Comments on: How Candidate Abuse Is Costing Your Firm Millions of Dollars in Revenue

By: Positive applicant experience in online recruitment | Stephen - Recruiting Online

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 15:46:04 +0000

[...] Every time a customer/applicant deals with your company is an experience. It only takes one negative experience to give a bad impression of your organisation yet many recruiters are still slow to correct this. In some cases this can be termed applicant abuse. [...]

By: David Lyons

David Lyons — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 01:43:07 +0000

excellent article, time well spent. From a recruiters point of view its important to remember that that candidate will one day become a hiring manager and either not use the company in question or take a revenge approach and headhunt their staff

By: Why the Job Seeking Experience is Set to Improve « Six Figures Blog

Why the Job Seeking Experience is Set to Improve « Six Figures Blog — Wed, 05 May 2010 05:05:49 +0000

[...] In March this year, Dr. John Sullivan wrote a powerful article for ERE on How Candidate Abuse Is Costing Your Firm Millions of Dollars in Revenue’. [...]

By: How abusive hiring practices damage employers and cost millions at Bill Bennett

How abusive hiring practices damage employers and cost millions at Bill Bennett — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 20:00:01 +0000

[...] HR specialist John Sullivan makes a powerful point in How candidate abuse Is costing your firm millions of dollars in revenue. [...]

By: Sharing Sunday, March 21, 2010 | Cube Rules

Sharing Sunday, March 21, 2010 | Cube Rules — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 08:02:27 +0000

[...] spend a lot of money on ensuring customer satisfaction — and totally abuse their job candidates. Why this costs more than [...]

By: How Coca-Cola achieved 50% participation in its wellness program « Email Newsletter Archive

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:10:47 +0000

[...] [T]he average professional candidate voluntarily spends more than $1,000 worth of their own time and money in preparing for and participating in an organization’s hiring process. Given that level of investment, they deserve to be treated like good customers.” –John Sullivan, writing on ERE.net [...]

By: Stop candidate abuse…it’s costing you… « A Wider Lens

Stop candidate abuse…it’s costing you… « A Wider Lens — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:04:54 +0000

[...] http://www.ere.net/2010/03/15/how-candidate-abuse-is-costing-your-firm-millions-of-dollars-in-revenu... Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Update on the conflict free-laptop searchAngola – Stop Milita [...]

By: Keith Halperin

Keith Halperin — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:54:52 +0000

Well put, Howard. There is at least one major difference between then and now. By going to http://www.glassdoor.com candidates can anonymously comment on their treatment, and others can see their comments.

Cheers,

Keith

By: Alexis Perrier

Alexis Perrier — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:48:48 +0000

Thank you very much for your article. You’ve put the finger on the 400 pound gorilla in the room that no one sees.

As a candidate, I too have really felt insulted time and time again by companies and third party recruiters for lacking basic politeness.

When I was recruiting for a software company 10 years ago, we had a policy of motivating all candidates to join us. Even when we knew we were not going to recruit them. The idea was to boost the image of the company among young graduates so that we would have as many applications as possible.

By: How Candidate Abuse Is Costing Your Firm Millions in Revenue | Baitbox.co.za

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 08:50:05 +0000

[...] the full article HERE Share General 2010 South African Employer Branding [...]

By: Howard Adamsky

Howard Adamsky — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 03:39:19 +0000

On October 17, 2002, my first ERE article hit and was entitled “Make Believe They are Coming to Your House.”

If you look it over, you will see it is very similar to Johns article right here.

http://www.ere.net/2002/10/17/make-believe-theyre-coming-to-your-house/

I find it fascinating that after almost 8 years, we are still wrestling with the same problem of how candidates are abused, ignored and mistreated. The sad part is that 8 years from now, the article will arise again and nothing will have changed. Honestly, how sad is that?

By: Keith Halperin

Keith Halperin — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:09:52 +0000

Bruce, if you know any WA companies/governments that will bring over a few hundred American recruiters to work on this, I’m sure they’d have a lot of takers, and I’d be one.

Cheers,

Keith keithsrj@sbcglobal.net
……………………….

Bruce McCowan Mar 15, 2010 at 9:00 pm
PS – In Western Australia there is an acute skills shortage in the resources and oil & gas sectors with a shortage of over 100,000 workers.

By: Marc Medios

Marc Medios — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 02:19:56 +0000

Having been through both sides, hiring and interviewing, I can certainly vouch for the sheer callousness of many companies, including large ones such as Kelloggs and Gillette. On the other hand, when hiring for clients, I take great care in making sure that candidates are informed, treated nicely, humanly and when not chosen, informed of that in a positive way.

My one hope: Karma’s a bitch and it will bite uncaring and callous HR managers at some point in their lives

By: Bruce McCowan

Bruce McCowan — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:00:04 +0000

One of the issues that we need to address is how we resource the corporate recruiting functions. I see many recruitment functions built around 20 – 25 unique hard to fill roles per recruiter. With little focus on systems and processes, and a high number of applications, this leaves no time to provide a quality candidate experience.

Dr Sullivan provides yet again some excellent examples for recruiting functions to build a business case to resource properly the corporate recruiting function. A key metric for recruitment leaders has to be candidate satisfaction. We need to continually educate the business on how a well resourced and high performing recruitment function builds the employment brand and in time will reduce the overall cost of recruitment as employee referrals increase and talent pools are built.

PS – In Western Australia there is an acute skills shortage in the resources and oil & gas sectors with a shortage of over 100,000 workers.

By: Cathie Wilkerson

Cathie Wilkerson — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:04:53 +0000

Excellent article! Too often we forget in recruiting that we have two customers; our clients and our candidates. Bravo John for your continuous focus on improvement and growth in the recruiting industry.

By: Joel Passen

Joel Passen — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:04:44 +0000

Many employers are still totally oblivious to the concept of building a community around their applicant pools. Most just ignore applicants- take them for granted, especially lesser known brands. Others treat applicants like circus animals requiring them to jump through burning hoops just to interview. Maybe Google can get away with this but lesser known brands absolutely can’t. And, for that matter, when the economy fully recovers and the lesser known brands start hiring again, they’ll be begging for more applicants.
As usual, I agree with John on the basic concepts of this post and it’s nice to see people talking about this issue. Poor candidate treatment is one of the biggest diseases in the recruiting industry. Is it corporate recruiting’s fault? No. These folks typically have little to no budget. Listen, when you’re a busy corporate recruiter, there’s no immediate reward to follow up with every applicant either. You’re just trying to fill jobs.
So, how do you break the vicious circle? How can you improve how your company treats applicants and portray somewhat of a positive brand image at the same time? And, if you’re not recruiting for a large brand, how can you do this with little or no budget?
DO crawl before you walk. You’re not going to change your company over night.
DON’T go lobby for a CRM system like SFDC or some complicated ATS. CRM systems are hard to use, they won’t integrate with the rest of your recruiting program and you’ll kill yourself entering data into yet another system. Big ATS are typically some of the worst offenders of create clunky processes. They’ve never been built with applicants themselves in mind.
DO make it easy for applicants to apply to your careers page. Automate this. Newer ATS software has gotten completely affordable (some will cost less cable tv). A good ATS will thank applicants when your company receives a resume – among other things. This is a start. Avoid being a black hole.
DON’T require applicants to set up a user name and password to send you a resume. Trust me; you can’t automate the feedback loop. Applicants, especially the A-players, are never going to log in to check on their status as an applicant. Applicant portals don’t work and never have. People have too many other places to sign into. And furthermore, applicant portals create significant drop-off rates during the application process itself. Talk to an Indeed.com sales rep, they track this stuff. Drop-off rates for some companies are as high as 50%.
DO have a mechanism in place to automate rejections politely. Call them Thank You Letters and treat them as such. Let applicants know that you aren’t a black hole but, that you’re not going to pursue them as an applicant at this time. They’ll appreciate the feedback and this will set you brand apart. These should be simple for recruiters to use – set these templates up once and use them. If they’re not simple, no one will use them Here is a good feature check this out – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq9hFgL3Vnc
DON’T try to be like the great company your read about in FastCompany by copying some 20 step recruiting process. Keep it simple and lessen the impact on your applicants AND your team. Recruiting is linear, a set of binary yes or no decisions. Treat it as such. A smart company will train their interview teams to better assess talent. Organize your resources better. Make sure that someone on the interview team is capable of selling your company. Streamline the decision making process. This will save everyone time and energy and you’ll make better hiring decisions. Applicants will recognize that you’re efficient and thoughtful.

By: Brian Kevin Johnston

Brian Kevin Johnston — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:51:24 +0000

Dr Sullivan- Your article was great. 3rd party agents follow up with the client/candidates well overall. You know this because they are still in business, and/or thriving…

I trust the community is recognizing TPR principles are finally getting there much deserved credit…

EnJOY your day… Brian-

By: Carol Evans

Carol Evans — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:02:56 +0000

Great article, John! I have always said that while they may not be the right candidate, they could very well be a customer or potential customer. It’s always amazing to me how in a service industry, that can be forgotten so easily. It’s a simple matter of RESPECT, and yes, that’s important even in a bad economy when jobs are scarce.

By: AllianceQ – How Candidate Abuse Is Costing Your Firm Millions of Dollars in Revenue

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:49:03 +0000

[...] Read the full article on ere.net… Tags: employer brand, ERE [...]

By: How Candidate Abuse Is Costing Your Firm Millions of Dollars in Revenue « hirebridge blog

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:47:02 +0000

[...] Read the rest of the article >> [...]