The "Csquare" of Recruitment - Providing best experience to your candidates and client leads to the real success

In this post I am not going to discuss about the widely used smart ways of managing, convincing candidates or clients – I would like to bring up the point of how important is it is to make client and candidate experience part of the overall recruitment strategy for the  super success of the recruitment function.

Everybody in recruitment today witnessing the transformation of staffing function in to a much bigger strategic activity, from one of the HR activities to in a way it is emerging as a separate function altogether. As the war for talent gets fierce day by day – it is extremely crucial for every recruitment team to shift their focus towards two important stake holders, who can influence the overall success of the recruitment function. It is time now we start re looking at our efforts towards redefining and enhancing recruitment experience for our client and

candidate.

Recruitment managers and recruiters should not forget the fact that recruitment is a service -irrespective of whether you are in a staffing services company or you are in an in-house recruitment team, it could be a IT services organization or a product development company. We are business enablers – we are not the business and most of the times we represent an organization. As Dave Ulrich said “Value and quality of the service it determined by the receiver not by the giver”. Whenever we start looking at the overall success of recruitment function we consider parameters like source mix, Turnaround time, Conversion ratio, Quality of Data and market intelligence, Offer decline percentage, Employer branding activities and to an extent verbal feedback from your clients which is greatly influenced by that particular moment and personal interactions. We all miss the “candidates” who are the focal point of the entire recruitment process and we also miss “Client” because of who we exist today. Few might argue that we receive feedback from clients/internal business regularly and work on it – but please do understand this is always about one single open position or it could be on why delay is taking place in filling positions etc, but we never receive constructive feedback on overall recruitment nor we put an effort to streamline and put up a robust feedback mechanism.  Now this is the costliest miss – this will lead to the danger of recruitment teams being perceived as transactional pieces. Let us see what needs to done and how that can we bring a paradigm shift in the way your client and candidate perceives recruitment and how it will lead to overall success.

Client: Diagnosis, not post mortem! Recruitment team needs to be proactive to provide better experience – get involved from day 1

Most of the times recruitment teams fail to meet the expectations not because they are not good enough but it is because they don’t really know what business exactly expecting, business or recruitment team alone cannot be blamed for this, in the conventional thinking recruitment is always a support function and comes second. as a result of this recruitment team receives requests to fill once business finalized their budgets, projections and deliverables, business has a deadline for each project to be delivered and to meet these they need people as of yesterday – without people they cannot meet their deliverables. So they push recruitment team and get pushed in return – it will become an ugly web where brick passing happens to and fro. There is flaw here.

There is nothing called closely aligning recruitment strategy to business strategy - recruitment strategy must be part of the business strategy

You have different metrics – Different deadlines – make it one: 

Almost all the time, business wants to deliver things at pace which is different from the pace at recruitment teams aiming to fill positions. See below

Technology team plans to deliver a product in next 2 months but SLA for closing a position for recruitment team still remains 90 days. So what will happen in this case – it will be similar like “operation success but patient dead”, recruitment team will try and fill positions in 90 days, but technical team will not able to ship the as per the plan. Now here we need tackle this problem from two ends – one, Recruitment head must be involved while Technology teams trying to put deadlines in place for their delivery and consider staffing problems to have achievable targets for future. From the other side – for recruitment team SLAs must not be “writing on the wall” – they should be flexible enough to adjust their SLAs as per business requirements – reason is if business fails there is no relevance for anybody’s existence.

Do not forget you are sailing in the same boat:  

Recruitment team often forgets that you and your business are working hard for the same purpose – “they need people more than you”, but when you forget this both sides will end up in an argumentative mode.in my experience so far I did see some serious flaws from business’ side which makes the life of recruitment team really difficult – but as we all know, we are business enablers and we are in service – so diagnose the problem and place reports in front of the business like a doctor – let this decide whether they want to get it fixed or not. If the recruitment team is date driven and come up with solutions, business will agree – reason being the same – they need people more desperately than the recruitment team.

It is not just Recruitment team’s problem – it is Organization’s problem: 
Most of the times recruitment team hides issues from business, It is the biggest mistake, let the business see problems through your eyes. You might not have a great brand name, your business model may not be really appealing to candidates – let business know, give them first-hand information, let them understand your exact issues, then only your client will be able to agree with you and empathize and realize as organization’s problems rather criticizing recruitment team.

Let your client be the owner of you success: 
Not for the sake of it – truly recruitment teams succeeds because of their client, the kind of insight they provide, the amount of time they spent with you play an incredible role in recruitment team’s success.

Never hide failure, shortcomings – I know of recruitment managers who asks their team to hide offer declines from the business till the last moment – by doing so you are losing credibility, no matter how many wonders you might do in the future, your client will not trust you.so let them know the moment you have a bad news.

Provide market intelligence regular, give an update about your competitors, and provide metrics around how you are performing. Let your client know your strategy, take their feedback embed them honestly – communicate the back up plans too – by doing so you are building the trust.

Never ever use the tone of an outsider when you are communicating to your client irrespective of whether they are within your organization or outside. Hard fact recruitment owns the problems of their client – you are solving their problem – hence you are “your client”  

Candidate: he is the solution for the problems you have

That company’s recruiters do not have a clue on what they are looking for!

They made me wait for one hour in the reception!!

I am done with the interview – but never heard back!!!

Interviewer did not have manners- he kept on speaking on his mobile while I was in the interview room!!!!

The above are few comments I have heard from my friends and colleagues who have attended interviews with various companies. It is sad that the most important stakeholders in recruitment process is not treated well. It is astonishing how recruitment team can forget that “the candidate is one who decides their success or failure”. We need to treat each candidate as a guest, I know and worked with few companies where the candidate is pampered starting from providing fine breakfast to pick and drop for the interview. Not all companies can afford to do that, because of the fact that not all of them are rich. To give the finest experience to a candidate you do not have to pamper him with nice lunch or cool drinks always, to be honest that not  is the purpose why candidate visited your place. Hence it is always a bonus to pamper candidates with nice stuff but is not mandatory to provide them great experience.

Provide consistent information about the opening and organization: 

Recruitment team must team make sure that information shared over phone should match with what is written on your careers page and wherever it has been published. Most of the times in a hurry recruiters post a very brief JD on the Jobsites, which will mislead candidates – must be avoided.

Let it be the memorable day:  

Candidate needs to be at his best during the interview , make him feel comfortable, receive them well with warmth, inquire if they want anything, provide them a special closed room for few minutes so that they can unwind themselves from their work related issues.Tell him how long the interview will take, run him through the JD and explain the background of interviewers,If candidate needs to wait for long – this happens when you have interviews lined consecutively, provide them some snacks – nobody likes the feeling of an empty stomach.

Let them know:  

Not telling candidates about the status of their application or interview is the biggest sin, in my view a recruiter who misses this frequently is not fit for his/her role at all. You may not be the only company that the candidate has applied; this status update will help him to take crucial decisions. Make sure you communicate the status – positive/Negative without miss, a recruitment who does this at 100% hit will be the most successful team.

Conduct a Survey with your candidates: 

There are so many free tools available on the internet to conduct surveys; Recruitment should conduct a candidate experience survey every quarter and analyses their shortfall, should implement measure in the next quarter to make it better. Ideally every candidate should be part of this survey. Make candidate experience part recruiter’s KRA, and give it good weightage.

Candidates are the ones who will build your brand – they speak, they write over internet, they refer and recruitment team succeeds.