Entries Tagged with Candidate

Thursday September 24th, 2009
Sure, candidate experience is still more talk than action. You don't change a decades-old paradigm overnight.

So I was reading Sarah White's blog post about how the industry talks a lot about, but doesn't actually deliver, great candidate experiences. 

And she's right:  For all the hundreds (thousands?) of blogs, articles, whitepapers, media features and god knows what else about candidate experience in the past few years, the truth is that most organizations are still woefully inept when it comes to actually delivering anything approaching a 'great' candidate experience.

But I disagree with Sarah when she asserts that the industry doesn't really care about the candidate experience.  I think the industry as a whole does care; it's just that you can't change a decades-old paradigm overnight.

Let's not forget that the whole concept of 'candidate experience' is a relatively recent one.  It wasn't until 2000 that The Cluetrain Manifesto got everyone thinking of relationships with stakeholders as two-way dialogues and that the idea that User Experience should extend beyond website design really took hold.

When I first started focusing on recruitment marketing in late 2004, hardly anyone was talking about candidate experience (or employee experience, for that matter).  Heck, most organizations were still struggling to come to terms with the ways in which the internet was changing the ways in which they were interacting with their customers, and even the term 'social networking' was just beginning to go mainstream.

What's more, the people in a position to transform their organizations - i.e. aged 35+ and in management roles - had just spent most of the past 15 years in a talent market where supply reliably exceeded demand (most of the 1990s sucked, employment-wise; the dot-com bubble years were nice but altogether too short; and by 2004 we were still a little gun-shy thanks to the spectacular dot-bomb flameout of 2001).  

Fifteen years is a long time, so it's not surprising that many organizations simply got in the habit of thinking that job-seekers would always be supplicants at the altars of employers:  There'd always be a plentiful supply of applicants, so why waste resources chasing them?

Of course, by 2005, we were starting to hear rumblings of an impending talent crisis thanks to a huge demographic shift (aging baby boomers + lower birthrates meant that more people would be leaving the workforce than were entering it).  But by the time the talent crisis was really starting to make itself felt in early 2008, we were blindsided by the global financial crisis - and suddenly we were right back to having a surfeit of applicants.

[Yes, I know that some industries have continued to have a chronic talent shortage, recession or no recession.  But I'm speaking in general terms here.]

Given that 

• It's been less than 10 years since the term (and notion of) 'candidate experience' has even been in use
• Only 3-4 of those years have seen a talent market in which demand even begins to exceed supply
• The economic environment of the past 12-18 months has generally obscured the talent shortage engendered by the demographic shift in first-world countries
• For most of the past 60 years, our approach to employment has been about candidates saying "Please, Mr Organization, may I please have a job?" - not the other way around

- is it really any wonder that we're seeing more talk than action when it comes to candidate experience at an organizational level?  Making a commitment to delivering great candidate experiences requires an enormous paradigm shift, a total change in our approach to the relationship between candidates and employers.  That kind of change simply doesn't happen overnight.

I think the wide range of comments on Sarah's post tell their own tale, too:  For every one of us who's passionat- nay, evangelical - about developing, delivering and measuring candidate experience (and I include myself - there's a reason the subtitle of this blog is 'Improving the recruiting experience'), there are others who remain unconvinced.

It's taken years for organizations to get their heads around the idea that successfully managing customer (brand) relationships and great customer experiences in a networked communication model (i.e. one-to-one communications vs the old, one-to-many model) requires an enterprise-wide shift in thinking.  

We're just at the beginning of that shift in terms of candidate and employee experience.  That's why so many discussions of candidate experience focus on specific tactical initiatives - writing better job posts, processes for following up with applicants - rather than enterprise-wide philosophies:  We know that in order to get the rest of the organization on-side, we have to be able to point to short-term successes ("See?  We put a little effort into writing our job postings and it reduced our time-to-hire by 50%!  Imagine what we could do with an organizational commitment to delivering great candidate experiences at every touchpoint...").

It's not that the industry doesn't 'care' about candidate experience; it's just that the average person doesn't really know what it is yet.  Don't forget: Those of us here on ERE - and Twitter, and LinkedIn, and social-media-for-recruiting in general - are the early adopters.  Sure, we've been thinking about, talking about, and writing about candidate experience for a few years now, but we're not all that representative of the average person.  It's just going to take the average person a little while to catch up.

How do I know?  At Head2Head, I've held the title of 'Director, User Experience' since 2005.  The first couple of years, the reaction to that title, even internally, was "Huh?"  But it didn't take long for my co-workers to understand that organizationally, it meant we were committed to delivering "Positive and consistent experiences across all touchpoints, to all stakeholders, that meet or exceed expectations, 100% of the time".  

Today, I hardly ever have to explain the concept to new employees or external recruiting professionals - they already get it, and they understand how it delivers value.  Outside of recruiting, well, I still do a fair amount of evangelizing - but I rarely get the "Huh?" response any more.  So while the industry may not be shifting as fast as we'd like it to, it is shifting.  

I think we have to be careful not to confuse "lack of caring" with "lack of understanding".  The former implies a disconnect, when in fact it's just a function of time and exposure.

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About the Authors

Paul Dodd
Co-founder and President
Head2Head Canada

Paul has one simple goal: To help companies hire great people - and get the most out of every recruiting dollar they spend. That's why he's recognized as one of the best recruitment-industry thinkers in Canada.

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