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Enhancing the candidate experience for better business outcomes 2

CONTENTSWhy does the candidate experience matter? 3

1. Job acceptance 4

2. Cost per hire 4

3. Number of applications 5

4. Business relationships 5

5. New customer acquisition 6

6. Sharing and referrals 7

The top causes of negative candidate experiences...

and how to fix them 8

1. The overall experience 9

Revelian Candidate Poll 11

2. Attracting candidates 12

3. Receiving candidate applications 13

4. Screening & interviewing candidates 15

Revelian Employer Poll 16

Case Study: Revelian’s game-based assessment

perceived as fairer than other assessments 17

5. Rejecting candidates 18

Five ways psychometric assessments – especially

game-based assessments - drive a better

candidate experience 19

Six quick wins 21

Enhancing the candidate experience for better business outcomes 3

WHY DOES THE CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE MATTER?It may seem like a no-brainer: as employers, we need to be providing potential employees with a journey that’s on a par with the experience we offer our most prized customers. The process should be easy and enjoyable, and candidates should get the information and feedback they require at each stage of the process. Even if they don’t achieve their desired outcome (getting the job), they should feel as if their time and energy has been appreciated and valued.

We know that offering a positive candidate experience has numerous benefits: candidates are more likely to speak favourably about our organisation to others, online and in person, and to buy from us and recommend our services and products. The flagship study supporting many of these claims is the Virgin Media experience: the company discovered they were losing approximately 7,500 customers per year: people who had applied for jobs with them and were unhappy about their experience, including how they were rejected . Once they improved their application process, they began to claw back some of the estimated £4.4m per year they were losing due to poor candidate experiences.

While it makes sense that better candidate experiences equal better organisational outcomes, it’s often helpful to have a few stats up our sleeves when making a business case for investing in improvements. Let’s take a look at some of the concrete ways that great (and poor) candidate experiences can impact your business.

“Candidate experience is an individual’s experience of a company’s recruitment process. For me, it is how the candidate reacts to and perceives a company’s hiring process, encompassing the entire journey from first touch to final point of rejection or job offer and hire.

The obvious answer to why a company should care about their candidate experience is that it will help attract the best new recruits. But the truth is that the implications of a bad candidate experience go beyond just the recruitment process.

Bad candidate experience is directly linked to brand perception- research has found that 41% of applicants who have terrible candidate experiences say they’ll take their loyalty and money elsewhere. Equally, a good hiring experience will set the tone for the rest of their career with the company.

- Manuel Heichlinger, Senior Manager for Talent Acquisition, LinkedIn

Enhancing the candidate experience for better business outcomes 4

2. COST PER HIREHaving a great candidate experience leads to a more favourable employer brand, which in turn can reduce your cost per hire. A survey conducted by LinkedIn looked at recruitment costs across different organisations, and mapped them against overall brand strength. Their finding? The cost per hire is more than 2 times lower for companies with a strong employer brand.

Along the same lines, Dr John Sullivan believes that organisations with a highly opaque or difficult recruitment process will waste more time responding to applicant enquiries, as people aren’t able to get the information they seek online or within the applicant experience.

1. JOB ACCEPTANCEIBM surveyed over 7,000 job applicants and presented the findings in their 2017 report, ‘The far-reaching impact of candidate experience’.

One of their key discoveries was that the candidate experience clearly influenced job acceptance rates: candidates who are satisfied with their experience during the recruitment process are 38% more likely to accept a job offer than those who were dissatisfied.

As we know, recruitment is both costly and time-consuming, which means a lot of wasted time and effort if your ideal candidates decline an offer due to a sub-standard experience.

Source: WorkTrends® 2016 Global (Those with job offer n=4,414)

Candidate experience associated with job offer acceptance

Source: LinkedIn survey of recruitment costs vs brand strenth

Enhancing the candidate experience for better business outcomes 5

Great candidate experience - candidates who rate overall experience 5 stars are willing to increase the business relationship

Source: TalentBoard global candidate experience research

3. NUMBER OF APPLICATIONSJohnson & Johnson have focused heavily on improving its talent acquisition process, including the candidate experience. In October 2017, it introduced a program called J&JShine that they say is “able to offer job seekers experiences in line with what they have come to expect as consumers—searching for a job should be as easy as searching for flights, restaurants, products, and other services. Because candidates are familiar with the experience, their level of interaction and engagement goes up, creating a larger pipeline of qualified candidates and filling jobs faster.” In the short time since implementing Shine, candidate applications have increased by 14%.

Similarly, Dr John Sullivan notes that, “Many likely applicants will simply refuse to apply to corporations that have hiring processes that they determine to be unresponsive or mysterious”. He also argues that failing to keep candidates fully informed about their progress through the hiring process will lead to increased drop-outs, decreased offer acceptance rates, and fewer applications for other open positions.

4. BUSINESS RELATIONSHIPSTalentBoard has been conducting candidate surveys since 2010, with the goal of elevating and promoting quality candidate experiences. In their 2018 surveys across North America, EMEA and APAC of more than 220,000 candidates at 300 different companies, they found that around 40% of candidates who had a bad experience (rated 1 star out of 5) would sever their business relationship with the organisation, while around 70% of those with a highly positive experience (5 stars) would increase their business relationship.

The study defines a ‘business relationship’ as alliance, product purchases and relationships – all of which add up to dollars earned.

Enhancing the candidate experience for better business outcomes 6

Poor candidate experience - candidates who rate overall experience 1 star are willing to sever the business relationship

Source: TalentBoard global candidate experience research

Candidates who have a good experience are more likely to want to be a customer

Source: WorkTrends® 2016 Global (Recent job applicants n=7,096)

5. NEW CUSTOMER ACQUISITIONNot surprisingly, IBM’s WorkTrends survey also found that people who had a good candidate experience had a stronger desire to become a customer of the recruiting organisation than those who had a poor experience. And while 31% didn’t want to become a customer despite being satisfied with the process, this increased to 60% when people were dissatisfied with their treatment.

Enhancing the candidate experience for better business outcomes 7

2018 2017 2016 2015 2014

Positive experience

78% 77% 81% 80% 81%

Negative experience

65% 61% 67% 66% 66%

Candidates sharing positive and negative experiences with their inner circles

Source: Source: TalentBoard 2018 North American candidate research

Advocacy stronger when candidate experience is positive

Source: WorkTrends® 2016 Global (Recent job applicants n=7,096)

Similarly, IBM reports that 62% of people who were satisfied with their journey would happily recommend the organisation to others as an employer.

6. SHARING AND REFERRALSTalentBoard’s 2018 North American survey found that of the candidates who had a positive experience, 78% would share the details with their inner circle (close friends, colleagues, family, peers) and 50% would share publicly in an online format. On the other hand, 65% of candidates who had a negative experience would tell those close to them, and 35% of the same group would speak about it online.

Enhancing the candidate experience for better business outcomes 8

THE TOP CAUSES OF NEGATIVE CANDIDATE EXPERIENCES, ...AND HOW TO FIX THEM

So, we know that poor candidate experiences often result in real, tangible outcomes for our organisation. But what is it, exactly, that leads to such negative experiences for candidates?

Of course, each organisation’s recruitment process will be different and there’s no substitute for doing your own research to find out what needs to improve. Alongside that, we can also benefit from the large body of research available that helps us identify the factors that most commonly cause candidates to feel undervalued and unappreciated.

We’ll summarise the top causes here and tell you how you can address them.

Enhancing the candidate experience for better business outcomes 9

1. THE OVERALL EXPERIENCE

PROBLEM: LACK OF COMMITMENT TO THE CANDIDATE EXPERIENCEAs with any organisational ideologies or values, commitment starts at the top and filters down. If your senior leaders are not on board with providing candidates with an excellent experience, it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to implement the changes required.

SOLUTION: ENSURE COMMITMENT STARTS AT THE TOPCommitment to the candidate experience needs to be an inherent part of the organisation’s values. If management isn’t convinced that treating candidates well is a sound business decision, you can use some of the factors mentioned in the previous chapter to inform a business case.

PROBLEM: NOT COLLECTING CANDIDATE FEEDBACKAgain, it might seem obvious that without understanding how candidates actually feel about their experience, any changes you make could fail to hit the mark and lead to improved business outcomes.

A study by Future Workplace found that 78% of jobseekers said they’d never been asked for feedback on their experience, and only 25% of employers said they regularly asked for feedback.

SOLUTION: START COLLECTING!There’s no substitute for collecting genuine, timely feedback from your candidates about what they like and dislike about your process. And, once you’ve begun to implement changes, their feedback can help you to understand which initiatives have had the intended effect and what still needs to improve.

PROBLEM: AN INCONSISTENT, PATCHY PROCESSAs consumers, we expect that when we engage with a brand, we’ll get a consistent experience. This means that throughout our interactions, we’ll see similar branding, communications will use a similar voice and style, and the information we receive will be well-thought out, not duplicated or copied from a ‘one size fits all’ template.

The same, of course, goes for the candidate experience: while candidates don’t expect anything too flashy, they do want a process that’s professional and thoughtfully designed, rather than something that’s been cobbled together with little thought about the journey as a whole.

SOLUTION: MAP THE CANDIDATE JOURNEYJourney mapping has been extremely popular over the past few years across vastly different industries and processes, and with good reason: it allows us to put ourselves in another’s shoes and really understand their experience with our organisation from their perspective.

In most cases, this involves creating candidate personas: understanding the different types of candidates who might be interested in working with you, their relationship with technology, their likes and dislikes, goals and frustrations. Then, walking through the different experiences these personas could have when applying for a position with the organisation.

In many cases, it’s not a pretty exercise in any sense of the word. According to a recent survey by Jibe, jobseekers describe today’s online application process as stressful, complicated and painful. In fact, many would rather stand in line at the DMV, go skydiving or speak in front of 100 strangers than go through the time-consuming process of applying for a job.

The good news is that uncovering problems is exactly the point of mapping the candidate journey. Once organisations understand what their entire recruitment process is like from the

“It’s apparent that companies who have candidate experience as a structural part of their culture and organizational DNA demonstrate those values throughout the hiring and employee life cycle. While individual recruiters are obviously the primary arbiters of this experience, success starts with support from the top – and a continuous commitment to candidates from across the enterprise.”- Ray Tenenbaum

point of view of those who experience it, they can start to improve it.

PROBLEM: LACK OF COMMUNICATIONThis is possibly the most common complaint from candidates, who want clear and timely information about the process and their progress. According to the 2018 State of Talent Relationship Marketing Report from Phenom People, only 2% of Fortune 500 companies “are communicating the status of a candidate’s application throughout the entire duration of the (hiring) process”.

The problem exists in all stages of the candidate journey, from learning more about a company to accepting a job or not being considered any further. And, as mentioned earlier, it can have serious repercussions for your organisation, from having top candidates drop out to wasting recruitment team time as they answer questions that could have been proactively addressed in communications to the candidate.

SOLUTION: ENSURE YOU HAVE EFFECTIVE COMMS FOR EACH STAGE OF THE JOURNEYAs you map the candidate journey, you will likely uncover areas in which candidate questions and concerns are not addressed appropriately, or communications are missing or sub-par. This will help you to identify opportunities to provide candidates with the information they need to help them progress confidently.

Newer technologies such as chatbots can help candidates find answers to their questions or concerns on your website, using their mobile phone. As Craig Fisher from Allegis Global Solutions says, “Job candidates like to be communicated with via their personal e-mail address, their personal phone—whether it’s by voice message or text—and via a company’s careers site, which could be with a chatbot. From the surveys that I’ve done, the overwhelming majority of candidates say they have no problem interacting with chatbots at the start of the application process. They find them to be helpful with completing administrative tasks. They are also a nice shortcut toward talking with a recruiter or being matched to other jobs that are similar to the ones being applied for.”

Text messages can be great for sending reminders to candidates about incomplete applications, interviews or assessments, and can even provide information about traffic conditions on the way to an interview (LinkedIn do this!). They can also be useful for contacting your talent pool when running a recruitment campaign.

“Create a CX that targets the best, treats the best with respect and offers a job based on the candidate’s motivating needs. Then apply these same principles to every other candidate. That’s how you create an award winning CX and hire great people, too”. – Lou Adler

Enhancing the candidate experience for better business outcomes 10

“Companies need to communicate with candidates in a more meaningful way and through more effective tools in the next year. In our latest research, companies using bots to communicate with candidates were two times more likely to fill positions within two weeks and companies using text were two times more likely to improve first year retention rates.”- Madeline Laurano, Aptitude

Research

Enhancing the candidate experience for better business outcomes 11

PROBLEM: IMPERSONAL OR SLOPPY COMMUNICATIONWhile not quite as bad as no communication at all, candidates also don’t appreciate receiving poorly worded or edited templates that may have been copied from other positions. Spelling and grammar errors don’t make a good impression either.

SOLUTION: ENSURE YOUR COMMS ARE PERSONALISED AND PROOFREADUnless you’re fortunate enough to have a dedicated recruitment marketing team, this could be a good time to get your marketing team involved. While you don’t want overly positive ‘marketing speak’ in your comms, you do want them to be well-written, personalised (at the very least calling the candidate and position by name), and free of errors.

REVELIAN CANDIDATE POLLOver the course of a week, we asked candidates visiting our website, “Have you ever had a really good experience when applying for a job with an employer?”

Have you ever had a really good candidate experience?

Source: Revelian data collected April 2019. n=141

We also asked respondents who said they had occasionally or often had a really good experience what it was that made it so pleasant. Overall, the top elements were:

• Communication and prompt responses throughout the process

• Warmth and friendliness of interviewers; feeling comfortable; interviewers being genuinely interested in candidates

• Information about and transparency of the recruitment process

• A short and straightforward process

• Receiving feedback about their application.

Enhancing the candidate experience for better business outcomes 12

2. ATTRACTING CANDIDATESAt this stage, the main issues for candidates is getting enough information to form a clear and accurate picture of what it’s like to work at your organisation, and a simple path to apply for an available role or register to be considered for future opportunities.

PROBLEM: LIMITED INFORMATION The TalentBoard survey found that 75% of candidates research multiple channels before applying for a job. This includes review sites such as Indeed and Glassdoor, your website and careers page, your blog and social channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Despite this, candidates still report lack of information about a position and the organisation as a key problem during the recruitment process. Sparse or patchy information or requiring candidates to go hunting for answers to their questions can be a turn-off for quality candidates who might have otherwise applied for a role.

SOLUTION: PROVIDE QUALITY INFORMATION (THAT ALSO SHOWCASES YOUR EMPLOYER BRAND)Why do your current employees enjoy working for you? How do they perceive the organisation’s culture? What sets you apart from other organisations? It’s important to think like marketers (or involve your marketing team) to firstly, ensure you understand what information candidates need before they apply, and secondly, how to best provide it to them.

Often, the first port of call for candidates is your careers page, which should be readily accessible across all kinds of devices, so candidates can visit when it suits them. It’s a good idea to make sure it includes engaging information (think photos, video, infographics) about:

• Why your employees love working there: What attracted them to their role and why do they stay?

• Your values and culture: Why do you do what you do? What principles guide your everyday operations? What values do you hold most dear?

• Your products and services: A snapshot of your current offerings, including any newer products or areas of special focus

• Information about diversity and equal opportunity at your organisation

• FAQS: Proactive answers to commonly asked questions about your organisation, applying for jobs and the recruitment process. As noted earlier, chatbots are rapidly gaining ground as an easy and engaging way to respond to candidate enquiries.

It’s also critical to get this content out on other channels your prospective employees will be engaging with, such as social sites, job boards and blogs. According to TalentBoard, candidates are becoming less trusting of an organisation’s own content and are increasingly looking to third party sites for more objective information about what it’s really like to work for them.

That doesn’t mean you can’t have some control over the content on third party sites. If you have glowing employee testimonials on your careers page, you can ask your employees to leave an open and

honest review on these sites as well.

“We saw a 69 percent increase in utilizing chat bots on career sites in 2018. More employers realize that a competitive differentiator is communicating earlier with candidates, even before they apply. Chatbots are being used to answer general employment questions and this frees up the recruiting teams to have more hands-on time with potential candidates already in play.”

- Kevin Grossman, TalentBoard

“More and more, younger workers will only see your website or brand on a mobile device. If your career site isn’t mobile-ready you signal to them that you are not a progressive company! Today’s workers want access to the tech they are used to. And it is mostly mobile.”

- Craig Fisher, CA Technologies

Enhancing the candidate experience for better business outcomes 13

3. RECEIVING CANDIDATE APPLICATIONSOnce you’ve attracted quality candidates, they need to be able to submit their application quickly and easily. If it’s difficult for them to work out how they can apply, or there are blockers such as having to move to a different device, or they can’t get the information they want before submitting an application, then it’s unlikely they’ll apply.

PROBLEM: LACK OF JOB INFORMATIONAre you still copying and pasting job descriptions into a template someone created years ago? Does it include a long list of requirements, but little information about what the candidate can expect to be doing day-to-day? Is the job description the only information available to candidates? Are you providing enough information about the salary, benefits and working environment? In other words, are candidates getting the information they need to make an informed decision about whether the role will be a good fit for them and it’s worth their time to apply?

Not giving candidates enough information reflects poorly on the organisation, wastes recruiter time in answering questions that could have been addressed earlier, and can mean you receive more applications from unsuitable candidates who are, in effect, being set up to fail.

SOLUTION: PROVIDE A CAREFUL, CONTEXTUALISED DESCRIPTIONAccording to TheLadders, candidates spend 49.7 seconds overall deciding whether a job is a good fit. This means that job descriptions need a clear and unambiguous title, and straightforward, easily scannable information about the skills required, the task requirements, and the salary and benefits available. They should also be able access further information if they want it, such as a profile of the hiring manager, and information from other employees they could be working with.

PROBLEM: A DIFFICULT OR LONG APPLICATION PROCESSHow long is a piece of string? It’s not easy to determine how long is too long for an application, but as a general rule, if candidates think it’s taking up too much of their time, then it’s not a good experience for them. According to CareerBuilder, 60% of applicants drop out after filling out part of an application, because it’s too long or too complex. However. while a study from recruitment service provider Seven Step RPO found that 30% of candidates thought 15 minutes were too long, 35% of under 25-year-olds were okay with spending 45 minutes or more on an application, provided they thought it was worthwhile.

So, while a longer application process is not (necessarily) a bad thing per se, candidates don’t want to feel like they’re wasting their time. Common peeves include:

• Not being able to import information from social profiles

• Not being able to complete their application on a mobile device

• Having to create or log into multiple accounts to submit an application

• Having information on their resume parsed inaccurately by an ATS, so they either don’t get recognition for their qualifications or experiences, or have to correct and re-submit information

• Having to complete the whole application in one session, particularly if they need to source or copy specific documents.

“One of the greatest trends today is a multistep application where a candidate can start the application process with very little information given and finish it at a later time or step.”

- Sharlyn Lauby, SHRM

Enhancing the candidate experience for better business outcomes 14

SOLUTION: OFFER A STREAMLINED, SIMPLE APPLICATION PROCESSThings are moving quickly in this space and it’s worth investing in state-of-the-art tech to get it right. As a 2016 article by Indeed noted, “Some companies are adopting application experiences that rival top ecommerce sites for simplicity, usability and brevity. As more job seekers encounter fast, easy online applications from these industry leaders, they’ll increasingly judge your company against this new standard.” Their advice is straightforward: use fewer screening questions; offer a simple, clean experience with few clicks required; make it mobile friendly.

PROBLEM: THE APPLICATION ‘BLACK HOLE’

It’s likely that most of us have experienced this at some stage of our lives. You put precious time and energy into submitting a job application and then… crickets.

SOLUTION: PROVIDE CONFIRMATION AND INFORMATION ABOUT NEXT STEPSWhile it’s probably not possible to write a bespoke thank you to every single person who applies for a job, it should be fairly easy to send a semi-personalised email or text that thanks each applicant for their time, confirms that their application has been received and is being reviewed, and advises what will happen next along with expected timeframes. You can also include links to further information about your recruitment process (e.g. videos, hiring manager profiles).

Importantly, if you provide applicants with dates or timeframes for specific events, ensure those dates are stuck to, or advise applicants if they change.

There’s a lot of room for improvement and innovation in this area. These days, as Dr John Sullivan writes, “You can easily track the progress of a $29 Amazon package of socks, but not your job application that you put numerous hours into.” Few companies are proactively advising applicants about what’s happening behind the scenes, but perhaps it’s time for a little more visibility and a little less secrecy.

4. SCREENING & INTERVIEWING CANDIDATESThere’s a lot happening in this area at the moment, with plenty of exciting new tools available to help you interview and assess your candidates. Tech such as video interviews, VR and augmented reality, and game-based assessments can provide a faster and more objective way to identify top candidates.

Of course, as with any HR tools, it’s critical to ensure they’re introduced as part of a thoughtful, fair and well-designed recruitment process.

PROBLEM: LACK OF PERCEIVED FAIRNESS AND VALIDITYNaturally, your candidates want to feel they’ve had a fair chance at displaying their knowledge, skills and experience during the recruitment process. This incorporates all of the screening mechanisms you use, such as screening questions, psychometric or other assessments, job simulations, case studies, and interviews.

About assessments in particular, Gerry Crispin, co-founder of CareerXroads and TalentBoard points out that candidates don’t hate assessments; what they hate is a hiring process that seems unfair. These perceptions of fairness can be driven by many things, including where the assessment falls in the workflow, whether they understand the value of it, and the kind of feedback they receive. As Crispin notes, “the number one factor in candidates’ positive feelings about an assessment is a clear link between the content of the assessment and the job they are applying to (also known as ‘face validity’).”

SOLUTION: ENSURE YOUR SCREENING TOOLS HAVE BOTH FACE VALIDITY AND PREDICTIVE VALIDITYBing Chun Lin from IBM notes that “what we think works and what actually works can be two different things. Great hiring processes (interviews, assessments, etc.) should both feel like they work (have face validity) and actually work (have predictive validity).”

In other words, the tools you employ to identify the most suitable candidates for a role should do what they say on the cover: they should actually help you to predict how they’re going to perform if you hire them. As Frank Schmidt et al noted in 2016, over 100 years of research have shown that assessments of general mental ability (GMA) are by far the single most effective tool for predicting future work performance (validity of 0.65), and that GMA assessments combined with integrity tests (combined validity of .78) or structured interviews (combined validity of (.76) offer the highest joint validity. Schmidt notes that “in economic terms, the gains from increasing the validity of hiring methods can amount over time to literally millions of dollars. However, this can be viewed from the opposite point of view: By using selection methods with low validity, an organisation can lose millions of dollars in reduced production, reducing revenue and profits. In fact, many employers, both in the United Stated and throughout the world, are currently using suboptimal selection methods (our emphasis).”

This gives forward-thinking organisations a clear advantage over those who are still relying on selection methods with low validity, such as GPA (0.34) or years of experience (0.16), or even tools they’ve developed themselves with minimal predictive validity at all. Once we understand which tools offer the best prediction of future performance, we can focus our energies on ensuring that candidates feel that their abilities are being measured fairly and their time is being respected.

Enhancing the candidate experience for better business outcomes 15

Enhancing the candidate experience for better business outcomes 16

In terms of (structured) interviews, this means allowing candidates to prepare appropriately, asking relevant questions, and not requiring them to repeat the same information time and time again. Organisations are using a range of techniques to make face-to-face interviews more candidate-friendly, such as:

• LinkedIn sends face-to-face interview candidates a text message with a link to traffic conditions on the day of their interview. They add other flourishes to delight candidates, including a goody bag to help them through the day.

• Providing background information about interviewers

• Coordinating travel

• Providing a detailed agenda

• Giving candidates a tour of the office/facilities

• Airbnb writes a welcome note for the candidate on the whiteboard in the interview room

• Ensuring interviewers are clear on their role and the candidate’s background before the interview.

REVELIAN EMPLOYER POLL

Over the course of a week, we asked employers visiting our website, “As an employer, do you feel the experience your candidates receive is as good as it can be?”

Is your candidate experience as good as it can be?

Source: Revelian data collected April 2019. n=57

Enhancing the candidate experience for better business outcomes 17

CASE STUDY: REVELIAN’S GAME-BASED ASSESSMENT, COGNIFY, PERCEIVED AS FAIRER THAN OTHER COGNITIVE ASSESSMENTS

While GMA or cognitive ability assessments are known to be the single most effective predictor of future work performance, the candidate experience has changed very little since the early 20th century. With the goal of offering candidates a much more enjoyable, less stressful experience while providing employers with objective and valid information, Revelian released Cognify, a game-based assessment of cognitive ability in 2017.

Since then, we’ve conducted both internal and external validation exercises to assess the effectiveness of the tool and collected anecdotal feedback from thousands of candidates. At the time of writing, some of our more significant findings include:

• 90% of candidates said that game-based assessments such as Cognify were as good as or better than traditional assessments

• A multinational tech company found that Cognify:

• Positively influenced candidates’ perception of the company

• Positively influenced their decision to accept a job offer

• Motivated them to recommend applying for a job with the company to others.

• In a study of US undergraduates, candidates felt that Cognify was a fairer assessment than other GMA assessments.

“The justice finding, in particular, is amazing – our sample thought it would be fairer to be assessed with Cognify than with a cognitive ability test battery if a job were on the line. This is directly contradictory to the worry about games making job applications “less serious” and applicants being angry about not being taken seriously; it seems the opposite is true, at least among those fairly recently entering and just

about to enter the workforce in the US.”

– Dr. Richard Landers

Several of the mini-games included in Cognify

Enhancing the candidate experience for better business outcomes 18

5. REJECTING CANDIDATESIt’s a fact that the majority of candidates who apply for a job with your organisation will be unsuccessful, which means they’ll experience your rejection process. This in turn impacts how candidates perceive your organisation: whether they feel that their time has been valued and appreciated, or that they were just another number.

PROBLEM: ‘GHOSTING’ CANDIDATESUnfortunately, there are still organisations using the strategy that ‘no answer means no’, which is, of course, extremely stressful for candidates. As mentioned earlier, TalentBoard’s research found that candidates share their negative experiences 66% of the time. Regardless of the stage they’ve reached in the recruitment process – whether they’ve simply submitted an application or have completed three rounds of interviews - everyone who has made the effort to apply should be informed when they’re out of the running.

SOLUTION: BAKE REJECTION COMMS INTO YOUR RECRUITMENT PROCESSMost Applicant Tracking Systems (ATSs) allow you to send automated emails to candidates as you progress them. Sending candidates a personalised email (at the least, including their name and the position title) that thanks them for their application, lets them know they’re no longer being considered, and asks for their feedback offers closure and gives you information about how well your recruitment process is working.

For those who’ve made it to the interview stage, it pays to offer even more personalized feedback. Some employers still send an email in the first instance but invite the candidate to phone them for feedback about their performance. Others believe candidates who have made it this far deserve a phone call. Chad MacRae of Recruiting Social says, “Don’t hide behind an email. When the candidate answers the phone, inform them you have an update, ask if it’s a good time to speak, and if it is, rip the Band Aid off and get it out.” Nicole Belyna of Thompson Creek Window Company has hard-and-fast rules for turning down candidates. If they’ve applied but did not interview, they receive a general email letting them know they weren’t selected. If they went through a phone screen, they receive a personalized email. If they’ve interviewed in person, they receive a call. TalentBoard’s research backs this approach up: “The positive candidate ratings jump upwards of 22 percent when they receive a phone versus the automated email rejection, a big difference that can go a long way”.

PROBLEM: NO FEEDBACK PROVIDEDAccording to LinkedIn, 94% of candidates want to receive feedback after an interview. Employers are naturally wary of providing too much feedback for legal reasons; however, candidates want to understand why they weren’t successful and what they can improve in future, particularly if they’ve progressed significantly through the recruitment process. Many employers choose to play it safe with a generic rejection along the lines of “Thank you for applying. Unfortunately, you weren’t successful”, which can prevent disputes and avoid awkward discussions with candidates about why they weren’t hired.

SOLUTION: OFFER HONEST AND USEFUL FEEDBACKWhile it can be a tricky area, candidates will always appreciate the opportunity to receive feedback if they ask for it. As Christina Pavlou of Workable advises, all feedback should focus on job-related criteria and, if appropriate, recommend skills they could develop to be more competitive in the future. This is especially useful if you have silver medalist candidates who could be top performers if they improved in certain areas: they’ll likely appreciate the feedback and may decide to develop those skills further before they next apply.

Delivering feedback to candidates is a skill that recruiters can learn as well. Joshua Budway of Medallia tells how Medallia improved the candidate experience and grew the company by 160% in two years. Amongst other things, they identified that the way they communicated feedback to candidates was having a big impact on the candidate experience, so decided to train their recruiters on how to deliver feedback more effectively. They introduced shadowing systems, for new recruiters to learn how senior recruiters did it; while their legal team trained candidate-facing teams on how to be honest and transparent.

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FIVE WAYS PSYCHOMETRIC ASSESSMENTS – ESPECIALLY GAME-BASED ASSESSMENTS - DRIVE A BETTER CANDIDATE EXPERIENCEAs a psychometric assessment provider, it’s probably no surprise that Revelian endorses the use of psychometric assessments during the recruitment process. But we do so for good reasons: as part of a well-designed selection exercise, assessments can genuinely offer a fairer and more equitable candidate experience. Let’s take a look at the top reasons for this.

1. Psychometric assessments remove biasesWe’ve heard a lot in recent years about how, despite our best efforts, we’re all subject to biases. Because we have to process millions of pieces of information, our brains have created mental shortcuts – the word ‘bias’ derives from the Greek word ‘oblique’ meaning a diagonal line. These shortcuts help us navigate the world with minimal effort; making conscious decisions takes a lot of brain power, and biases allow us to conserve energy for more important decisions. When we make a quick judgement about other people, most of it happens unconsciously on the basis of our background, cultural environment and personal experiences. It’s fast, automatic and, as the name suggests, unconscious.

Scientifically developed and validated psychometric assessments objectively measure people’s attributes and behaviours, regardless of their ethnicity, gender, age, level of education and other background characteristics. This means you can be confident that you’re accurately assessing specific attributes, such as problem-solving ability, work-related values, emotional intelligence, integrity and more in a bias-free and inclusive manner. And just as importantly, candidates can see that you’ve opted to use fair, bias-free recruitment tools that give everyone an equal opportunity.

2. (Good) psychometric assessments offer ‘face validity’As well as being unbiased and fair, candidates want to know that the process they’re going through is relevant to the job they’re applying for. Some traditional assessments such as cognitive ability tests (asking people to solve verbal, numerical and abstract reasoning problems), values assessments (asking candidates to specify their most important values), and integrity tests (asking candidates about their attitudes towards counterproductive behaviours) have reasonably high face validity: candidates can see that they’re measuring important attributes or behaviours that are related to their performance at work.

Perhaps more surprising, however, is the perceived validity of Revelian’s game-based assessments, Cognify and Emotify. As we developed these tools, we were only too aware that there was no point in asking candidates to play games simply because they were fun and ‘edgy’. We knew that the games had to be related to job performance and appear to be measuring something of worth.

During the development process, we worked closely with candidates to ensure they felt the games were serious enough, while still remaining enjoyable. We surveyed well over 2000 candidates and, reassuringly, found a high level of face validity: candidates felt confident that they were being assessed across attributes that were highly relevant to their ability to perform on

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the job. As one candidate said, the games were “easy to use, challenging and applicable. Makes you think about how the game applies to your skill set and those required by the employer”.

3. Game-based assessments are designed with the user in mind = increased engagement, decreased stressSometimes, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the primary user of your recruitment process is the candidate. And while most of them accept that psychometric assessment is a necessary and important step in the process, that doesn’t mean they have to like it.

Game-based assessments focus on offering a better user experience, by involving candidates throughout the development process and focusing on elements of game design such as flow, autonomy, achievement, onboarding, transitions between tasks and player motivation. Inevitably, candidates (players) will experience games in their own meaningful ways and often this can transpire in ways we couldn’t even imagine.

Feedback received during the development of Cognify and Emotify highlighted the sense of challenge, variety and fun, which found candidates deeply engaged in the tasks at hand and which in turn greatly reduced their anxiety. As one candidate said, Cognify “took the nervy part of a traditional assessment away”. Another said, “It was frantic and fast-paced which really got you focused and engaged. It was great that because I became so focused, I didn’t feel as nervous as I did before starting.”

4. (Good) assessments are underpinned by scienceAs well as being a fair and unbiased way to identify candidate attributes, well-developed psychometric assessments have been through an extremely stringent research and development process. During this, we focus heavily on both the test’s reliability – its ability to produce stable and consistent results – and validity – the extent to which it measures what it’s intended to measure.

This means that not only you, but your candidates as well, can have confidence in the assessments you ask them to complete. Provided they’ve been properly developed and validated, they offer your candidates an accurate and reliable assessment of their abilities and behaviours, using well-accepted and standardised constructs proven to predict performance at work. And it also demonstrates that you care about the quality of tools you use to hire your next team members.

5. (Good) assessments enhance your employer brand

It goes without saying that a strong employer brand has enormous benefits for an organisation. But it also has benefits for your candidates. As mentioned above, the quality of the tools you use says a lot about you as an employer: if you’ve chosen scientific and accurate tools, then your candidates can see how seriously you take your recruitment process and how willing you are to invest in identifying the most suitable and ‘best fit’ applicants for the role.

Alongside that, game-based assessments in particular show candidates that you care about their application experience; that you’re a forward-thinking and innovative employer who believes that candidates should have the opportunity to showcase their skills in an enjoyable, market-leading and immersive way. We received plenty of feedback along these lines from candidates while developing and validating both Cognify and Emotify. One candidate said, “I am impressed at [employer name] for this innovative and unique method of assessment,” while another said, “I’d be interested in working for an employer that uses these games…it shows they’re exciting and progressive and open to using new technologies.”

“Great people want to work for great, progressive companies. Using cutting-edge technology as part of our recruitment process aligns with that.”

- Maria Moraitis, Head of People and Culture, Fleetcare

SIX QUICK WINSIt’s a lot of work designing and implementing a best-in-class candidate experience. If you’re short on time or resources, there are a few things you can do quickly to improve the way you’re interacting with your candidates.

1. START COLLECTING CANDIDATE FEEDBACKWhile it may be a cliché, that doesn’t mean it’s not true: you can’t improve what you don’t measure. And chances are, your candidates have opinions about their experience that you haven’t thought of. You can begin their collecting feedback easily by setting up a simple survey and including the link in all of the comms you send to your candidates.

2. ADD A BOT TO YOUR CAREERS SITEIt’s likely that your recruitment team gets asked the same questions over and over again, which means they’re spending time responding to queries rather than interacting with promising candidates. Adding a bot that answers FAQs can free up their time and reduce candidate frustration by offering them timely and accurate responses to their questions.

3. RECORD SOME EMPLOYEE TESTIMONIALSThey don’t have to be a top-quality production; in fact, more candid, less polished videos have an authentic edge. Simply record some of your most engaged employees talking about why they love working for your company and adding them to your careers site will go a long way to helping candidates understand more about your culture and the type of environment you offer.

4. GIVE CANDIDATES A TIMELINEWhile the gold standard here would be offering employees a dynamic way to track the progress of their application, that can take significant time and effort to put into place. As a first step, you can ensure that all applicants have a timeline of your recruitment process, so they know what to expect and when the important dates are.

5. SEND REJECTIONS, OFFER CLOSUREAs mentioned, one of the most common candidate complaints is never hearing from an employer again once they’ve submitted an application. These days, it’s easy to send bulk emails to candidates using an ATS, or a job site with applicant management functionality. While it might be more appropriate to phone candidates who have made it to the interview stage, an email to candidates who haven’t progressed that far is a quick win that closes the loop for candidates and demonstrates that you appreciate their time and effort in applying.

6. FIND SOME CHAMPIONSCommitment to the candidate experience starts at the top. If your senior leaders understand the (extensive) business implications of improving the candidate experience, they’ll be more likely to embrace projects that improve it and likely to promote it across the organisation.

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