Your Candidate Experience Is Your Employer Brand
1-minute read
Companies spend an inordinate amount of time and money trying to make sense of employer branding.
What they don’t realize is that the highest ROI is in candidate experience.
A good candidate experience is the ultimate employer branding strategy.
This will drive more positive word-of-mouth inside the sectors of the labor market that disproportionately trust word of mouth over other ways of finding new job opportunities.
Note: the same applies when offering a poor experience.
Until you dial in your candidate experience, stop worrying about branding and awareness stuff.
You’re wasting time—time that you already don’t have—on trying to drive people into a disorganized experience. Your recruiters are sourcing. They’ll drive your highest quality leads. Focus on supporting those efforts and making your recruiters look good by fulfilling the promises they’re making to candidates.
Bottom line: The experience is the brand.
Get back to basics. Invest there.
Hopefully, things just got a lot clearer for you.
Context: I view candidate experience as every interaction a prospective job candidate has with your company.
Interactions include but aren’t limited to:
- The copy a candidate reads—everywhere.
- Your sourcing.
- Your job ads and job descriptions.
- The technology you use. (Yes, dinosaur ATS systems are killing your brand.)
- What it feels like to apply to your job.
- The transition from talking with a recruiter to scheduling and meeting with a hiring manager: how you connect people, how they schedule, the communication tools you use, etc.
- The number of interviews you require.
- The speed of your process.
- How you extend an offer.
- How you decline a candidate.
- *The first 90 days someone has working at your company.
Every touch point in the process is an opportunity to brand yourself as either a company that gets it, or as a company that has NFC.
*I understand that once a hire is made that technically falls under employee experience. But I’m thinking about a referral opportunity. If a person has a legit enjoyable experience all the way through their initial ramp period, the likelihood of a referral increases by some number which equates to “a lot”.