purpose prioritises work that matters to them, their company and the world. They are almost certain to be more engaged in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work.

Interestingly, they aren’t just millennials: a higher proportion of both Gen Xers and baby boomers define themselves as purpose-oriented.

By contrast, non-purpose-oriented people see work solely as a source of income or status. They are far less likely to be engaged in their work, like the staggering 68% of US workers cited in a 2015 Gallup survey into employee engagement. Gallup went on to define not-engaged workers in the following terms:

“These employees are not hostile or disruptive. They show up and kill time, doing the minimum required with little extra effort to go out of their way for customers. They are less vigilant, more likely to miss work and change jobs when new opportunities arise. They are thinking about lunch or their next break.”

Not exactly the first words you’d choose for your next person spec. Yet like the majority of employers, are you actually doing anything to distinguish and target purposeful candidates in your hiring efforts?

If not, here’s where you can start:

• Understand your company’s purpose – While every company knows what it does, very few know what for. But until you can clearly say why your company exists, you have no way of making a meaningful connection with anyone – customers or employees.
• Bake purpose into your employer brand – Your ‘why’ should be articulated in your company mission statement and you want it front and centre in your employer brand. It should define your values and drive your culture, so that anyone coming into contact with your company can see it at work.
• Connect with purpose-oriented talent – Create purpose-driven attraction strategies and seek out candidates who share your sense of purpose. Bear in mind these candidates are more likely to be passive, so you can add them to your talent pipeline and start a meaningful long-term conversation even if they’re not ready to jump now.
• Probe for purpose during selection – Ask questions like “what matters to you?” and “what motivates you?” at interview. And remember that when it’s the candidate’s turn to turn the spotlight on you, you’ll have a much better answer to the question “why should I work here?” up your sleeve.

Those in the know, share. If you think your network would find inspiration in this post, we’ve made it really easy for you to tell them using the LinkedIn Share button below.

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This year’s LinkedIn Global Recruiting Trends report is a few months old now, but it’s still a rich mine of talking points. Among the slew of stats are a few we keep coming back to with increasingly furrowed brows.

They’re to do with employer branding; more specifically the gap between talent leaders’ stated beliefs about employer branding and their financial commitment to it.

The first concerns the perceived value of employer branding (EB) in talent attraction:

This is supported by a ‘fantasy budget wishlist’ figure:

Then we get to the reality of the situation:

For us, the size of this gap is startling and puzzling in equal measure. How can there be so much strategic goodwill towards something so financially undervalued? Why isn’t more time and money allocated by hiring teams to putting the employer brand at the heart of their strategies?

Ultimately, do employers actually believe in their employer brand in the way they say they do?

Inevitably, the answers to these questions come with some caveats and considerations. Here are the main ones.

The shifting landscape of employer branding

The roots of the employer brand may lie in recruitment but it has grown branches into other areas of HR, plus marketing and corporate comms. Today, it is its very own fiefdom in many large organisations. EB has changed course and now drains from different fiscal pools. And while this doesn’t explain away the yawning chasm between perceived value and actual spending, it may account for some diminution of EB within recruiting budgets.

An HR hot potato

There is another consequence of EB’s shape-shifting intangibility. In effect, it’s hard to make a compelling and consistent business case for a strategic tool that somehow still seems to evade definition to the point where nobody in the organisation is entirely sure who’s responsible for it. Resources are tight as it is. Why would you allocate and fight for more budget now for something that may not be in your purview this time next year?

Resources on the rack

That brings us neatly onto another critical factor. The LinkedIn report confirmed what most recruiters already knew: resources are stretched. Hiring volumes are growing but hiring teams aren’t. You have to do more with what you have to put bums on seats. And what you have are tried-and-trusted tactical tools: job boards, agencies, recruiting tech and, if you’re smart, employee referral.

An immeasurable device

When you’re under pressure to deliver results, it’s natural to fall back on what you know. Just as importantly, you need to be able to prove you’re delivering those results. And measurement is another area where employer branding has historically struggled to assert itself.

So where does all of this chin-stroking leave employer branding as a recruiting tool right now? Compromised, certainly. But are all of these circumstantial factors legitimate reasons for talent leaders’ lip-service-and-long-grass approach to their own employer brands?

‘Probably not,’ is the honest answer. EB experts such as Dr John Sullivan are exasperated by the myth that employer branding is beyond measurement, proposing a swath of metrics to gauge EB strength and impact, from productivity gains to quality of hire assessment. And if you can measure it, you can build a business case for it.

Similarly, many commentators think that the cost barrier is a red herring. Here’s recruitment strategist Mark Stephens:

“I find [it] very interesting that there is a perceived high/prohibitive cost to employer branding in relation to recruitment. After all, we are not talking about trying to establish a global corporate brand […] Your company brand is quite simply what your current and past employees say about you. If you don’t know, then ask them.”

It’s a simplified view pointing to a simple truth. There are EB activities that recruiters can undertake without busting their budget, whether by themselves or in league with other employer branding stakeholders. The task of exploring and mapping out what defines and distinguishes you as an employer, then putting that at the heart of your talent acquisition… Isn’t that what every recruiter worth their salt should be doing anyway?

It’s ultimately a question of will. If talent leaders really want employer branding at the heart of their hiring strategies, they have to make the case from the ground up. If they want more budget to invest in EB, first they must give business leaders something to invest in.

The answer is there. But ironically the question remains the same: Do employers care enough about their employer brand?

Those in the know, share. If you think your network would find inspiration in this post, we’ve made it really easy for you to tell them using the LinkedIn Share button below.

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Why now? Because in today’s candidate-driven market, those in demand are making informed choices between multiple offers. So when you see the thought, effort and innovation some employers put into their candidate experience, you’ll know where you might need to improve for your offer to be the chosen one. (Unless you work at one of the companies below, in which case: keep it up!)

We’ve found big-name employers across sectors raising the bar at different stages of the candidate journey, plus one tech giant that hit upon a unique way to revamp a failing process.

Here’s what you’re up against:

1. T-Mobile: Winning at the attraction/research stage

In this instance, T is for transparency. T-Mobile’s careers site is a crystal-clear window into the company’s employer brand, hiring process and individual vacancies. As well as displaying Glassdoor reviews, each role page tells candidates how long the vacancy has been open and how many people have so far applied. Elsewhere on the site, infographics and videos explain the hiring process to the nth degree.

The result? Candidates approach their application 100% informed and enthused about T-Mobile, without hesitation or reservations. They’re several steps closer to the company before they’ve even filled in the first application field.

2. AT&T: Winning at the application stage

That last point leads us neatly to AT&T. The telecoms giant had serious issues with its applications. They took too long and applicants disliked the process so much that over 70% of mobile applicants gave up before the end.

AT&T’s solution was bold, beautifully simple and devastatingly effective. Cutting the number of application fields from 75 to 31 resulted in an overall completion rate of 79%, with mobile completions leaping from below 30% to 65%. Based on a cost per application of $6.50, AT&T estimates that this one slick move saved them $1m in a single year.

3. Hootsuite: Winning at the screening stage

Rejection is the part of the process that hurts candidates the most, but arguably the one many employers are least engaged in. Not so Hootsuite, exemplar of our earlier candidate experience post.

Rejection is the part of Hootsuite process we loved the most. As they put it, “how a company handles that delicate situation says a lot about their character… We are dedicated to ensuring applicants who do not move forward get as much resource towards getting a positive experience as the applicants who do.”

How? By revamping their rejection emails to let candidates down gently, invite them to keep in touch and provide a curated suite of job search resources. Engagement at its thoughtful, meaningful best.

4. Humana: Winning at interviewing and onboarding

You’d expect a major U.S. health and wellbeing company to be people-focused. Two key elements of Humana’s candidate experience certainly are.

First, adopting video and automated telephone interviews has aided candidates as much as recruiters. Given time to plan and record responses at their leisure, applicants are far more likely to rate the interview experience as positive. Better still, the system’s efficiency means applicants learn their fate significantly faster. Without even being in the same room as an interviewer, candidates are more engaged in the process.

Meanwhile, as an active recruiter from the U.S. military, Humana goes to great lengths to help veterans transition to corporate life. Innovative onboarding initiatives include relocation concierge services, setting up accommodation for new hires ahead of their start date.

5. Airbnb: Winning at candidate perspective

Last but not least, when Airbnb realised the chasm between its growth trajectory and arcane hiring practices, the company came up with a leftfield way to reinvent its candidate journey. The recruiting team storyboarded the experience end to end, on a wall, with post-its, to earn deeper insights into candidates’ needs, motivations and pain points at each stage.

As people who know a thing or two about gaining richer insights from delving deeper, we couldn’t help but love this slice of fresh thinking.

Conclusion

No employer serious about hiring great talent can afford to ignore the value of candidate experience. Fortunately, few do. But there are some companies taking candidate engagement to another level and reaping the rewards for doing so. We hope these stories help inspire you to join their ranks.

Those in the know, share. If you think your network would find inspiration in this post, we’ve made it really easy for you to tell them using the LinkedIn Share button below.

The post 5 Employers who are Winning at Candidate Experience appeared first on EWS.

Why?

Because candidates talk… and disgruntled candidates talk loudest. When they have a bad experience, not only are they unlikely to reapply to you in future, but they’ll also share it with their network. That’s bad news for your employer brand (and your consumer brand if they use your products or services).

If your candidate experience isn’t one of your top priorities, you’re not alone. Few recruiters get it absolutely right* and most companies stumble over the same few hurdles.

Are you one of them? If you’re making any of these four mistakes, it’s time to give more thought to how you’re treating your candidates – and what they’re saying about you in return.

1. Not being clear and up front

Recruiters are rarely outright dishonest when hiring (scroll to the end of this post for one particularly egregious example). But the process can easily be clouded by uncertainty and evasion.

If a candidate doesn’t know where they stand, or what to expect next, or who’s interviewing them, or how many they’re up against, or how close they are to a final decision, it’s confusing. And needlessly so. It’s a simple courtesy to provide a broad outline and timeline for the process, then update applicants on their progress, right up to the point when they’re no longer being considered.

We’re firm believers in honest feedback for unsuccessful candidates too. Take time to help someone in their professional journey, even when your company isn’t the next destination, and you leave them feeling valued, respected and open to future conversations.

2. Not following up

‘Not following up’ is the polite term. ‘Ignoring’ puts it more bluntly, and it’s always a horrible feeling.

Never forget that recruiting is only a one-to-many process from your perspective. Most job applications are submitted with great care and high hopes. At this first stage an automated reply is the very least they can expect – yet only a statistical minority of applicants receive one.

As candidates progress, contact should increase. We recommend following up even if you have nothing to report, particularly if you’ve promised to. You might consider adding a follow-up pool in your ATS, where applicants sit until contacted. And why not ask them how they’d like you to keep in touch – phone, text, email or even social?

3. Thinking like a recruiter

The last paragraph leads us to another key mistake: not considering what candidates actually go through to get the job. With your recruiter hat on, you see your hiring requirements and you want to find the candidate that fits them best. But how can you be sure that your process is best equipped to lead to that candidate if you don’t see it through their eyes?

And what about the dozens, maybe hundreds of applicants who fall by the wayside? How are they left feeling about the experience?

Try to understand – and even better, design – your process from an applicant’s point of view. Here’s where it’s your turn to ask candidates for honest feedback. Take it on board and keep tweaking.

4. Engaging too many candidates

Good rule of thumb: the more personally engaged a candidate feels, the better their experience will be. You simply don’t have time to personally engage everyone… so be ruthless in your candidate selection, not your candidate engagement!

Spreading yourself too thin between too many candidates is precisely when you run into the other problems we’ve discussed. And for what? The outside chance that a maybe candidate transforms themselves into the perfect hire at interview? Of course it’s a possibility, but almost certainly to the detriment of your overall candidate experience.

Now contrast that with richer, personalised conversations with fewer, better candidates. Even the unsuccessful ones will leave the process feeling good about your company… and keen to reconnect in the future.

If you see anything familiar in our quartet of common mistakes, we highly recommend taking steps to improve your candidate experience. Companies that do, like Hootsuite, are reaping the reputational benefits that come with a distinctively brilliant candidate experience. It’s a genuinely effective way to distance yourself from your competitors – and be talked about for all the right reasons.

One example of a company getting it unspeakably wrong: a start-up that had found a great candidate for a senior sales opening. At the latter stages of the process, they asked him to use his contacts to secure a sales meeting with a company his existing employer was also targeting. So a straight choice between his current employer and his prospective one. Things were going so well with the start-up that he set up the meeting… at which point the phone went dead on the job. He never heard from them again. How many people do you think he’s told that story to over the years?

Those in the know, share. If you think your network would find inspiration in this post, we’ve made it really easy for you to tell them using the LinkedIn Share button below.

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