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There have been several recent articles on the importance and, in some cases the lack of attention on, the candidate experience. One article goes so far as to call out the Candidate Experience Award winners and question why they are silent on the topic.

As the chairman of Talent Board, the nonprofit organization that delivers the Candidate Experience Awards each year, there is plenty I can say about the power of a positive candidate experience, and the amazing value and efforts that many employers, including some of the most well-known employment brands, are implementing to gain a competitive advantage and treat candidates with the respect they deserve.

Employers care, and they should. keep reading…

“Death by interview” is the harsh but unfortunately all-too accurate name that I give to the majority of corporate interview processes because of the way that they literally abuse candidates.

Death by interview is worth closer examination because harsh treatment during interviews impacts almost every working American, simply because each one of us is subjected to many interviews during our lifetime.

The hiring interview shares a love/hate status, where even though applicants initially hope to be granted an interview, once they are finally notified, they almost universally undergo a wave of stress and painful memories that causes them to stop looking forward to them.

“Death by interview” is the term used to describe the drawn out pain that job applicants suffer as a result of requiring an excessive number of interviews, repeating the same questions across multiple interviews. and the unnecessary uncertainty that is part of most interview processes.

Death by Interview Component No. 1 — An Excessive Number of Interviews keep reading…

Every few months here on ERE, some author writes an article discussing the “candidate experience,” or as I prefer to call it: the “c words”: candidate care. As a contract recruiter, I’m very frequently a candidate, so while I’m just one person, I’m very familiar with this side of the process, so let me discuss the candidate’s perspective. keep reading…

Hard on the heels of the release of the Candidate Experience Awards Report comes word from CareerBuilder that the vast majority of candidates who apply for a job never hear a word after submitting their resume.

Surveying 3,991 employed, full-time workers, CareerBuilder found 75% of those who applied for a job never heard from the company. So common is that silence that only 82% of the candidates actually expect to hear something, even just a perfunctory, “Got your application.”

Contrast that with the experience of the thousands of candidates surveyed as part of the CandE awards research. Almost 78% reported getting an acknowledgement after submitting an application. And more than half of the applicants to the 90 companies taking part in the evaluation said they got a note describing the next steps in the process.

While even among the 37 winning companies the process wasn’t without its issues, overall 53% of the candidates would apply again. A majority are willing to tell their friends about their experience; some are willing to post about it on Facebook, Twitter, a blog, or elsewhere. keep reading…

Charlie Brown never got much respect. Not from Lucy, who when she wasn’t snatching the football away at the last minute, was making fun of his pitching skills, nor from the Little Red-Haired Girl, with whom he was so infatuated.

Now, as it turns out, Charles Brown doesn’t get much respect from Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For. Out of his 100 applications for a job as a marketing manager, the Charlie Brown of our story has no idea where he stands with six out 10 of the companies.

Six weeks after applying, Charlie heard directly from only 28 companies that he isn’t getting a job. Seven more gave him a reference number, but despite having an MBA from Michigan and BA in mechanical engineering, Charlie didn’t know what to do with it. Three companies allowed him to check his status through their website. One — REI, the outdoor company that has been on the 100 best list for years — actually gave him a call.

As the other Charlie Brown would say, “Good grief.” keep reading…

You’ve written a compelling job ad that hits all the hot points. You’ve distributed it widely. You’ve even managed to get it high up on search results pages. Despite all that, the number of applications is disappointing.

What went wrong?

The problem, says CareerBuilder, could very well be technical. Bad links, computer or Internet difficulties, and cumbersome applications are the top reasons cited by interested candidates for not responding to a job posting. keep reading…

Mystery Applicant is the winner of ERE’s first-ever competition between startups, one that began with almost 50 applicants and ended up with the candidate-experience technology firm pocketing $10,000.

You may have read about the company as it launched quietly and later said it had signed on an 80,000-candidate-a-year customer. It was picked among six finalists, including Goood Job; Lab of Apps; Ongig; Traitperception, and Venturocket. They came from as far as the UK and Israel, and as close as San Francisco to take the stage in Mountain View today at the Recruiting Innovation Summit to show off their products and fight for the grand prize.

Nick Price, director of Mystery Applicant, said after the award was announced that he’ll use the money to invest in product development. “The money is brilliant,” he said, “but the recognition of what we’re doing is really good too.”

Tweets flew fairly frequently during the competition, and the startups were grilled from judges Jason Warner, Steve Boese, and Ethel Chen, including being asked:

• How will you make money?
• How will it work with an iPad?
• What’s your go-to-market strategy?
• Does your product do so many different things that the message gets muddled up?
• How do you solve the problem that some people in our networks are people we don’t really know?

Judges were asked to choose a winner based on such things as whether the companies actually solved a business problem; how well they focused on a target market; and how well they positioned their product in the marketplace.

Videos from the demos are below, broken up into two parts and followed by the announcement of the winner, which included comments by the judges. keep reading…

When U.S. college students and recent grads go looking for a job, they want quick answers, trustworthy insights, and evidence the employers know how to use the various social media channels to add value to their search.

So says PotentialPark, a Swedish recruitment market research firm. Its annual survey (U.S. results were not posted as of this writing) of 3,552 U.S. college students and recent grads found young job seekers are comfortable with social media and expect that you will be too. While 86 percent of them make use of company career sites, more than half (56 percent) expect to find a company on Facebook, and 69 percent expect you to be on LinkedIn.

What PotentialPark found when it audited the corporate career sites of almost 500 U.S. firms was that only 57 percent link to their Facebook page; 79 percent connect to LinkedIn or some other professional network. The career site itself, says PotentialPark, “rarely offers any interaction.” keep reading…

According to the U.S. Labor Department, 2.1 million people resigned their jobs in February, the most in any month since the start of the Great Recession.

This is startling given that the economy is not strong and that millions are out of work. The natural inclination would seem to me to be to hunker down and hang on to the job you have, no matter how bad it is. That is what happened in previous recessions. Yet these were disgruntled, unsatisfied, and unfulfilled people who voluntarily, many without other positions or jobs lined up, chose to leave.

In discussions with some of them, I heard talk about feeling they having been used to bolster executive salaries and inflate shareholder expectations unrealistically. Many felt unappreciated and disrespected — a word I hear a lot now and never used to hear at all.

And with eroding benefits and the potential of better access to health care, the hold that corporations used to have is loosening. keep reading…

HR professionals have designed, built, torn down, and rebuilt many things to enhance talent acquisition: processes, procedures, metrics, sourcing channels, more metrics, and even more sourcing channels.

Looking back over our careers, we can see that great things have been created across the recruiting landscape. On Earth Day, however, we are thinking about how we can reduce, reuse, and recycle to contribute to a healthier “candidate planet.” With all the “stuff’ which has been created, we believe we need to replenish and restore our overall candidate experience. Here are a few of the ideas we’re pursuing now: keep reading…

There are plenty of whitepapers and blogs that attempt to define and describe the candidate experience, but can we go further? Can we find a way to make it part of a holistic recruitment approach, and think of it more like a product, or a “deliverable” item?

Granted, it is hard to imagine that the candidate experience can exist independently of a talent acquisition strategy and vice versa. Instead, we need to refine the entire recruitment strategy to ensure the candidate experience is pre-targeted and delivers real value to the customer.

So, What’s the Product?

Recruiters are always looking to enhance, differentiate, and sell their products, but what exactly is the final recruiting product? Some may say it’s the job offer, but if we think about the way recruitment tools and strategies have evolved, this definition alone cannot capture it.

All of the recruiting and talent resourcing efforts that use interactive media sites — creating user-friendly career pages, blogs, communities, etc. — are designed to draw in and gain candidate interest. They hope to entice candidates (as much so as hiring managers) to “buy” into a recruitment process in the hope of obtaining a job. But, if the product is only the job on offer — and this can only be given to one person — this would leave most of the customers who applied with nothing to show for their “purchase.” If we say that the final product is the company job offer, we are bound to have many unhappy customers.

Instead, we can argue that the one thing all buyers can receive from an organization is a candidate experience. Whether they actively apply for a position or they are approached, and regardless of whether or not they are offered and accept the job, the experience is the one thing each applicant can receive.

From the moment the first connection is made, be it a click on a site, an email or a telephone call, the experience begins. keep reading…

On Wednesday, October 27 at noon Eastern, we will be privileged to have a brief LIVE chat on our sister site, SourceCon.com, with the “personal branding guru” himself — Dan Schawbel. Schawbel is the managing partner of Millennial Branding, LLC, and the author of the #1 international bestselling career book, Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future. Me 2.0 made the New York Times summer reading list for job seekers, was one of three social networking books recommended by Shape magazine, was the #1 career book of 2009 by The New York Post, is a #1 bestseller in Japan, and is also being translated into Chinese, Korean, and French. Recently, Schawbel was named to the prestigious Inc Magazine 30 Under 30 list. Additionally, Dan’s blog, the Personal Branding Blog®, was ranked the #1 job blog by Careerbuilder in 2008 and 2009.

keep reading…

Everyone is on LinkedIn and so are we! Join us there for more of the interesting news and conversations that ERE is known for.

Here’s what’s going on in the ERE community this week:

1. Think Twice Before Hiring an Overqualified Candidate
2. Devaluation Of The Sourcing Role
3. What Keeps You Up at Night?
4. Candidate Experience Survey – Survey Questions?
5. Where Should I Post Sales Jobs in Canada?
6. He’s MY Candidate!

1. Think Twice Before Hiring an Overqualified Candidate

Mark Bregman writes that you should think hard before hiring someone who is overqualified. He writes, “The one real issue with overqualified candidates is whether they will stay. When a person steps down a level, and takes less pay, there is a real risk they will be vulnerable to recruiters, or will even seek another opportunity, seeing your position as only a stop-gap, or a way station on the path to something better.

Is there a such thing as an overqualified candidate? Is it a big deal? Check out the great discussion going on in the comment section and weigh in yourself.
keep reading…

What a fun week in the community. I can’t wait to see more of you in person at the #socialrecruiting summit in May (pst… this is the last week to get the early bird discount).

Here’s what’s going on in the ERE community this week:

1. Inhouse recruiters: ignore Facebook at your peril
2. Confessions of a Job Seeker: What I Learned!
3. Typers and Talkers
4. Oregon Law Bans Use of Credit Reports for Employment Screening
5. Diversity Firms — Know of any good ones?
6. Featured group of the week: Dallas/Ft. Worth Recruiters

1. Inhouse recruiters: ignore Facebook at your peril

Katrina Collier writes regarding the importance of not ignoring Facebook, “Social Networking Could Soon Pass Search, written by ReadWriteWeb‘s Marshall Kirkpatrick, summed up the importance of this beautifully: “What would it mean if social networking over-took search in terms of sheer visits online? It would mark a sea-change on the Internet. No longer would our dominant use of the web be seeking out web pages built by HTML web-masters! Now we would all be publishing tiny little updates that perhaps only our friends and family care about.” So what “tiny little updates” are being written about your company and are any of these preventing you from attracting and hiring great talent?

Is Facebook an essential part of your branding and attraction strategy? If not, would a shift in traffic numbers with Facebook in first place change your mind? Drop a line in the comments.

keep reading…

Have you joined our LinkedIn group yet? Check it out.

Here’s what’s going on in the ERE community this week:

1. Lessons for a new recruiter
2. Bogus posting or clumsy candidate experience?
3. How come you’re ignoring your employment brand?
4. Is pay to play the new norm?
5. Can you get a good background check for $25.00?
6. Featured group of the week: Canadian Staffing Experts

1. Lessons for a new recruiter

Matthew Hakaim had an interesting post about lessons he learned as a new recruiter. He writes, “It’s easy to find someone to teach the “doings” involved in the work, but to find someone who is passionate about what they do and the service they provided was key for me. I found that passion and experience in one of the client managers at the firm I worked for, and I immediately aligned myself with her. Her name is Maria Barton, a no nonsense Brit with a work ethic that most people could only aspire to achieve, and the people skills akin to some of the world’s greatest leaders.

What lessons did you learn as a new recruiter that you can share with others entering the field?
keep reading…