When it comes to innovation in recruitment marketing and the candidate experience it is very important to never believe the hype. Once you cut through the buzzwords and considerable self-interest promoting spin it becomes clear that driving change and embracing new technologies is something a lot employers find very difficult.
My research has shown me that one of keys to success when it comes to innovation lies in experimentation, testing and iteration. My guest for this episode of the podcast is someone who successful uses this approach to drive change. Heather Tinguely is Senior Program Manager of Innovation Incubation and Candidate Experience at Microsoft.
In the interview we discuss:
• How beta testing ideas can engage stakeholders and win budgets
• Why the candidate experience is so important to Microsoft
• Innovations for the “day of interview”
• The evolution of the careers site and the relationship between content and candidate experience
• The critical importance of being mobile first to avoid the big problem with responsive design
• Personalisation based on candidate profiles
Heather also tells us what she has her eye on in terms of future trends and technologies
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Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?
Ep 44: Innovating To Improve the Candidate Experience
Support for this podcast comes from Cielo. Cielo is the world's leading provider of global recruitment process outsourcing and related solutions, spanning the talent lifecycle from employer branding to onboarding. Cielo takes a "we become you" approach to RPO that provides their clients with customised solutions that match industries, geographies and business priorities. To find out more, visit www.cielotallant.com. Hi, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to Episode 44, of the Recruiting Future Podcast. When it comes to innovation in recruitment marketing, it's really important to never believe the hype. Driving change and embracing new technologies is something that lots of employers find very, very difficult to do. One of the keys to success actually lies in experimentation and testing, and my guest this week is someone who successfully uses this approach to drive change within their organisation. Heather Togelay is senior programme manager for innovation incubation and candidate experience at Microsoft. Listen on to hear our wide-ranging discussion on recruitment marketing, innovation and the candidate experience. And if you listen right to the end, you can hear me give details of a great special offer that's available for all podcast listeners. Hi, Heather, and welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me, Matt. My absolute pleasure. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone a little bit about you? Yeah, so my name is Heather Togelay, and I work for Microsoft in the centre of excellence. And for the last several years, I've been most focused on incubation programs and projects within talent acquisition, as well as candidate experience. For those people who might not understand the centre, could you just give us a quick overview of what you mean by incubation projects? Yeah, so, you know, the company, the size of Microsoft, you know, when you look at all of our different groups and, you know, across all of the geos and, you know, divisions, there's a lot of different needs out there. And we have some really creative, bright people that want to try new things. And so, when you have these ideas, you know, pop up, you want to try to harvest those ideas and make sense of them, see if, you know, they're worth doing or not. And the best way to do that is really to do it on a small scale, on an incubation kind of level. So, what my team did in the past is we would take these ideas that were surfaced and say, hey, you know, we're on a pilot program for a small portion, you know, of the total, you know, population at Microsoft and just see how it goes. We kind of, you know, get it out a little scrappy, a little dirty and then get feedback, right, from the client groups and then iterate on it over time. So, you know, one good example of a pilot program that we did recently was something called the candidate concierge, which was an app focused on the day of interview that we would give our candidates access to that would give them things like real time updates, give them a slate of their, their interviewers with LinkedIn profiles attached, give them a lot of really great content around, you know, our company news feeds and, you know, access to the jobs blog and things like that. And it would also allow them to give us real-time feedback throughout the course of the interview day. But we started that on a very small scale. We got all of the feedback from candidates using it and we used that feedback to iterate and add features, you know, delete ones that weren't using when we looked at heat map data. And then by the time we wanted to go scale it and get additional funding, we had a really good business case to do so. We were able to say, hey, this is a really good idea, you know, we vetted it out. Not only did they say they liked it, but we used their input to make these 13 changes now give us money. And then we were able to kind of have, you know, a little bit more credibility going into that broader program to scale it. So that's one example of incubation. But we have incubation going on all across our company within talent acquisition, across, you know, many teams. But I think that's our, you know, a philosophy that we like to embrace. It's certainly a very interesting way of working. I think I can see the real benefits of doing that. To sort of move on to candidate experience and kind of explore this a little bit further. candidate experience is obviously a very sort of hot topic at the moment. Some people might even describe it as a buzzword. It gets talked about. I'm not entirely sure everyone really knows what they mean by it. What are your sort of views on candidate experience? You know, what is it? Why is it important? You know, where are your thoughts on that? Yeah, you know, I think you make a lot of good points. I think it's, you know, the new buzzword. You know, I like to look at it pretty pragmatically. And I think it goes something like this. There's a war for talent out there, especially, you know, in certain pockets, certainly we see it every day, you know, in the tech industry, you know, all gloves are off. And there aren't that many good candidates out there. When you start looking at data, I think two things pop to me. One is that data tells us that when you look at insat scores or, you know, overall satisfaction scores of candidates, the ones that are not satisfied are the ones that have low insat scores basically are never going to touch your company again, okay, like in a candidate capacity. And so when you look at a very small group of really talented people, let's take cloud architects as an example, if you don't do the basics, well, if you don't communicate with candidates, you know, you don't call them after that final day interview, you don't do those basic steps. Over time, it just whittles away. It's not rocket science. But, you know, it's very difficult to see when you're in the weeds that you're actually having a really detrimental effect on that pipeline pool. The second thing that really sticks out to me is that data tells us that about two thirds of candidates that leave unhappy, that leave your candidate or recruiting process unhappy, basically will never touch your products again. They're not going to be a customer of yours. So that means that if you're in the consumer space, which, you know, Microsoft isn't partially in the consumer space, every time a person looks at a Windows phone, every time they get their hands, you know, they open their computer and they see that Windows logo, they're going to have a bad taste in their mouth. And those two things alone, I think, are really, really convincing reasons why you want to pay attention to that candidate experience. So then when we start really digging in and asking, what is it? Again, I don't think that it's rocket science. I think that at the end of the day, the most important thing the candidates want, they want to understand what the journey looks like. They always want to know where they stand. They want next steps. And if the first path doesn't work out, they want to plan B. They want you to make that handshake to that next potential fit at your organization. And if you're with a company, you know, the size of Microsoft or similar, people really need to have a good idea of where they fit holistically, you know, not on a job description level. They just want to understand, hey, with my passions and my needs, where do I plug in? Where can I plug in? Where can I make impact? If not for today, you know, for tomorrow. And so I think that if we can just get the fundamental communication layers down, I think that solves for about 80% of the candidate experience, you know, concerns that would definitely increase, you know, those SAT scores increase those, those in SAT scores. When you look at the day of interview, it's probably the most crucial piece of the candidate experience, because when you look at just the vulnerability of candidates going into that day, they're putting everything on the line, right? It's also the highest level of quality candidates that you have. Certainly a lot of companies piss people off, like at the point of apply, right? Because they don't know where they stand, they go into a black hole. But man, when you start messing with people at the point of interview, now you've got a problem. And so really working on managers, you know, and that assessment process, making people feel really taken care of that day of interview, making sure that they have a wrap up at the end of their day, and making sure they get a phone call, you know, within 72 business hours, regardless of whether the recruiter has an update. Those are just the really small things. So, you know, a lot of times people think about these delighters, the sexy stuff. There's so many things in our industry that we can just get right that are so basic, that I think would really improve things vastly, you know, for the candidate. Yeah, that definitely makes a lot of sense. And I think the day of interview stuff is very interesting as well in terms of what you've been thinking about that and what you've done that. And Matt, I have one, you know, one other thing that I've kind of been thinking about that's kind of interesting. We think a lot, I think, in the marketing realm about casting a really big net, you know, we want to basically say, our company is the best, you know, come and join us. And then you have, on the other hand, these recruiters that are having to like rule these people in and out, you know, for OFCCP in the States. And you have all of these, you know, these factors, we're really, we're requiring our recruiters to spend a lot of sweat equity, you know, ruling people in and out and really assessing people when we cast such a big net. And so some of the things that I've been thinking about, at least on the marketing side, that would really help candidate experiences, you know, what can we do from a content management perspective to customize and personalize the content that we share with candidates, while almost creating content gates around what people can see, or the expectations that we set around content. So let me give you an example. If a candidate comes to a career site, loads their profile, you know, we set a cookie, we know who they are, wouldn't it be nice to just show them plus or minus 30% of what we think they could be qualified for? And by the way, also set limits, you know, on how many applies they can make. There are certainly companies out there doing this. By doing that, you know, you limit, right, that the quantity coming in, and therefore, you buy more time and, you know, your recruiters have the ability to do higher value activities. The other thing that I think would be really cool is, I mean, I'm big on transparency, but you know, what if a candidate could load their profile and they go to a job description, and it's almost the price line model. You know, you try to get a car, right, and you name your own price, and you say, "I want to pay five pounds, you know, for this car." It basically tells you you don't have a chance of getting that car, right? Like, you see the little scale and it's like red, like, don't even try. You can push that button, but you've wasted one second of your life. I mean, I think that if we got to the level of transparency, you know, where we had sophisticated algorithms in place, you get to a deep link on a job description, and in a nice, soft way, we tell you, "You know what? You know, you probably have a 50% chance of getting this job, because I think you're lacking these three basic qualifications based on your profile." I think that that would actually, you know, decrease the amount of lower quality applies, and it would also set the right level of expectation, you know, for the candidates so that their hopes aren't high, and they're not getting disappointed. It just saves everybody, you know, time. So that's kind of some of the way that I'm thinking about it. It's not only how can we delight candidates that come into our ecosystem, it's also about how we can have a better level of transparency and set better expectations upfront to save everybody time. I think that's it. I think information and expectations are really, you know, really the kind of the heart of the problem around all of this. Just in terms of expectations, sort of expanding this out slightly. To me, one of the, you know, the key parts of meeting the expectations of a potential candidate while you're doing recruitment marketing is being great and mobile because we know that obviously a large sector of the audience wants to, you know, look and search and find for information on their mobile. Where's your thinking round, this sort of role of mobile in job seeking and recruitment marketing environment? Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's a necessity. So we've had, we launched our first mobile side, I guess in 2011 and, you know, and we're on the path now to make some, some vast improvements there. But, you know, I will say that just in general, if you're asking my thoughts, I think it's critical. I mean, you look at countries like India, you know, for example, and it's a must-have. I mean, I don't know how you can, how you can recruit in India without having, you know, a mobile presence. But I would go one step further. And, you know, just in kind of looking recently in a lot of systems and tools and career site offerings out there, we typically stop at just this idea of responsive. You know, if we can just fit the content, you know, to a small screen, everything's good. And the reality is, is that you see a large drop-off at apply. I mean, it's something like, you know, I don't know the most recent stats, but it's something like, you know, 20 times more people drop off and apply on a mobile phone, right, than on desktop. Yeah. And that's really because you have to optimize. I mean, and you have to simplify. It's not just a matter of fitting the screen. In an ideal universe, you know, just from a UX, a user experience perspective, as I go in to kind of think about revamping, you know, our career site, I'm actually thinking mobile first, which is what everybody should be doing. There's no reason why, you know, we should be asking 50 questions on desktop, right? If we can simplify it on mobile, we should be simplifying it everywhere. But the point being is that, you know, from the standpoint of making sure that you have access to the cloud for document upload, doing things like pre-populating location, you know, based on the position that they're applying for, you know, parsing information from LinkedIn profiles. I mean, whatever you can do to just make that mobile apply easier for the candidate, you have to do it because you're not going to see the success that you would otherwise. But I just can't imagine that companies don't have it on their radar right now. Yeah, I think lots of people do. I think that they, you know, sometimes they struggle with the how or the budget or, you know, whatever, you know, whatever it might be that's holding them back. But, you know, I completely agree with you. It's absolutely critical and mobile first is definitely the way to go. Final question. So what other sort of trends and technologies are you seeing in the market at the moment that are of particular interest to you or that you think, you know, might be the future? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of exciting stuff out there. I guess my mind has been really focused on kind of the content end of things. I've been digging pretty deep into how to personalize and customize, you know, content, you know, looking at, you know, different content management systems, different ways to build associations between personas and what they see. You know, so one example of that is I think when a person comes to a career site, either based on web behavior or based on profile, if they're signed in, they should actually get a view of the career site that is meaningful to them. So whether that's a technical, non-technical lens, you know, whether that's, you know, whatever lens you want to, you want to create for that person, you can get as specific as you want to. But I think that whether, you know, it's on the content level, whether it's on a job description page, similar to what, you know, Google has done recently on their job description pages. Every job description page should have, you know, a video of the location that's tied to the requisition. You could have a team video, right, that's specific to the job description. What you see on most career sites is that there's very little organic, you know, or traffic coming in that's hitting the career side. It's usually coming in from third party job, you know, platforms. So when you see that so many people are landing on those deep links, all of a sudden, having that customized and personalized content is really important because it's your one and only opportunity to really sell the candidate on a job. So that's where my, where my head has been. But I think there's a lot of exciting product. At least it's exciting for me because I think anything that can kind of make recruiters lives easier and more efficient and add to the candidate experience or things that are important to me. And so things like interview scheduling, that's automated, right, and easy for the end user. Looking into building some customized candidate, you know, portals that basically follow the candidate end to end with features and functionality that change, you know, from stage to stage is also something, you know, very interesting to me. And just, you know, setting those little Easter eggs into lighters throughout the process, they don't have to be, they don't have to be big, but, you know, looking for vendors that can just, you know, kind of create that, that wow, that wow, you know, feeling without having to kind of build things from scratch. But there's some really interesting stuff that I'm excited to start looking at. Heather, thank you very much for talking to me. Thank you, Matt. Thank you so much. My thanks there to Heather. So what about the special offer I mentioned at the beginning of the show? Well, it comes courtesy of longtime podcast supporter, Rackfest. In the summer of this year, as the eyes of the world turn to the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Rackfest is bringing its own style of street carnival to the recruitment industry, taking over Borough Market in London. It's now on its third year, and Rackfest is a one day celebration of all things in-house recruitment and resourcing. There's a real emphasis on the power of sharing, and Rackfest generates one of the largest conversations that the in-house recruitment professionals in the world. If you head over to thisisrackfest.com and use the discount code podcast16, you'll get a discounted ticket. Don't forget you can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes and Stitcher and find past episodes at www.rfpodcast.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about me. Thanks very much for listening. I'll be back next week, and I hope you'll join me. (upbeat music) This is my show. (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]