Why is the candidate experience so important? Mike Sipple Jr’s guest on the Talent Magnet Leadership Podcast, Kevin Grossman, shares the answer in this week’s episode. Kevin is the current President and Board Member at The Talent Board. He is a certified Talent Acquisition Strategist, and a Human Capital Strategist with over twenty years experience. In this must listen conversation, Kevin dives deep with Mike into why leaders should care about candidate experience, and the impact it has on our organizations.

Kevin shares that The Talent Board was created to carry out survey research on companies’ performance and give them awards based on their ratings. It’s also about getting benchmark data for them to understand what their strengths and weaknesses are based on the feedback from candidates who were not hired. [1:36]

There are four key metrics that make up Kevin’s audit: the overall rating from candidates, how likely candidates are to apply again, how likely they are to refer the company to others, and what kind of relationship the candidates intend to have with the company going forward. “Application finalists are willing to refer if they perceive everything was fair and they have positive sentiment,” Kevin tells Mike. [5:12]

Leaders should focus on creating positive and fair experiences for candidates during the application process, including communicating feedback to finalists who are rejected. This contributes to higher positive ratings. [9:25]

Leaders need to take candidate experience seriously because many candidates become future clients depending on how we made them feel, and how we treated them. [16:27]

As our businesses and organizations grow, we need to scale and invest in automation. During the application process this means that we need to have a system to quickly sift out applicants who don’t fit the criteria of what we’re looking for. [17:34]

The candidate resentment rate, where candidates express no desire to work with a particular employer again due to a poor experience, plummeted in 2020. Kevin shares that this was due to employers and companies being pushed into a forced level of transparency. This transparency, coupled with continuous empathetic communication, garnered sympathy from candidates. [20:20]

Kevin shares tips and recommendations for companies navigating through lots of negative feedback. [27:03]

As leaders, we need to invest the same effort and time, and thoughtful communication  into our employees as we do our customers, as well as those who aren't our employees who will experience our brand in some way in the future. [30:01]

ResourcesMike Sipple Jr. | LinkedIn | Twitter

Kevin Grossman | LinkedIn | Twitter Talent Board