Creating The Ultimate Candidate Experience = All You Need Is L.O.V.E.D.

Candidate experience is a much talked about aspect of the recruitment life cycle.  Just  Google Candidate Experience and take a gander at what you find.  The list of conversations, blogs, articles, white papers, complaints etc. is enormous.  Five months ago a question was posed on candidate experience at LinkedIn and the 21 replies were interesting.  A quick read of these responses reveals all the common candidate experience issues you can likely list right off the top of your head. 

I am a huge advocate of creating a Candidate Bill of Rights for your candidates.  I recommend this to every client I work with who wants to improve their recruiting organization and get better results.  Essentially this is a social contract with your applicants and candidates that defines what they can expect, how they will be treated and creates an environment where each candidate has a unique, customized, transparent and meaningful experience.  Unfortunately, so few organizations "get this" and commit to even a basic level of creating a great candidate experience.

When I work with our clients on a Candidate Bill of Rights we recommend that one of the main tenets of the CBR is that every candidate should be made to feel L.O.V.E.D.  To learn more about what this means you need to read more.

I am shocked that more organizations have not committed to establishing, committing to and then publicizing a Candidate Bill of Rights.  Interestingly, the few organizations that have created and publicized them are in third party recruiting.  I am not surprised as this industry realizes how mission critical it is to treat people properly and create meaningful relationships.  Their very livelihood depends on it.  Since most corporate recruiting organizations don't get paid for what they produce nor are they held accountable to candidate experience issues and meaningful, business focused results actually executing something such as a Candidate Bill of Rights is less important.

While the Director of Talent Acquisition at FirstMerit Bank we created a pretty robust CBR and the immediate improvement in candidate survey scores and overall candidate experience was tremendous.  Among many other aspects of our CBR we committed to making every candidate feel L.O.V.E.D.  I know it all sounds a bit "gooey" but the reality of the acronym is really about some of the most important executables a recruiter can employ to ensure a great candidate experience.

At the risk of this all seeming a bit Sesame Street I am going to break this down for you.  Here is what you have to do to make a candidate feel L.O.V.E.D. 

• L = Listen
• O = Own
• V = Validate
• E = Educate
• D = Deliver

In a series of posts we are going to go into a little bit of depth on each of these 5 areas and provide a few details on how to actually execute on each. 

In the meantime, check out The Beatles performing All You Need Is Love and get in the mood!