In the past ten years us recruiters have gone from a famine of old out of date enterprise tech to absolutely inundated with truly amazing technology. We've had ATS platforms, chatbots, AI screening, automated scheduling and a decade of dudes with nice haircuts in Patagonia vests telling us "hiring is broken.. we’re revolutionising the hiring process."
It’s been great to see and todays recruiter can do SO MUCH MORE. We can hire more, we can schedule faster, we have less of the boring manual stuff and more of the cool strategic stuff
But, go and check what candidates actually think of the process now compared to ten years ago.
In 2013, the Talent Board started properly measuring this stuff. That year, 10% of North American candidates reported a genuinely poor experience.
Ten years later, in 2023, that number was 12%.
Today, only 26% of job seekers say they've had a great hiring experience. 65% say communication through the process is inconsistent. Only 11% of organisations bother running a candidate satisfaction survey at all.
I personally think that’s generous. In my experience I think overall candidate experience has dropped considerably more. But even accepting that poor candidate experience has gone from 10% to 12% as true, it still poses an enormous question…
All this tech to improve recruitment, how did me manage to leave the CANDIDATES behind???
Hmmm…. something else is going on methinks….I smell a recruitment based, hardy boys style mystery! C’mon gang, let’s get our recruitment detective kits and talent decoder rings and get to work!
Luke’s 2 Cents
Here's my thesis. Candidate experience needs project resource in the background that nobody budgets for. Templates need writing. Careers pages need keeping current. Hiring managers need briefing on how to run a warm interview, and none of them report to you. That work needs steady bandwidth, and recruiting bandwidth peaks and troughs entirely on demand, never on how much you'd like to invest in the experience layer in a given quarter.
So you scale. You're now talking to more candidates than you ever have. Applications per role have roughly tripled since 2021, past 300 on some platforms. Recruiters are handling 93% more applications and managing 40% more open roles than in 2021, off teams that are smaller than they were back then.
That's exactly the moment candidate experience should matter most, because more people than ever are forming an opinion of your company. It's also exactly the moment every recruiter on the team is running about like a blue-arsed fly doing nothing but filling roles, because that's the only thing anyone's measuring them on.
All that shiny tech you bought to handle volume and none of it protects the human layer. So, when the CEO dials in from his gated community in Chinnintgon, Connecticut to tell us we got the big investment, rip up the treasury docs and go hire everyone in the world, candidate experience collapses like a flan in a cupboard..
Ok dude, sad story, what can we DO about it?
1. Build a content system you control, so you're not gatekept by marketing
Every recruiter I know has had a good candidate-facing idea die in a marketing approval queue. A new careers page section. An honest "what it's actually like here" video. A rejection template that doesn't read like it was drafted by a nervous lawyer.
Set yourself up with a tool that knows your brand guidelines, tone of voice and approved imagery, so anything you draft is on-brand from the first version. You still loop marketing in. You just stop losing good candidate content to a three-week review queue because nobody had capacity to look at it.
2. Own the touchpoints that are always in your control
You don't control your ATS's UI. You don't control how long a hiring manager takes to give feedback. Template emails, rejections and the actual face-to-face moments are yours, though. Nobody else touches them.
A rejection that explains why, in plain language, costs nothing extra to send and changes how someone remembers you. 50% of candidates say they'd reconsider a company after a bad experience if the recruiter simply apologised. That's a low bar, and most companies still don't clear it.
3. Turn on candidate NPS. Don't be squeamish about the data.
Most ATSs let you survey candidates. Almost nobody switches it on, and the few who do only send it to people who accepted an offer, which only tells you how the winners felt.
Send it to everyone you've been in contact with. Screened out at CV stage. Rejected post-interview. Ghosted you halfway through, if you can catch them. Nobody's going to storm into your office because you found out your process has problems. You'll just know things you didn't know before, which is the entire point.
Ten years of investment went into the parts of hiring that make recruiters faster. Almost none of it went into the parts candidates actually feel.
What's the one candidate touchpoint at your company that's been quietly rubbish for years and nobody's owned it? Tell me tell me!
Luke Update
Recruiters, it's been a while since I've posted a newsletter. I've been on hiatus for a couple of reason. First, Family holidays. Second, I had to move my website and all of my systems and newsletter from a very, very expensive Kajabi that jacked their prices up by 100% overnight to a very cool Beehiiv, which has not.
That took a while to put in place. On the plus side, though, I've got a funky new website. Check it out, and all my back issues are now available on the website, which is something a lot of you have asked for, so that's all done. It took a lot of work, but we got there.
Regular services now resumed. You'll be getting my mal-adjusted nonsense in your inbox every Wednesday or Thursday from here on in.
Additionally, in two weeks' time, I'll be in New York for a few days with Avalanche, but me and a few other recruiters, including the irrepressible Shaun Hervey, will be at Pig and Whistle in Manhattan on Friday 18th of September. If you are in town and fancy a catch up, come hang out!
Well... that's issue seventy eight! If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.
I'll see you next week!