I wrote recently that employers have lost their candidate experience North Star. And then someone commented: Sorry to disagree with you, but the employment world has never had its North Star to lose in the first place.
I know the person and certainly empathize, but my response was that we do work with employers every year that do have it and/or have found it. We prefer to highlight those while trying to help others to improve their recruiting processes and communication and feedback loops.
The hard part is keeping the North Star in constant view. Based on our annual candidate experience benchmark research, it’s a smaller universe of employers that do it consistently.
We’re currently writing our 2023 benchmark research reports that will be available in early 2024, and unfortunately, the overall positive candidate experience, what we’re now calling candidate contentment, declined sharply while candidate resentment, the very negative experience, increased globally.
However, there are employers working hard to reverse this trend, those that have above-average candidate experience ratings in our annual benchmark research. Here are just a few excerpts from case studies included in our upcoming 2023 research reports:
“We are committed to providing personalized interview feedback for each candidate. Our goal is to leave them in a better position than when we found them. Additionally, we’ve created over 20 email communication templates that allow for a more personalized response when regretting candidates upon resume review (which represents about 90% of applicants).” — Room & Board
“We’ve launched organization-wide training sessions and internal campaigns to emphasize the importance of treating candidates as human beings. This includes empathy-building exercises and understanding the impact of a positive candidate experience on our employer brand.” — UST
“To offer candidates more flexibility and transparency, we now provide them with the choice of receiving updates via a phone call or email upon final selection. We also prioritize upfront communication, sharing targeted start dates with candidates and the hiring team to ensure alignment.” — Ingevity
Sadly, it’s too easy to focus on the negative candidate experiences, so let’s focus on what we’re collectively doing to improve recruiting and the candidate experience, and keep building on those incremental improvements.
No matter what happens in 2024, we implore employers to refocus on the North Star of improving their communication and feedback loops and ensure all candidates (and employees) are given empathic and timely closure if they’re not going to get the job.
That’s why we’re again grateful to launch #CandExperienceDay2024 on Wednesday, January 24, 2024!
This is where employers, recruiting professionals, recruiting technology providers, and candidates alike can help us elevate and promote a quality candidate experience everywhere by sharing your positive candidate experience stories in social media posts, quotes, pictures, memes, videos, and more across preferred social media channels on January 24, 2024, using the hashtags #CandExperienceDay2024 and #TheCandEs.
We’ve celebrated Candidate Experience Day for the past few years to kick off our new benchmark research program year, and we hope you join us January 24, 2024.
Happy Holidays!