Importance of a Positive Candidate Experience During Job Hunting
Every touch point encountered with a brand becomes linked to the brand name and will ultimately affect how a consumer views that brand – whether favorably or unfavorably. A positive brand image is something organizations strive for and will spend millions of dollars a year on to instill in the minds of consumers. And perhaps the reason why organizations are willing to invest so heavily on this topic is because they know that a negative customer experience can have a significant impact on a company’s success.
Take, for example, a fitness club. How many of you joined a club at a rate of $60 a month – thinking you got a good deal - and then realized that your friend, who recently joined, signed on for 10 bucks cheaper? How did that make you feel? Angry? Annoyed? Most possibly both – but there’s not much you can do about it now; except maybe bottle up your discontent for that fitness club and then vow to sign up somewhere else next year. That’s the thing about negative brand experiences – people don’t forget.
The same can be said about the job hunting experience. There are many factors that can occur during online job hunting that may affect how a candidate views that organization and their decision to work there. Some of the more common ones include:
- Recruitment Brochures: Recruitment brochures should be used to inspire candidates to want to work for your organization. If a recruitment brochure doesn’t properly communicate to an applicant the benefits working for your company can provide or the types of candidates you’re looking for, this may actually have an adverse effect on the types of people who apply to the job. A study by Gatewood and colleagues found that, “the image applicants formed about an organization, based on their recruitment brochures, accounted for 60% of the variance in decisions to apply for work.”
- Long Application Processes: Hour long questionnaires and surveys may help an organization determine the best fit for the company, but to a job seeker, it’s tiresome. Factor in that statistically the chances of actually getting the job are slim, this may deter candidates from even applying. In fact, Richard Cober – The Quest for the Qualified Job Seeker – states, “The more time that passes between exposure to a recruitment message and the opportunity to apply to an organization, the less likely a potential applicant may be to follow through with their intentions to apply.”
- Application Management: How many times has a candidate gone in for an initial interview, to never hear back from the organization ever again? Ignoring applicants makes them feel as if they don’t matter and often relays the image that they don’t care about their employees either. Taking the time to tell applicants a position has been filled will do more good than harm, and may even persuade candidates to want to work for the company that much more.
What these aspects of the recruitment process illustrate is that every step has an impact on the company’s brand image. It’s important for employers to carefully think through how the recruitment process is experienced by the applicant. If not, the effects may include: a decrease in the amount of applicants applying, a decrease in the quality of applicants applying and a negative image in the minds of other job seekers as well. If done properly, however, this will often bring about the most qualified and valued types of candidates out there applying to your organization and make them never want to leave.
At Jobtac we know what it feels like to be ignored or have to go through long and tedious application processes. That’s why we’ve added features such as Application Tracking/Management and iapply to make job hunting easier than anything out there. The tools are at your disposal to utilize and the benefits come not only to the job seekers, but to the employer as well.
