I was talking to a recruiting ops manager recently about providing positive candidate experience. As a recruiting ops person, her primary focus is efficiency with her people, processes and technologies and she understands the link between positive experiences and recruiting outcomes.
We founded Survale to serve recruiting ops people like her, not as a tool to make candidates happy, though that is a necessary byproduct of what it does. We founded Survale to show companies just where their processes are breaking down and point the way to fixing them. The fact that this gets me more excited than delighting candidates is between me and my therapist.
So imagine my surprise when my recruiting ops friend pointed out that one major benefit of exposing candidate experience feedback to recruiters and hiring managers in day to day TA management, is empathy.
You know that feeling when you hear something that strikes you as brilliant and then you realize how utterly obvious it is? That brilliant thing that hides just below your nose?
It’s not that recruiters and hiring managers are callous uncaring people. Far from it. But they are in the business of disappointing many more people than they delight. And so many of the dispositioned are just toggles on a computer screen to recruiters. But dispositions are very important events for candidates. And they come at the end of several interactions with the organization, if not with people. If you’re not exposed to feedback on a regular basis, everything becomes out of sight out of mind.
This recruiting ops manager explains that, especially in high volume recruiting environments, recruiting can get very impersonal. Many recruiters work in environments where candidates are evaluated and hired with little to no human interaction. Reading that a candidate was disappointed because they never received any communication after they applied, or that they are bummed out because they really love the company and hoped they could have been hired, cuts through the anonymity central to many recruiting processes.
Year round exposure to candidate feedback reminds recruiters and hiring managers alike that what they do affects people. And that these candidates have hopes and aspirations that hang in the balance. They also have difficulties: Transportation issues that make it difficult to get to interviews, or caretaking responsibilities that require flexibility. All of this comes through in candidate feedback and reminds us that the process is personal.
Is empathy required for positive candidate experience? I think respect and diligence are more important to positive candidate experience, but I think empathy goes a long way in supporting both respect and diligence.
By exposing recruiters and hiring managers to regular candidate feedback you provide a great reminder that we are all in the people business. They can take that orientation and translate it into better experiences for candidates. And guess what? Those better experiences show up as kudos in future candidate feedback. And the cycle reinforces itself.
