Moments of truth are what shape, form and define us. They chisel and authenticate the essence of what we are and why we are. The manner in which we interact with such moments is pivotal to how we are judged and how we judge ourselves. We can be perceived as either rising to the occasion or falling by the wayside. Just this week, I took my daughter to her own moment of educational truth at a university interview – jury still out. Two England sports teams appear to be emerging positively from their own respective moments of truth. The rugby team, after a generally underwhelming series of autumn internationals played the hitherto incomparable All-Blacks off the park. Meanwhile our cricket team subsided ignobly against India in the first test, only to turn a rather sharp corner in the right direction by crushing them in the next and playing themselves into a strong position in the third test. Ed Balls, the Shadow Chancellor, faced his own when replying to George Osborne’s Autumn Statement – instead of claiming that ‘The national deficit is rising’, his actual words were ‘The national deficit is not rising’ – so missing the opportunity to put a beleaguered government further to the sword. A moment of truth fumbled much like the Indian fielding.
And employer brands face their own moments of truth. Specifically when they most tangibly interact with their candidate audiences – the application process. This is clearly a major stress test for an employer brand – how do candidates feel about the organisation and the value proposition they have bought into when they get up close and personal with it?
TMP recently invested in two complementary pieces of research – an analysis of candidate responses to the application process and a view of what employers think they are delivering to applicants. Whilst it is relatively straightforward to associate the employer brand with external recruitment communications and/or internal employee engagement, we wanted to understand to what extent the employer brand and promise was being delivered during the candidate process. Was it enhancing and validating the impression candidates had of the employment experience at a potential new organisation or was it destroying return on investment in the employer brand? How was the employer brand performing during this moment of truth?
Let’s examine some of the key out-takes – and TMP are just pulling together a whitepaper should you be interested in a more comprehensive journey through the findings.
Pleasingly, there was a sense of common purpose about the overall importance of the application process – 89% of recent candidates agreed that if an organisation felt strongly about its people, this would be reflected in the application process. This correlated with 91% of employers who agreed that the way an individual was treated during the application process would ultimately determine whether they wanted the job or not.
However, candidate and employer were not always of a similar mind during the research. 41% of our candidate survey felt that they would judge an application form on the time it took to fill it in and that the most irritating facet of the process was when an employer asked for duplicate information during an application. On the one hand, 70% of employers felt that they lost too many candidates during the filling in of an application form, yet 72% ask for not only a CV but a completed form as well.
Surprisingly, communications and clarity around the issue of assessment centres also saw candidate and employer some distance apart – whereas 54% of participants felt they were either not informed or only partially informed about the structure of the assessment centre and what was expected of them, 80% of employers felt that they had gone to great lengths to spell exactly (if not successfully) this out.
There appeared some glaring disparity around the issue of applicant feedback. Although 39% of candidates were of the opinion that they had not received feedback, just 6% of employers thought they had not provided such feedback. A major discrepancy.
Fascinatingly, even those people who had received an offer as a result of the candidate process were not completely convinced. Some 41% still had their doubts about the job they had accepted but were yet to start – making them all too easily open to counter or alternative offers.
For TMP, perhaps two final points fell out of the research which suggested that far too many employers were not following through on their employer brand at this critical moment of truth – a truth for their employer brand and the likelihood of turning great applicants into great employees. Firstly, despite the research turning up some sizeable gaps between what candidates are looking for from this process and what employers feel they are delivering, 88% of employers felt that the candidate experience they were providing was representative of how they treated their employees. Let us hope this is not the case.
Perhaps of most concern: whereas 77% of employers felt their recruitment communications were aligned to their employer brand, just 24% felt their assessment centre was, 17% their application form and 16% their telephone interview.
It seems that many employer brands are either failing this key moment of truth or are simply not aware of the extent to which the candidate process is a moment of truth. Even people at the business end of the candidate process – at assessment centre stage or even beginning their on-boarding – still feel like strangers to an organisation’s employer brand.
The candidate process is where an organisation’s employer brand is at its most naked and its most influential. And yet is appears all too easy to assume that employer brands are for messaging and not for the confidence, reassurance, clarity, openness, sincerity and alignment that underpin great candidate journeys.
Getting to the heart of your employee mindset 