The Truth about Candidate Experience…
For the past few years, the buzz in talent acquisition has been on improving the candidate experience. “We need to eliminate the application black hole,” they say. “Every candidate should get an explanation of why they didn’t receive an interview or offer,” the experts write. In this year’s CareerXroads Mystery Job Seeker Report, Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler conclude:
“The pace of changing online recruiting practices has, to say the least, been glacial at most companies. This paper highlights many of the same shortcomings that have plagued them for years. Yet what is particularly difficult to understand is why this continues to be the case when the fixes are straight-forward.”
As a former talent acquisition leader at many FORTUNE 500 companies and a current consultant who helps companies innovate in their recruiting practices, I am going to speak for the many corporate talent acquisition leaders and say:
- We get it. We really do.
- We, as much as all of you, want to significantly improve the candidate experience and have every candidate feel that they have been given fair consideration and timely updates.
- We understand the impact a poor candidate experience has on our employment brand, our company brand, and our bottom line.
- It is much more difficult than you all think.
Let’s start with all the problems with our applicant tracking systems. We know they are difficult for candidates to use and require much more effort to apply than they should. We know that there are some great systems out there that can make applying easier. We also know that we can probably configure our current system to make the process more user-friendly.
What you don’t know is that it is nearly impossible to get funding for a new system as we are competing for the same funds as every other function in the company. Plus, we got a new system five years ago, so the IT dollars are being spent elsewhere. Also, you don’t know that changing our current system configuration is also difficult. We often don’t have control over the resources that are “authorized” to make system changes. Also, we’ve been keeping a running list of configuration changes we need since implementation 5 years ago and it has approximately 1000 items on it. Our “resources” are currently on #10.
As for providing updates to candidates, we know that is what they want most in the process. We know that if candidates don’t receive personal phone call, interview or offer when they are sure that they qualified for the position, they want a specific explanation as to why. We also know that providing regular updates will greatly improve candidates’ opinions of us (which have no where to go but up). We know that we can use our ATS to send out automatic updates so that recruiters don’t have to.
What you don’t know is that our systems do allow candidates to check their own status, but that doesn’t seem to be enough. (As an aside to TA leaders, if you don’t know about a technology called Application Connect that makes status updates easy and friendly for candidates, you should check it out). You don’t know that a single requisition can yield over 100 candidates and well over half of them don’t even meet the minimum requirements for the position. Each recruiter could have 20-30 of these requisitions. I think you know that providing reasons to these 1000+ people is not realistic for even the most efficient, superhuman recruiter. However, you keep telling us that we should “find a way” to do this. What you don’t know is that candidates bear some responsibility for their own experience. Applying to dozens of positions that clearly state requirements that they don’t meet creates the situation where we can provide little insight to anyone about their status.
We know that we need more resources to be able to answer candidate questions and to provide greater insight into our culture, our hiring process and what we are looking for in a candidates. We know that doing this will make it easier for the candidates with the right skills to find us and fill our positions more quickly.
What you don’t know is that we really do want to be just like the companies who win the annual Candidate Experience Awards. You don’t know that we have launched initiatives inside our companies like “The Year of the Candidate Experience” and incented recruiters to be timelier with their follow-up to candidates. You don’t know that offering best-in-class solutions like candidate call centers and daily recruiter chat sessions require significant investment and/or layers upon layers of approvals from key departments in the company. You don’t know that in down economic times, our executives really believe that hiring should be much easier (despite the countless data points and research papers we have provided to them). You don’t remember that we have been downsizing recruiters since the beginning of the recession. Even though the job market continues to be tight for key skills, our companies are not funding additional headcount. So, we have fewer recruiters with larger req loads and more unqualified candidates applying.
The bottom line is that we know we must get better. However, we are also tired of everyone telling us how terrible we are. I promise you that we are working on it. I ask you to promote the companies and tools like Application Connect that help. I also ask you spend time understanding our challenges and issues instead of continuing to berate us in columns and blogs and conference break-out sessions. Together, we can all make the candidate experience better.
Kara Yarnot is Founder & President of Meritage Talent Solutions, a talent acquisition consultancy for corporate HR and vendors. Prior to launching her company, Kara held senior leadership positions at SAIC, The Boeing Company and NVR, Inc., among others. She can be contacted on Twitter @klyarnot, LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/