The New Rules of Recruiting: Job Candidates are Customers

The Candidate Experience Matters

A customer in the consideration stage of their buyer’s journey reaches out to you to find the solution to one of their biggest problems. You initially have that customer fill out a form with 25 questions they can’t access from their mobile device, only via desktop computer. Then, you don’t respond to the customer for 20 days before inviting them to come to your brick and mortar location 25-miles away from where they live for a series of questions that will determine if they’re an ideal customer or not.

Can you imagine if businesses worked that way? It seems absurd to the point of hilarity, yet that’s how companies treated potential job candidates for years. 

• More than half of job seekers say employers never kept them up to date about their application status.
• 61% of job seekers say they’ve had recruiters “ghost” them, even after having an initial phone screening.
• 60% of job seekers quit in the middle of an application due to length or complexity.
• 40% of job seekers opt not to apply for roles they found if they can’t access the applications via their mobile device.

At some point, businesses decided it was perfectly fine to treat job candidates in ways they’d never dream of treating customers, even though doing so has dire effects on their applicant traffic and bottom line.

• 63% of job seekers will reject a job offer due to a bad candidate experience. 
• 72% of job seekers who had a bad candidate experience told others about it online or in-person. 
• 64% of job seekers say that a bad candidate experience would cause them to stop purchasing goods or services from a company.

Increase Your Applicant Traffic 

Savvy companies understand that you need to market to candidates, nurture them through the hiring process, and provide them with a truly stellar experience if you want to keep them interested.

HR thought leader Josh Bersin said in his annual 2021 HR-tech report, “the HR tech market is turned inside out—it’s entirely focused on employees, not HR.”

How can thinking of candidates like customers help you to reimagine your recruiting process? 

• You want stellar candidates who didn’t get the position this time to apply again. 
• You want job candidates who are loyal customers to continue being loyal customers. 
• You want job candidates to widen your talent pipeline by telling their networks how great their experience was with you, even if they didn’t get the position. 
• You want job candidates to write positive reviews about the application process on sites like Glassdoor and LinkedIn.  

It can’t be over-emphasized enough how shortsighted it is to disregard the candidate experience, especially since hiring challenges are the #1 problem businesses are facing in 2021. The HiringThing Guide to Increasing Your Applicant Traffic can help you start treating your job candidates as customers and improve the hiring experience in a way that produces results. 

Download The HiringThing Guide to Increasing Your Applicant Traffic

The HiringThing Guide to Increasing Your Applicant Traffic can help you reimagine job candidates as customers, build job candidate personas that give you insights into what your ideal candidates look for in a job posting, and help you transform your hiring process into one strong applicants seek out. 

GET THE GUIDE

About HiringThing 

HiringThing is a modern recruiting platform as a service that creates seamless hiring experiences. Our private label applicant tracking system and open API enable technology and service providers to embed hiring capabilities from sourcing to onboarding. Approachable and adaptable, the platform empowers anyone, anywhere, to hire their dream team.