Apr 2017
How does your candidate experience effect your external facing brand?
A good customer service experience feels great. Even if you are resolving an issue, a complaint treated in the right way can leave you feeling truly valued and more of a brand advocate than before. It’s common sense that bad customer service can be incredibly destructive to a brand. For example, I now don’t personally use one of the large energy suppliers due the service I received when trying to resolve an issue, not because of the issue itself but because of their approach to ‘solving’ the problem.
The same is true when it comes to candidate experience. Someone applying for a job is investing themselves, as well as time and maybe money into their job application. A negative experience during the application and selection process, regardless of whether or not they get the job, can be detrimental to their view of the brand as a whole.
A recent article focussing on Graeme Johnson, the former Head of Resourcing at Virgin Media (he's now leading recruitment at BT), demonstrates this brilliantly. Virgin Media’s candidate experience was having such a negative impact on retention of customers who interviewed with them, as well as their friends and family, that they were losing £4.4m each year. Virgin had no data on the friends and family of the candidates who also then left them as a result of the process, so it is safe to say that number was actually much higher. So not only is the candidate experience vital from an employer brand perspective, but this just goes to show how important it is from an overall brand perspective.
On the other hand, a good experience can help retain or even increase a customer base. When developing a careers site for one of our clients, they were really keen to show the value in the experience the candidates had by linking to the retail element of the brand from the site. They are able to track the monetary conversions that occur after someone has visited the careers site. These may not have been instigated on or because of the careers site, but it certainly helps them along their journey rather than putting in road blocks.
Measuring attrition isn’t always as straight forward as it is with Virgin and our retail client but it does demonstrate the power of a good (and bad!) candidate experience. And that it can also have a wider impact on the brand and bottom line!
To talk to us about your candidate experience, give us a call on (0117) 300 3000 or email hello@wearedna.co.uk
In categories: Employee Engagement
