Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?

Ep18: When Employer Brand and Candidate Experience Collide

In this episode Matt Alder talks to Nick Price of CareerGift.The relationship between employer brand and candidate experience is a well documented one however despite this very few employers seem to consider the candidate experience to actually be part of their employer brand strategy.In this interview Matt and Nick discuss the unbreakable relationship between employer brand strategy and candidate experience. Nick share his thoughts on the practical things companies can do to align one with the other and also talks about CareerGift’s unique offering which is helping employers deal with rejected candidates in a brand appropriate way Subcribe this podcast in iTunes

Duration:: 14m
Broadcast on:: 01 Jul 2015
Audio Format:: other

In this episode Matt Alder talks to Nick Price of CareerGift.

The relationship between employer brand and candidate experience is a well documented one however despite this very few employers seem to consider the candidate experience to actually be part of their employer brand strategy.

In this interview Matt and Nick discuss the unbreakable relationship between employer brand strategy and candidate experience. Nick share his thoughts on the practical things companies can do to align one with the other and also talks about CareerGift’s unique offering which is helping employers deal with rejected candidates in a brand appropriate way

Subcribe this podcast in iTunes

Support for this podcast comes from RecFest 2. RecFest 2 is the in-house recruitment event of the summer, with an incredible line-up of speakers and the biggest conversation of like-minded recruiters in the world. RecFest 2 is taking place on July 9th in London and is now sold out. Go to RecFest2.com to join the waiting list or follow the conversation via Twitter and Periscope on the day itself. Hello and welcome to episode 18 of the Recruiting Future Podcast. This week's guest is Nick Price from Careergift. I've known Nick for a very long time, having worked with him at TMP and then more recently on developing Mystery Ablican. Nick has some unique insight at the intersection of employer brand and the candidate experience, something he's tapping into to develop Careergift's offering to help employers deal with rejected candidates. Hi everyone and welcome to another Recruiting Future Podcast interview. My guest this week is Nick Price. Nick works for a new company to the market, Careergift. How Nick? Hi Nick, how are you? Very well, thank you Matt. Good stuff. Now we'll talk a little bit more about Careergift later, but for those people kind of not familiar with you, it would be great if you could just talk about your background and the kind of things you've done and you know what you're sort of interested in in this space. Yeah, okay, I mean I guess I've spent about 15 years working in the employer branding field in some shape or form I guess. My formative years I've spent at TMP where we were one of the first organizations I think really to take research and employer branding seriously within the context of recruitment. In those days, research and recruitment didn't necessarily go hand in hand because I mean we're talking to a lot of account managers and account directors about doing research with their clients and they gave me a funny look because it wasn't a full page in the Sunday times and as we evolved out the companies taking it more and more seriously, understanding the messages that they needed to deliver to recruit the right people. Employer branding kind of evolved around that sort of time and we started working with companies such as IBM who I think was one of the first big research projects that we did across Europe. That was really where I started my career and as employer branding took off a more and more company started to use it. We started to embrace more the internal side as well so you know matching up that perception that expectation that potential job applicants would have would do reality what it's actually like working there. So I worked at TMP for some time then worked as a head researcher 33 where again we did a lot of interesting projects and projects around Europe and India again evolving the employee branding and EVP work and I guess really at that point I left 33 to plan my own fire. If you like I was quite keen to do more consultancy work and do more work around the communication side of employee branding as well so we did a lot of film work this is back 2007-2008 when recruitment videos are still more one-way traffic if you like they're more about delivering a message rather than engaging with what the actual message of working for that organization would be like. I did that and then I became very much focused on the candidate experience piece because with employee branding the candidate has a very valued view on what that organization is like particularly from a brand perspective you know their perception of why they'd want to work there the expectation they're going to have if they join and really that started to stow the seed for when we set up Mistrapika which was a candidate experience feedback tool and the thing behind that was we were asked in so many ways for feedback in consumer society if you like you know to rate your experience on things like eBay Amazon etc but you know applying for job is one of the most important things that you can do and at the time people were getting asked for feedback on that so that was really where Mistrapika and Saturn that's you know still going strong and really that's where my focus has been the last you know three, four, five years has really been on the candidate experience element of employee branding but making sure that this is all very much placed in the wider context of that employee brand piece. I work with you at TMP and we work together on Mistrapika as well and I know that you've always had a very you know strong view about what employer branding is and what employee branding isn't what's your definition of employer brand and how does that sort of dovetail into you know candidate experience what is it that employers need to be aware of here. Employer brand has had so many different types of definition and application in the last you know in the last few years I mean you know we're familiar with the way it was first used as a term back in the 90s but it's really evolved I think with more and more companies now are developing their employer value proposition in a more meaningful way and employer branding is moved on from just being you know it's what people say about you when you're not in the room etc and there's a phase where nobody controls employee brand because everybody talks about it on social media I think it's actually about sounds thinking led from the top around an organisation is culture and you know the way it's perceived and actually valued by the employees themselves. Where does the candidate experience fit with that why is it so important and what do employers need to be aware of. I think that particularly now you know hiring practices just generally it's become a more two-way transparent relationship if you like companies that take care of employer brand and improve and how they treat candidates are therefore attracting better quality candidates. The candidate job applicant they'll already be forming a perception of that organisation before they've even applied and they're visualising themselves in that role so the way the candidate is entreated through that process is really important because those hopes can be dashed pretty quickly and so the whole subject to kind of experience is a very important one and in terms of how it fits with employer branding I think we should also not forget that just applying for a job and going through the process candidate experience doesn't start or stop there and there's some interesting research I was reading done by the Aberdeen group. It talks about the impact of onboarding and onboarding is a vital part of that employer brand's experience and you could argue that some people will actively say they do it but pretty much everybody does it even if they do it badly and what Aberdeen group did was look at the impact of onboarding effectiveness and those in the bottom 30% of how they scored this piece of analysis defined as the onboarding laggards retained only 30% of the employees after one year was those in the top 20% retained 91% of their first two employees so when we talk about an experience we shouldn't just talk about it in an isolation because it has a big impact on your ability to not only recruit the right people but all done properly also to retain the right people. That's really interesting I'd not come across that particular angle on it before it's interesting to hear those stats well from your experience of sort of working with lots of companies in this space and you know obviously having huge amounts of exposure to stats via the things that you've been researched by the things you've been working on. What do employers need to do this well what are your sort of your top tips if you like in terms of providing a better candidate experience? I guess the first point is start by thinking about the numbers that are coming into contact with your brand and how you're going to manage that experience. The kind of experience awards and the talent board have done a lot of research into this area and some really useful stats and one of those stats was that over half of candidates are some relationship with a hiring organisation and this is like to be even higher if it's a retail group for example we last volume higher so the first thing is to think about how you're actually treating those that aren't successful and I think when we talk about kind of experience you often talk about making the process better and a lot of organisations frame their offering around that but I think it goes far beyond that. Again some interesting research showed that nearly half of the people that apply for jobs are looking at the values when they research your organisation so those values have to be reflected in terms of your behaviours your process and how you're treating those candidates. Thinking about the candidates you don't hire how do you manage your hopes and expectations you know put yourself in their shoes be clear on setting expectations align your behaviours and messaging with your EVP and your employer brand 43% of candidates experience discrepancies between job descriptions and what they actually end up doing nobody wants those kind of surprises so I think be realistic that be transparent and be honest and I think you know be considerate of your candidates time and efforts now we know that it's indeed for example in other sites to make it a lot easier to apply now and do a lot of candidates that may fire off a lot of quick applications but there's a lot of people that dedicate a lot of time to apply for job and I think recognising that effort and input is really important I've read another another status I've said 74% of the data collected by companies on candidates it's not even used in the selection process 38% of candidates surveyed in the kind of experience awards didn't receive any information prior to their actual interview any information they got was a day in location think about that relationship you're building with those candidates as they apply and offer feedback where possible I know this isn't always practical but you do a tool there that can help you the final sort of point on all this is measure it don't just measure it though listen to it and action it and put the right interventions in place to consistently improve the kind of experience 75% of candidates surveyed by the talent board we never asked about their experience before they received that survey we're talking about HR technology we're talking about data we're talking about candidate candidate experience being big topics and yeah it's not enough organisations are getting regular feedback and acting on it and actually making it a real you know a measurable business management tool I think that's really interesting because I think that a lot of the talk and focus on candidate experience is it's all about small practical things that sometimes are very difficult to implement and I think what you've what you've illustrated there is that this is a strategic decision that fits alongside an employer brand strategy and it's you know it's not necessarily easy to do but you know there is data that you can collect and you know the benefits of paying time and attention to this in terms of recruitment ROI are quite big could you just to kind of finish off could you just sort of tell us a little bit about career gift okay yeah so in talking about the number of people that come into contact with your brands but don't actually aren't actually successful in their application career gift is an online career management toolkit to help people get the job they want so every candidate that applies to organisation will get a link and access to career gift so for all those people that weren't successful in this particular occasion you're effectively giving them a gift of an and access to the career gift portal and you know our view is that it's an opportunity to give something back but it's also a very important and you know fundamentally good thing to do they can go away better equipped in the job hunting world and improves their relationship with your brand and they may well come back further down the line as a better candidate and become successful with you so it's a way of maintaining your your good brand relationship with the candidate and job applicants and building a positive association with that application experience so basically it's it's content to help job seekers with their job search that's that's kind of branded but by by the company they've applied to it's jointly branded with career gift it's you know every candidate can go away and have access to career gift and it's basically sponsored by that organisation fantastic well best of luck with with career gift and thank you very much for talking to me thanks man cheers my thanks to Nick Price you can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or Stitcher you can listen to past episodes and read show notes at www.rfpodcast.com and also subscribe to our mailing list there to get exclusive content and find out about future guests thanks for listening i'll be back next week and i hope you'll join me this is my show [BLANK_AUDIO]