A close family member is in the middle of changing jobs right now and the process she has experienced to reach such a stage has been insightful. It’s hard to avoid candidate experience as a key theme today, largely because the vast majority of people calling out 2018 talent acquisition trends have chosen exactly this subject in their list. And it’s pretty common to analyse exactly where recruiting organisations are letting themselves down in this regard. However, it would be some challenge to encounter a more positive, more swift, more brand-enhancing candidate experience than the one she has just been through.
But the key reflection on the process? Transparency. At no point during the various interviews, phone calls and emails did she not know what might happen next, and when and with whom. Her decision to accept their subsequent offer was not a difficult one.
And in an era where AI and online metrics are transforming both society and talent acquisition, in particular, surely we take transparency as a given?
It doesn’t always feel that way.
Certainly not in the eyes of Keith Weed, Unilever’s CMO, who threatened last week to pull his vast marketing spend from the likes of Facebook and Google. Given he spends 25% of his budget with the two, it’s hard to overestimate the impact it might have. And why? In response to the growing criticism that both sites (and others) do little about the fake news, sexism, racism and extremism with which the likes of Unilever often find their brand messaging sharing online space. Little wonder, then, that he put things very bluntly – ‘We can’t continue to prop up a digital supply chain which at times is little better than a swamp’.
Little in the way of transparency to be found in a typical swamp.
Unilever’s stance is not inconsistent too with the words of Abi Pearl, Head of Advertising at giffgaff – ‘Online ads don’t make a brand famous’, as she bemoaned the lack of transparency in the metrics supporting such advertising.
Two pieces of very topical research underline just how important transparency is to successful talent acquisition. First the US CareerArc. This month saw them publish learnings which suggest that 91% of candidates seek out at least one source of online information in order to evaluate the employer brand and reputation of an organisation they are considering joining. And it seems there’s no shortage of such online information available. Whereas two years ago, just 38% of people leaving an employer on a non-voluntary basis would post reviews of their experience online, today’s figure is 66%. Interestingly, such figures feel at odds with corresponding employer activity. In the same piece of research, 31% of employers felt that online review sites provided an unfair perception of the employment experience they offered, with another 55% feeling that such perceptions were just somewhat fair.
Just 9% of candidates, then, do not seek the transparency that online career review sites can provide. Even if few employers feel their own online reputation is accurately portrayed on the likes of Glassdoor and Indeed.
Whereas candidates are craving more and more transparency, it feels as though employers are increasingly uncomfortable with such exposure and openness. Given the extent to which the labour market is tilted in the direction of the candidate, this imbalance feels like a huge missed opportunity for talent acquisition.
Transparency was also a core theme of some very recent research by Robert Half. No fewer than 58% of UK job seekers have taken a second choice job offer because their first option took too long to make a decision. More than half of survey participants waited more than a month post final interview for a decision. For many such applicants, again in the absence of transparency, there is a perhaps forgivable lack of understanding as to how an employer is taking so long to come back with a decision.
This is absolutely consistent with news just this week regarding Army recruitment. This week the story broke that the Army had recruited just 7,500 in the last year, despite more than 100,000 applying, leaving the country short by some 4,500 and with the force’s ranks now smaller than they were before the battle of Waterloo. The reason? Low unemployment and candidates having plenty of other options? Not at all, rather waiting times of up to a year between applying and joining the Army, with many simply dropping out of the process rather than continuing to wait.
Again, a talent acquisition process with little in the way of transparency of outcome resulting in disengaged candidates and pipeline holes – as well as an awful lot of wasted expenditure and damaged employer reputation.
And without trawling over well-worn ground, we are living today with potentially the most tangible destroyer of transparency – Brexit. No one, but no one, employee or employer, is clear about what our departure from the EU will mean either for the economy or the labour market. We might make assumptions that EU nationals will leave Britain for environments more welcoming and that skill shortages will soar. But we lack certainty and transparency.
In the general absence of such transparency, those organisations demonstrating such qualities stand out.
Take KFC. Given the food they are named after and what would appear to be their raison d’etre, it’s quite something to have to close 600 UK stores as a result of running out of, yes, chicken over the last few days. And yet, that’s exactly what has happened to the fried chicken retailer in the move from one distributor to another. They will undoubtedly still lose a lot of money, but the company made no attempt to hide some rather stark failings. Instead, they were honest, transparent and happy to make light of the situation – ‘Yes, the chicken crossed the road, just not to our restaurants’. KFC were also very positive in terms of how its people were dealing with the situation – ‘Shout out to our restaurant teams who are working flat out to get us back up and running again’.
Yes, red faces and red ink on the balance sheet, but instead of keeping quiet or blaming others – Oxfam might want to take note – KFC were open and upfront and supportive of their own people.
Instinctively, transparency feels like low hanging fruit. It doesn’t call for intellect, wit or insight. It’s about combining an open, authentic, what-you-see-is-what-you-get employer brand with a candidate experience which allows the applicant to know where they are and what might be happening next.
It’s little wonder, however, that its absence is costing the likes of the Army and those other employers in the Robert Half research both great candidates and great reputational damage to their employer brand. And it’s equally little wonder that when a candidate comes across a process which places transparency and candidate communications to the fore, recruitment decisions are so much easier.
It’s worth thinking, then, whether your employer messaging and candidate process are a closed door or an open window into your organisation.
(Although few employers have anything like the clout of Unilever’s Keith Weed, it would be interesting to understand how major recruitment spenders on the likes of Google and Facebook feel about sharing their online space with some of the less savoury elements of the internet).
Getting to the heart of your employee mindset 