Recruiters score Recruiters: 5/10 must do better.
A spotlight on talent acquisition, some of its failings, and how to fix them.
Yesterday, about 50 Recruitment and HR professionals met in a pub in Brighton for the (soon to be) annual event #TruBySea. It’s called an Unconference because of it’s low-key, open, no BS and everyone can have say style. Because of this a ‘track’ can go in any direction, and this is what happened with mine. I wanted to run you through what happened.
Track 4: Exceptional Candidate Experience Leads to Maximum Employee Engagement — Tony Payne — 12:00hrs
I went with HR buzzword overload in order to mentally-SEO people into the room. It worked, a full house (room). Admittedly, some just seemed comfortable to stay where they were from the previous track.
We started off on track, I set the scene and started with some prepared notes on acting like a Marketer. Think about all applicants as either future employees or brand ambassadors. The experience has to be great or you’re potentially causing damage to your companies brand and future performance. That sort of thing. I was ready to move into my 7 strategies of (customer/candidate) engagement shortly after opening things up to the floor. I asked, who has any good or bad experiences to share?
Spoiler alert the crowd never got to here about the 7 strategies, for which their lives will ever be that tiny bit duller. But back in the days when Recruiters were trained (Hays c2000), I learnt to go with the flow of the conversation, jump down the rabbit hole!
What happened was some of the most talented professionals in their field sharing some of the terrible experiences they’d experienced. Can you guess where we started, I bet you can? …
The dreaded Black Hole of job applications
Everyone seems to have seen, felt, lived the utter desperation of applying for a job and then ... nothing. Not even an automated reply. What? How? Hang on a minute, it’s 2020 and employers can’t even setup an auto-reply? I thought these came out-of-the-box ready with all ATS’s. Something along the lines of: “if you haven’t heard from us in 14 days, your bascially rejected”. Obviously not. I don’t like this approach, but at least there is a basic thread of human decency in acknowledging someones efforts. It’s the least I would expect. If you can’t arrange an auto-response on new applications you should really give up recruitment.
We moved up through the recruitment process into the interview stages, and the lack of feedback after an interview. Let me repeat, after. Thats criminal. In some cases, applicants are being formally rejected but with vague, generic or even irrelevant reasons. There is actually a reason for this. Internal/External Counsel (Lawyers) are advising companies like this: Do not give feedback for rejection. At least don’t give specific feedback. Why? Because it opens the company up to risk. Especially the risk of discriminatory claims. Subtitle: People Sue for Bad Interviews. Maybe that should be Bad Interviewers.
Something good
Let’s lighten the mood slightly and share a remedy. Recruiters, setup up templates. As many as you need, they will be 90% identical except for a reason for rejection. Think of the top 5 or so reasons for rejection, there aren’t that many really. Now at least you can pick a relevant reason based on the real feedback from the interview. Want to take it a step further, include a link to a separate post/blog where you talk more indepth about what the feedback means and why it may have been given. Simple and scalable. Whilst not as good as full disclosure, you achieve a rejected candidate that stays engaged (happy) with your company. Think how might that same candidate look to your organisation in another 12 months with a years more experience?
You also gain a modicum of respect.
Recruitment could be more accurately named Rejection
I believe it was Roland Rosevear that pointed this out, and he’s right. If you look at a typical hiring funnel your looking conservatively at x20 the number of applicants to the number of hires. In reality, I think it’s closer to x100 across all functions. I kicked off the track with act like a Marketer. Most Marketers would take a customer base of x100 every day from which to build a brand from.
Wrapping up
This wasn’t a case of good recruiters calling out bad recruiters. Everyone in the room at some time has been guilty of ‘mistreating’ applicants or disregarding some level of courtesy in order to meet a deadline. Some have even been trained to be like this. The voice of ‘Big Business’ also pointed out the difficulty in providing quality/personal feedback at scale. But everyone agreed there should be improvement and I hope that the final message will help:
Have empathy for job applicants, some are in a dark place, others are just lost in a sea of Easy Applies. All are people.
I’m Tony Payne, Head of People & Talent and recruiting for nearly 20 years. If you liked this please click follow and comment. If you didn’t, please still comment.
