Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Candidate Feedback
From a contributor: I've been in senior level executive recruitment for over 24 years now. As most of us know, the industry has always been client-driven. Recruiters are expected to represent their clients in the market and make talent-assessment decisions on behalf of the client, long before candidates are presented. Even in periods of talent shortage these recruiters must remain client-driven because they are retained/paid by clients. Over the years many firms have chosen to survey their clients in order to better manage their expectations in the future. However, it seems no one wants to survey the candidates! Is it because recruiters believe candidates get what they expect throughout the process? Is it because candidates lack power in the process? After all, most candidates are just one in a group of 6-10 presented. Or is it because recruiters believe that for candidates the process is not broken, or does not warrant improvement?
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11 comments:
Interesting diversity in these responses, from "we don't have time" to "we value candidate input". Like customer feedback surveys I believe it's important for every service provider to take advantage of every opportunity to improve their service. Surveys like this one (http://www.zapsurvey.com/Survey.aspx?id=3bfb7488-d378-4daf-9fbb-fbb9f0dcc690) are inexpensive to produce and manage, assuming you can get candidates and potential candidates to participate.
The real kicker is how to implement improvements in your recruitment process that help prospects and candidates but are easily translated as an improvement for the paying (hiring) client. The most obvious solution is to provide results of the surveys or general candidate feedback to the client. Depending on the level of the search and volume of projects, a client might find this feedback extremely useful in better understanding how they are viewed by the talent marketplace. For two clients, we included this ongoing feedback at their request - they discovered they needed to fix their comp structure and shorten their hiring process in order to improve their reputation and attract passive candidates.
In our survey results we found the main issues raised by prospects and candidates to be:
1) Communication, described as detailed, frequent updates, flexibility in scheduling and contact that makes a candidate feel important.
2) Managed Expectations, described as realistic feedback going into the process and realistic feedback after interviewing. Most prospects and candidates understand search, but feel their expectations are always too high, leading to greater disappointment down the road.
3) Meeting Preparation, described by candidates as the recruiter's effort to help make the candidate smart going into interviews - beyond annual reports and website links. Candidates describe the ingoing process as empty and the outgoing process (feedback) as full of ideas, criticism and suggestions for "next time".
4) Acknowledgment, described as the courtesy of responding to the overture of candidates. Many receive automated email responses, but feel a better acknowledgment exists, somehow communicating greater detail about their match with the current and prospective inventory of search projects, suggestions, etc.
As a recruiter and consultant, I understand point number four is time-consuming and for recruiters and corporations that receive hundreds of resumes per day/week this task is too time-consuming. To streamline access, some recruiters use candidate worksites to allow candidates a feeling of getting past the gatekeepers, but this may not fully address their need for feedback.
We do hiring manager and new hire satisfaction surveys but if you actually survey the candidates that you don't end up hiring I'd be very interested in learning more about your findings. Response rates and satisfaction levels of course but as well the kind of improvements that you have made that you most likely would not have implemented without this kind of feedback.
What format is your candidate survey in? Do you only give it to those you end up hiring or every candidate that goes throught the process? Would you be willing to send me your survey? I am the Director of Staffing for a CPA firm in CA and very interested in what you have done.
Actually, while hiring manager feedback is very important to us, candidate feedback is equally important to us. We use surveys to officially capture the data from both groups, but the candidate feedback is often what we use to determine process improvements to be considered.
Whether recruiting firms have traditionally seen the value in surveying candidates or not, in a competitive environment, the assumption should be that the brand/ reputation of the firm is as important as employer brand/ reputation is to a corporate recruiting organization.
Perhaps because the candidate is not the 'client', my experience says that many recruiters [corporate recruiters and recruiting firms] skip the necessary first step in a professional relationship: establishing shared expectations. For example, some recruiters promise to call the candidate regardless of the outcome, when if they thought about it, that may not be a reasonable expectation, given the pile of work and sheer number of transactions they're dealing with. This seemingly small infraction becomes the broken promise that damages trust. The candidate is unlikely to refer others [I always remember the consumer surveys done years ago that indicated that a dissatisfied 'customer' typically told at least 20 people about their disappointing experience. I think this applies to candidates as well.]
In a corporate setting, there is much to be gained by surveying candidates who were hired as well as those who left and those who 'got away' in the hiring process. Many misconceptions are put to rest through this process, including false beliefs that, if acted upon without objective data, can easily send a sourcing initiative in the wrong direction. The same, for many reasons, should apply to recruiting firms who care about their reputations and their ability to attract the best talent on behalf of their corporate customers.
Over the years many firms have chosen to survey their clients in order to better manage their expectations in the future. However, it seems no one wants to survey the candidates! Is it because recruiters believe candidates get what they expect throughout the process?
Your question actually has the answer in it--they are not the client. In our transactions, the party that issues the check and hopefully, checks is the client --which is why we survey institutional clients about their opinions and fantasies about the search process and how it should occur.
What do applicants care about from us? Honesty. Communications, That we take their call and hang on the phone with them and stroke their ego when their friends have squashed their egos with a pointed question.
In one of my programs, I have applicants pay for access to me because, frankly, in traditional search, I don't have the time to speak to everyone who calls and asks, "So, what's going on? Do you have anything for me?"
Without doing such triage, I would spend all day answering questions like these, rather than do what they really want me to do--network my way to a firm that wants to hire them.
So, I think it is because we believe we know the answer and have little to learn from them.
Recruiters are still operating on a business model that really hasn't changed since the industry was established. Clients realise this and are now becoming much more innovative. Also a new breed of non-recruitment company recruitment outsourcing is now taking hold where our clients are being taught by recruitment technologists to our job better than we do it. HRX (www.hrx.com.au) is an example of this sort of company.
Our whole industry needs to take a new approach to dealing with candidates (eg more like sports agents) otherwise we risk longer term irrelevance.
You raise a very valid point about the importance of the candidate in this entire process. I had noticed this with several of my client over the years and had always wondered why would someone not pay attention to the candidates who could be the biggest source of referrals? As an outsourced recruitment provider we had decided to address this a year ago by doing the following:
□ Implementation of Candidate Satisfaction Surveys: This is used mainly to gather information of how satisfied the candidates were with the recruitment process and how it could be improved to make their experience better.
□ Creation of a new position of Candidate Care Specialist: This position was created to ensure that the candidate has a superlative experience through the recruitment lifecycle.
We went through several iterations of this process to ensure that we got the feedback needed to make changes which has led to great improvement in the candidate satisfaction scores. Lo and behold, we are now swamped with referrals.
Ravi Subramanian
Director, Strategy & Development
office: 312.676.2320
illuma, LLC
www.illumallc.com
We don't have the resources (time and money) to do what candidates would like, so we as recruiters do the best that we can to balance a superior candidate experience with the resources available.
Previously written
1) Communication, described as detailed, frequent updates, flexibility in scheduling and contact that makes a candidate feel important.
2) Managed Expectations, described as realistic feedback going into the process and realistic feedback after interviewing. Most prospects and candidates understand search, but feel their expectations are always too high, leading to greater disappointment down the road.
3) Meeting Preparation, described by candidates as the recruiter's effort to help make the candidate smart going into interviews - beyond annual reports and website links. Candidates describe the ingoing process as empty and the outgoing process (feedback) as full of ideas, criticism and suggestions for "next time".
4) Acknowledgment, described as the courtesy of responding to the overture of candidates. Many receive automated email responses, but feel a better acknowledgment exists, somehow communicating greater detail about their match with the current and prospective inventory of search projects, suggestions, etc.
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Although candidate interview preparation is desirable and clearly part of Candidate Preparation 101, often what candidates are looking for is unreasonable and jealously guarded by the hiring employer.
As for #1, 2 and 4, this is part of the unreasonableness of candidate expectations. Often, TPRs are at the mercy of an employer who seems to change their their thinking day-to-day based upon new thinking, business circumstances and other variables.
If we were to actually relay every whim to an applicant, they would jump off a cliff (as would be the case in reverse).
As we all, I suspect, know, whether we are TPRs are corporate, part of our job is to manage hysteria and expectations of people who are deluded.
As a TPR, I don't have time to call every person "frequently" to report. My book is too large and, if I was slumping, I would be investing the time to build it again.
And email helps.
Interesting topic, and timely on my end. I've just hired a Recruiting Coordinator, and one of the tasks I've asekd her to take on is setting up a rolling applicant survey, likely using Survey Monkey. For now, I'm going to only ask candidates who we have hired to take the survey, but I'm toying with the idea of opening it up to all applicants (I'd embed a link to the survey in my ATS's auto-reply, where I already have a link to our career site RSS). If I get enough data points, I'll share my findings here on ERE.
>From my perspective as a corporate recruiter, such feedback is invaluable (even if I'm not always going to like the answers - actually, especially if I don't like the answers). I think the idea has some legs on the agency side, as well. One thing I noticed in several of the replies was the old-school TPA thinking of "the candidate isn't paying our bills." I grew up in TPA's, and disagree. The candidate and the client are both paying - just not both in coin. The candidate is paying us with their: talent, time, honesty, and cooperation. The fact is, we're always selling on both sides, and justifiably expect payment for our efforts. That means we have to have to behave like everyone's client. Because, well, they are.
I've noticed that some of the posters in this thread seem to have some disdain for their candidates, and feel like the bulk of them are pests that can be blown off. This might be easier short-term, but the long-term payoff comes from making an effort to communicate often and clearly with everyone. The always highly placable A-player is going to be looking for a recruiter they can buddy up with and trust - in return, they'll focus on you, and refer their A-player colleagues to you. To get them, it's important to go overboard on customer (candidate) satisfaction. In the end, you'll be dealing less with quantity, and more with quality. You'll make more placements, they'll be less painful, and you won't have to deal with a constant flood of B & C players who constantly pester you for feedback and updates. Also, those A-players usually go on to (or start off as) hiring authorities. At that point, they're clients who pay in cold, hard cash. They're going to remember who treated them well during their recruitment process.
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