Breakfast News - May 2024

Candidate experience (CX) is often cited by early careers employers as important to them. Candidates on the other hand have increasingly become expectant of clarity, authenticity and speed. Much like the consumers in all of us when buying a product or service.

But are employers getting this right?

Are we running recruitment processes, or creating candidate experiences?

In this latest Breakfast News instalment, we heard from economists, industry experts and customer centric gurus including the ex MD of Nandos on consumer expectations and best practice when it comes to candidate behaviour, recruitment processes and the idea of candidates as customers.

The session was filled with statistical insights and personal experiences to help employers with their aim of creating a true candidate experience.

Here are a few highlights:

• Employers are experiencing increasing challenges in the selection and onboarding stages of recruitment where ghosting (9%),withdrawals (14%), declines (6%) and reneges (7%) raise a question on whether this is due to candidate relevance and competition or more towards candidate experience.
• The number of applications candidates are making plus employers are receiving has been on an upward trend for a long time with the sector seeing an 86:1 application to hire ratio. These increases can have consequences for operational efficiencies, candidate relevancy and ultimately leading to many companies deploying a process where candidates are a number.
• The traditional set up and perhaps mindset within recruiting early careers talent has majored towards an imbalance marketing mindset at the start (brand and attraction) and end (offer and onboarding) of recruitment but often overlooks ways to support (and ideally differentiate) the experience a candidate has whilst in the assessment and selection process.  In the complexity of the process and tech setup, we can lose sight or ability to deliver recruitment as a two-way experience and candidates are indeed customers.
• Candidates feel like they’re being advertised to, with inauthenticity becoming more evident in communications and content.
• The information candidates are seeing, receiving and asked to adhere can be missing, unclear, not timely or ’consumer grade’ in look and feel and usefulness.
• There are lessons to be learned from customer-centric approaches outside of recruitment when it comes to creating an experience.

But how can we go about creating a better CX for our early careers candidates?

Access the resources to:

• Watch the video recordings of our speakers and panellists.
• Download the slideware.
• Read the extended write-up.