Nick Johnston explains why candidate feedback matters in hiring. Giving feedback at each stage improves employer branding and keeps candidates engaged, even those who don't get the job.
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Candidate experience is critical to engaging people with our company and also representing our employer brand and our company brand. We should always be thinking about this whenever we're recruiting. Candidate experience is really driven by good feedback. What do I mean here? The true differentiator of our employer brand and driver of candidate experience is how we feedback. It's us fulfilling on some of our promises that we care for people, that we want to develop them, that people are our most valuable asset. As we often see in employer brand statements. I can tell you how rewarding it is to see candidates thanking my recruiters for providing feedback properly. And the one thing that stands out in all of those messages that I see is they say other companies just don't take the time to do this. It's a sad fact that we as recruiters all need to step up here. This is how we differentiate our brands. This is how we treat our candidates with respect. This is incredibly important if you're working in a B2C environment, because the research shows that candidates that have a bad experience in recruitment work will stop buying from that company and will influence other people to stop buying too. This is incredibly important if you're in a B2B environment because those candidates that you're dealing with may later be customers. They may later be partners. You want them to have a good perception of your company. However, day to day as recruiters, we're super busy. We're dealing with multiple candidates and multiple projects. So how do we do that without overloading ourselves? Well, let's look a bit deeper at the hiring cycle and the level of feedback that we should aim to provide. As we move through the lifecycle of recruiting, we really provide feedback at three key points in the process. And candidates can expect and deserve different levels of feedback according to how much time they've invested in the process. I have a very simple rule here. My personal belief is if a candidate invested time to speak to us, we need to invest time to speak to them, to give them feedback before we send them any system messages or decisions that are triggered out of an ats. The three points of feedback that we really need to focus on is the application stage. Any candidate that applies deserves to be acknowledged for their application. And if we're rejecting them, they deserve to get a message, just an email, because we probably haven't spoken to them that says, sorry, we're not progressing you. Other candidates were better, that could be system driven, that can be automated, that's easy for us to do, and it's a reasonable expectation for every candidate they're going to get acknowledged and the decision. If we're moving them forward to the screening phase and, and we've taken the time to have a conversation with them and we're not going to move them forward, they deserve a short call just to inform them. We don't have to get too deep here. Perhaps we just say we're moving other people forward, they were stronger in these areas and leave it at that. If we get into deep assessment, then we've really got deeper insight on the candidates and this is where we should look to create some value add for the candidates, give some advice or guidance if they're not moving forward to help them to further and develop themselves. These people may be silver medalists, these people may be candidates that we want to bring back in the future. We can differentiate ourselves and really help engage with them if we can just take the extra time to make a medium call and give them some value added advice as well as a decision. As we're moving candidates forward to the offer stage, we also need to give them feedback. This is going to be a deeper call. We need to be positioning with them what we like about them, where they may need to develop, how we're going to help them with that. As part of that offer process, they need to know what their stretch areas are as well as their strengths so that they can decide whether they want to sign up. And even as we get into the onboarding and orientation piece, that information shouldn't stay in recruitment. It needs to move across into our L and D teams and with the managers so that they can start to help the candidate to become more productive. What's important here is that we make sure that we give that candidates feedback at the three key stages of application and sourcing. The screening and assessment phase and the offer and the orientation phase. And if we do that correctly, we can give them the right level of insight without overloading ourselves and make sure that we differentiate ourselves as an employer, add value to our candidates and really keep them engaged with our company as an employer.
