Do you ever look at those customer review sites like Trip Advisor? The bulk of the reviews always seem to be either 5 Star or 1 Star. People don’t feel quite as compelled to write about their ‘3 out of 5’ moments.
The absolutely fantastic experiences or the completely terrible ones; those are the ones we’re most likely to remember and tell others about.
Apparently around $650 billion will be spent globally this year on Customer Experience (CX) technology and R&D. And yet, how much effort, budget and thought is put into the user experience of the people a company wishes to hire? The ‘other’ CX; Candidate Experience.
People are number one?
Almost every business of any size will tell you that “our people are our most important asset”. And yet how many companies can genuinely say that the way they hire represents a competitive advantage?
The people you hire and the recruitment process that you use to do it go to the heart of your culture as a business. That process needs to be coordinated and everyone who takes part in it - from the Partner or CEO through to the TA team – needs to be on board.
The candidate needs to feel they might be joining a company and a culture that truly cares about who they are.
Filling vacancies or building blocks?
Recruitment firms are often quite rightly criticised for being too transactional and just looking for a quick buck. Well what about the company doing the actual hiring?
Recruitment has to be seen as more than just ‘filling vacancies’. Everyone has vacancies – that’s just part of being a business. Just like everyone has customers.
What separates one firm’s reputation from another comes down to how that candidate or customer were treated by your company. It’s the experience they had at every touchpoint with your company. It’s the message they go back with to their friends or colleagues, or the review they leave online about your company.
This is as true for Customer Experience as it is for Candidate Experience.
Remember: one star or five star reviews only.
There’s another post coming soon on what a good process might actually look like…
- by Tariq Siraj