We recently hired a new intern class for the summer. Every year, I’m reminded how much rejecting finalist intern candidates stinks, mostly because college students aren’t desensitized yet to the murky, brandless, generic black box of candidate rejection like the…
Candidate Experience
Candidate Experience vs. Candidate Quality? Have Your Cake and Eat it Too
When it comes to hiring in 2018, candidate experience is driving the bus. Failure to provide a good candidate experience can spell disaster for your hiring process and your brand. If you want proof, check out this cool little widget…
Slow Hiring Is Damaging Your Firm and Here Are 20 Reasons Why
Few realize that increasing your hiring speed often has the second-largest impact on hiring results (after referral hires). Most track time to fill, but few recruiting leaders calculate the high correlation between your hiring speed for top talent and their…
5 Traits of a Productive Recruiter
Recruiting is tougher than ever. Busy recruiters never seem to have enough time or qualified candidates at their disposal. So how are successful recruiters getting by? What are they doing differently? Here are five key traits which make them more…
The 7-Stage Framework for Developing an Award-Winning Candidate Experience
Candidates are indeed our customers, as found by Virgin Media when it realized that 18 percent of its rejected candidates were also customers, and costs due to poor candidate experience added up to $5.4 million in revenue. So, if we…
10 Candidate Experience Tips That Will Increase Offer Acceptance Ratios
While the surplus of available opportunities may be a major advantage for passive candidates with professional backgrounds in high demand, it is painful for companies who are hiring. Organizations all over the country are feeling the burden of talent scarcity,…
Does Your CEO Know You’re Rejecting Tens of Thousands Who Like Your Firm?
Any firm in the Fortune 200 is likely rejecting half a million applicants each and every year. But unbeknownst to most recruiting leaders, their awkward and mostly unmanaged process for notifying applicants that they have been rejected is likely causing…
Death of a Recruiter? I Don’t Think So
I made the last payment on the house today. Today, dear. And there’ll be nobody home. A sob rises in her throat. We’re free and clear. Sobbing more fully, released: We’re free. — Arthur Miller All too often we as…
4 Simple Ways to Ensure Your Hiring Process Isn’t Turning Away Millennial Jobseekers
The generational divide is more an illusion than anything else. It in many ways comes down to etiquette. As a recruiter or hiring manager, there are several key tactics that require very little effort on your part, yet make a…
The Search for The Best Interviewer
I once did a study to measure the commercial impact of poor candidate experience in a large subscription based telco business called Virgin Media. You might have heard about it? That work, almost four years ago, helped me engage a…
Glassdoor Survey: This Is the Largest Problem Facing American and UK Employers
The largest problem facing American and UK employers at the moment is attracting quality applicants, according to a recent study published by Glassdoor in September. When surveyed, 76 percent of hiring mangers stated they have experienced difficulties drawing the attention…
How a Non-recruiter Learned to Improve Candidate Experience
As an employment marketing writer, I spend a lot of time working closely with recruiters and hiring managers. I am fascinated by their experiences — from the entertaining to the disappointing to the bizarre. But the best stories are the…
Sometimes We Recruiters Forget that Looking for a Job Is the Hardest Thing
In a post about the homeless a while ago I made a pretty bold statement, even for me, which is rare: “The three most stressful life events according to psychologists are, in order, getting married, buying a home and looking…
Revelation — Treating Job Applicants Who Are Also Customers Poorly Is Costing You Million$
If the customer is always king, then an applicant who is simultaneously your customer must also be treated like a king. If you recruit at a firm that has retail customers, I guarantee that you don’t know the answer to this…
I’m a Responsible Babysitter, But Something Tells Me That Job Alerts Aren’t Working
I’m concerned about job alerts. These are the micro-apps that job boards, applicant tracking system vendors, and others, have created to keep candidates interested (warm) by pushing out opportunities to candidates that are supposed to be relevant to the candidate….
Candidate Experience? One Company Is Thinking About the Applicant Experience
Close followers of the talent-acquisition field know that there has been a lot talk of the candidate experience; some folks have thought about redefining the term to include people browsing around a company’s website before they’re even a candidate … passive…
Spring Cleaning Your Employer Brand
Spring has sprung. There are flowers in the air, a new crop of graduates preparing to enter the workforce, and spring cleaning everywhere. At home and at work, people are tidying up their places and spaces. So why not add…
Frustrated With Your Recruiting Results? Ask New Hires ‘What Worked’
It’s a basic law for business process improvement. When your process is completed, you survey your users to find out what worked and what didn’t work. In recruiting, it turns out that identifying “what worked” is the second-most impactful of…
Candidate Coaching Improves Hiring Results — So Stop Losing Candidates For Preventable Reasons
If you are failing to coach your candidates prior to their interview, you may be unnecessarily losing as many as 20 percent of your qualified candidates simply for trivial reasons. Candidate coaching is where a corporate recruiter provides pre-interview guidance…
Which Comes First: Employment Brand or Candidate Experience?
Is a strong employment brand important? Yes, it can be. Is candidate experience important? Yes, it can be. For the last several years, at the end of the year, we were showered with predictions for what will be important in TA…