When it comes to hiring manager candidate experience ….should I say it?….OK I will. Hiring managers suck.
I’ve taken a deep cleansing breath and re-thought it. Really, hiring managers are busy. They have so many competing demands that recruiters need to provide more education, more training, more automation and more oversight.
But you know what? Between you and me? They do kinda suck (bear with me, hiring managers. I give you props a little farther down).
No Reply
How do I know? I helped build software that automatically gathers feedback from candidates, recruiters and hiring managers at each step of the hiring process. And even though each emailed survey that goes out says “do not reply to this mailbox,” candidates still do.
At Survale, we have a monitored “Do Not Reply” mailbox that fills up with candidate feedback responses for those candidates that don’t quite understand or are just desperate to get through to someone.
When it comes to hiring manager candidate experience, things are not going as smoothly as Talent Acquisition might think when candidates get promoted to phone screen, interview and beyond. Here are some sample “No Replies:”
- “I never heard back to confirm a time. Emailed several times no answer. Still in the market. Thank you”
- “No one contacted me”
- “I really appreciate you reaching out. Unfortunately I cannot provide feedback since a conversation never took place. I did get a voice message and returned the call shortly after (within 30 mins) and then a week later but I never heard back.”
- “I was never contacted for any phone interview”
- “As a professional looking forward for an interview to advance in my career, it is very disheartening to have an interview scheduled and never get a call, let alone, essentially be ignored when trying to reach out. I feel that I missed a great opportunity due to the lack of communication skills, work ethic, and respect of the recruiter.”
- “No one contacted me as I was told they would.”
- “Somebody else interviewed me and dropped the ball and they never got back to me. They said they would be contacting me for another interview and they never did. I have lots of other interviews as we speak with other companies.”
You get the idea. And, yes, there are phone screens in here that might be blamed on other representatives besides hiring managers, but the core message is the same:
Talent acquisition professionals, you don’t know what happens after you move that applicant to phone screen, interview and beyond. And if you fear that much of the work you do to get qualified applicants into the hiring process is wasted, you would be correct.
Hiring Manager Candidate Experience: Ask. Know Better. Do Better
It’s time to look the problem in the eye. Take stock of the real waste in your hiring process. The fact is that candidate experience and hiring managers is a huge area of concern these days. But any candidate satisfaction efforts you undertake that don’t include real-time feedback from candidates, recruiters and hiring managers at every step of the journey is a waste of time.
Yes, that’s a beautiful career site and the search SEEMS cool and the job content is engaging enough and maybe the application is fast and easy, and your employer brand seems compelling but how do you now it’s EFFECTIVE
And what if it’s all great and then that applicant gets to an interview and no one shows up? Or the interviewer is unprepared, disrespectful and/or late? Or the candidate rejects your offer?
Utilizing real-time feedback that includes candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers gives you a full circle picture of what’s working and what’s not at each stage of the hiring funnel. Plus you have a chance to re-engage and save the candidate.
What’s more, this kind of feedback-driven process lets you hear from candidates, your peers, AND hiring managers. And guess what? Many hiring managers think Talent Acquisition is not giving them enough high quality options to fill their needs. And they are often right. It’s tough to find grey squirrels these days, let alone purple squirrels.
The fact is that there are a lot of very conscientious hiring managers that are great partners for Talent Acquisition. All the more reason to get real-time feedback from them to fine tune your processes.
Real time, full circle feedback identifies issues, allows you to fix them and quantifies the problem with real data you can use to enlist participants to do better.
So yes, it’s great that your sending out a survey every year or every six months or once in a while, but that data is old and it’s usually too general to identify specific issues. Certainly not specific hiring manager candidate experience.
If you’d like to learn how Survale can give you visibility into how your recruiting process is working for candidates, hiring managers and recruiters, click here for a video demo. It’s the perfect way to get candidate experience and hiring managers aligned and improving your hiring outcomes.
