Who cares about candidates?
Posted by Mitch on 22nd October 2015
I think the formalisation of the concept of ‘Candidate Experience’ is now just another of those ‘emperors new clothes’ things that pop-up from time to time.
It’s something I used to think made sense for hiring companies and recruiters to care about – and at its rudimentary level it still does make sense.
The problem is, now it’s been hijacked by marketers desperate to find a new garden to piss in.
The only people with the inclination and the money to buy into Candidate Experience as a new part of the recruiting process to obsess about are, ironically, the very people who don’t need it.
Namely, large corporates with omnipresent brands who are not going to lose any consumers who have temporarily doubled-up as a candidate, just because they didn’t get a response to their job application.
Of course there’s always an exception, like everyone’s favourite cable company Virgin Media, who re-examined their application process in order to save around £4 million. There’s nothing like a big pile of cash to encourage people to do the right thing.
But for almost every other large corporate, their recruitment process screams out “Hey, we’re doing you a favour just by having job vacancies you ungrateful drones”. It’s the same dynamic at play where people allow themselves to be treated like shit by those that are rich and powerful. But when someone from their own peer group does it, out comes the righteous indignation.
There is a school of thought that for a company to build a great Candidate Experience requires great recruiters – something I kind of agree with.
The problem is, they don’t pay internal recruiters anywhere near enough to attract the best.
And they probably don’t need to either.
I think the reality is that large corporates are only an option for 3 types of recruiters;
1. Ambitious recruiters who want to learn more about the recruitment landscape so they can take that learning back to agency-land a year or two later and make some real money putting it into practice.
2. Older agency recruiters who have finally been beaten-down by the bullshit that is contingency.
3. HR people who are into masochism.
The fact that corporate recruiters even have to bother themselves with Candidate Experience issues is just one of the prices they have to pay for working there.
That and the institutional arrogance their employer has when it comes to hiring. The main reason I stopped working with large corporates about 5 years ago, was this attitude they had that they didn’t need to put any effort into attracting new hires.
Life’s too short to work alongside that kind of arrogance everyday. Well, at least my life is.
Apart from large corporates, nobody cares about Candidate Experience.
And they only care about it as another branding bauble to hoodwink the world with.
Even candidates don’t care about it.
If companies really cared about what candidates experienced when applying for their jobs, they’d be more careful about which recruitment agencies they use.
The day Candidate Experience became a thing, was also the day it started being bullshit.
Since when did treating candidates with basic courtesy ever need to have its own chapter in the recruiting ‘How to’ guide?