Have we lost it (and them)

Candidate experience (CX) is much discussed by employers as a major factor inclining brand perception, word of mouth and of course keeping the best talent, more fought for, engaged and likely to progress. Students on the other hand have increasingly become expectant of consumer-grade user experience (UX), clarity, authenticity and speed.

But are we getting CX right? Do we have a recruitment processes mindset, or brand and attraction (marketing) mindset?

Thank you to the May 2024 Breakfast News speakers, Vicky Pryce, Georgia Greer, Nicky Garcea, our panel and Marcel Khan, from which this article was put together. You can access video content below.

 

Macro factors

Competitive landscape

Institute of Student Employers (ISE) reported last year that more employers were hiring into more occupational routes than ever before, with occupations seeing a 3-6 times annual increase. What does this mean? Well, it means traditional sector/business competitors have now been joined by talent competitors who sit in other sectors. Take Legal occupations for example, nearly 3 times as many employers year-on-year are hiring into Legal roles. So, firms are diversifying the routes entry level talent join their company whilst swaying more towards linear and skills pathways as opposed to rotational, generic and leadership programmes.

Tech

We’re blessed in the early careers sector to have lots of technology options to support each and all stages of the candidate journey. As Gen Z have grown up with social apps and messaging, the spotlight is on providers and employers to provide a modern, engaging and comparable experience to candidates.

Duty of care and The New Moral Age

As a Breakfast News speaker said, ‘we’re entering a new Moral Age where businesses will need to be very clear on their purpose and where they stand on macro and public issues as well as things like use of AI. Gen Z (and even more so Gen A to come) are looking for transparency on this and making decisions based on ethical alignments. This can be our lense from EVP and discovery stages in terms of what is being said, shown and done in all things – including how we project employer values, commitment to diversity and ESG. All the way to contractual and onboarding including working locations, access, mental health support and development. Employers have the chance to present these topics informatively, with clarity and up front in the candidate experience. It may well have a positive impact on the next set of metrics…

Measuremenet

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

This is a simple question that we can ask candidates. How likely are you to recommend us. It can be asked through more than one stage of the process from the early careers pages to the application form, assessment stages and onboarding. Given us a picture of where to focus improvement efforts. Ideally this data should be captured by EDI group to consider specific interventions – accessibility and neurodiversity considerations in particular.

Ghosting, withdrawals, rejections and reneges

ISE data is also showing that employers are experiencing on average:

• 9% ghosting
• 14% withdrawing
• 6% declining offers
• 7% reneging on offers

Transfer this into employer processes at the tune of 500, 5,000 or even 50,000 applications and you soon start to see the opportunity that present itself to employers to gain operational efficiencies and improve ROI metrics by creating marginal gains across the process via CX enhancements.

The CX set up

Before we dive into recommendations per stage, we need take a step back and look at how most early careers employers are set up to process candidates. It’s also worth noting at this point too, many of these candidates are first-time applicants to jobs and programmes so are experiencing being a candidate for the first time. First impressions really do count.

Typically, we see employers setting up like this:

• Marketing: Brand – Attraction
• Selection: Screening – Assessment – Interview – Assessment Centre
• Contractual: Offer - Onboarding

For some time now, a top and tailed ‘attraction mindset’ by employers has created a large proportion of their candidate and customer centric focus to be in the Marketing activity at the top of the funnel.

Could employers put a more even focus and attention on the Selection and Contractual stages?

The themes and objectives we hear from employers are centred around speed, efficiencies and quality over quantity. But before making modifications to their end-to-end operation, how can employers still enable psychological safety in recruitment?

There are three key core considerations in achieving this:

• Remove barriers – you want candidates to apply and feel like you care about them
• Clarity and transparency – once applied, you need to make candidates aware and clear as to what you are and will be asking them to do
• Provide authentic moments – with so many options to use different recruitment technology, deciding what and how to assess candidate is becoming even more important

Methods to improve CX throughout the process

Brand and Attraction

Perception of brands can change quickly based on macro activity or gradually on a more micro level. If we look at the uncertainty around the economy and politics, businesses could find a lack of clarity regarding demand planning or even find themselves returning to COVID-era experiences with roles pulled and start dates moved out.

Most firms are stating the same kind of information online around all things diversity related. But the narrative changes and can be much more impactful in person with real-life experiences and engagements.

We already know from Cibyl’s Graduate Survey 2023, that salary expectations for graduates are now at an all-time high of £33,500, an increase of over 10% on 2022. If the cost-of-living pressure increases further, we could we find salary becoming even more prominent as the most important factor for students when considering an employer. 23% of respondents in Cibyl’s Graduate Survey 2023, cite this as their number one factor when deciding between employers.

Students are voicing how the information can be inconsistent in the process, saying employers are focusing too much within job descriptions on the role, values etc, leading to them being advertised to and meaning that employer can come across as disingenuous.

Students are increasingly finding, the opportunities to secure work experience, internships and placements difficult. Couple that with cost of living and balancing study and down-time (in order to gain the full university experience and healthy wellbeing) and students are finding themselves with limiting options to get onto the radar of employers.

Recommendations

• Provide demand and timeframe clarity. Maybe as a COVID learning for the periods ahead, employers could provide more clarity and certainty for candidates, so time and effort on the candidate side is not wasted.
• Culture is key. People-centred approaches throughout the process are well received, such as events, 121 engagements and meeting or hearing from employees.
• Diversity differentiation. There is an opportunity for employers to differentiate from the competition when it comes to their diversity aspirations, approaches and actions by deploying more tangible and in-person experiences to compliment the less authentic corporate and generic views and statistics.
• Salary review. Leveraging insights from the ISE and also Cibyl’s Graduate and School Leaver data enables employers to benchmark by sectors and regions.
• Authentic branding Showcase the company culture, values, and employee testimonials through videos, social media, and the company website.
• Bring content to life. Students are keen to see and hear more about what employers want from them as talent and what they would gain by joining the employer. More focus on mentors, projects, networks and opportunities. Rather than stale transactional job descriptions, early careers talent are wanting more tangible, relatable and attainable detail. It is much more impactful to ask and listen to employees as opposed to telling candidates why you should work at a particular employer.
• Understand your audience. An end-to-end recruitment review and insights, would allow employers to ask themselves if what their talent audience deems important, is reflective in their EVP, content, communications and processes. Many early careers employers already understand how their target audiences perceive them through the work of our student market research consultancy, Cibyl.

Screening, Assessments and Interviewing

We hear a lot from students who’ve had experiences of feeling insignificant and describing it as being a number, not a person. When you consider both the volumes of applications employers are receiving plus reports of more applications per students with advancements of AI, it’s certainly a challenge for employers to make candidates feel individual and create personalisation.

There’s been an ongoing trend reported by the ISE over the last decade showing the growing leniency in education pre-requisite criteria deployed by employers in terms of less asking for a 2:1 or above degree and/or minimum UCAS points. This has in no doubt helped with making recruitment more inclusive in early careers. But at what cost?

The ISE data also shows the ratio of applications to vacancies has leapt up in the last two decades, with employer members telling the ISE last year that they collectively received over 900,000 apps for just over 20,000 jobs. That’s a ratio of 86 applications per vacancy BUT some sectors and employers are receiving well over 120 applications per role.

It does pose the question:

Are we assessing for the most suitable candidates? Or are we simply rejecting the most unsuitable candidates via multiple stages?

Recommendations

• Review length of window to apply. It could be useful to look at historic data to show which roles are more popular, which roles have better pass rates and ultimately which roles are likely to have a needless volume of excess candidates. You may find those candidates could apply to other roles you have and help with other pipelines.

Assessment and Selection

There is an expected and growing need for candidates to be clear on where they stand be it when applying or in the process itself.

Another important factor to consider is where on the life and empathy roadmap, candidates may be. As talent pipelines become more inclusive, it’s important that employers find ways to speak to broader audiences in their communications and stages of the process. The support networks and those helping candidates with insights and information before or during the process can also be contrasting too. It’s therefore important for employers to provide enough information at each stage so that candidates can feel they’re being supportively informed in a way which wants them to perform well, and not feeling apprehensive or disengaged.

When a recruitment process is meant to be a two-way experience, have we lost our way when it comes to doing enough to educate and inform candidates to understand if the employer is right for the candidate?

Time is important and precious to students who in some case have to spread their full-time course across working part-time and other commitments. It’s not just about how long the whole recruitment process takes but when it happens in amongst study timetables across semesters.

Recommendations

• Preparation and guidance. A concerted focus on preparing candidates before and during your recruitment stages can have significant positive impacts on your DEI aspirations to level the playing field, with many diverse communities showing improved conversion rates to apply and performance in process. This includes our own GTI experiential learning activities such as GradSims, where diverse communities are 40% more likely to complete pre-application activities like this.
• Real life materials. Providing real life materials and therefore experiences doesn’t just discourage cheating, but also increases engagement and ultimately enhance your CX.
• Review exam materials. Employers need to consider exam periods in their assessment planning from the outset or on a rolling basis to avoid unavailability or inability to make adjustment for candidates who already invested significant time in their process. This is an avoidable occurrence for both parties.

Feedback

Students can appreciate that applications and time restraints might cause a lack of feedback given to candidates in a recruitment process. However, it certainly feel like from a candidate experience and brand engagement perspective, providing feedback in a timely, useful and actionable format would be a welcomed addition at scale to a talent audience who are early into their recruitment and careers experiences.

Recommendations

• Identify where you can feed back. Depending on the tech stack deployed or automation abilities of the process in place, it may be possible to automate and personalise the feedback given at some or all stages of the process. Every piece of feedback this early into their career navigation experience would be help provide a better CX but also likely encourage reapplying or a positive brand perception amongst them and their network.
• Provide some value and call to action. If employers can give feedback, they ought to not forget the quick value-add wins when it comes to providing alternatives routes internally or externally be it via partners or useful information and networks. These call to actions can be automated too but pose a natural positive end to a long multi-touchpoint engagement.

Offer and Onboarding

For those employers with extended candidate engagement periods between offer and start dates, providing new joiners with ongoing personalisation and communication lines is critical in reducing reneges and on rare occasions (but has happened!), no shows.

Recommendations

• Mentoring - Assign the new joiner to someone more senior whilst onboarding and as they join.
• Networking - Based on interests and relevance, introducing them to new people can makes those new joiners feel part of something with an established identity they can get involved in.
• Regular face to face - Building in where possible, regular in office time can help in those early periods, to keep new joiners connected.