Recruiting’s Dirty Little Secrets — What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

Two of the hottest topics in corporate recruiting today are the candidate experience and need for transparency. And although many corporations are making a sincere effort to improve that candidate experience, they often pay only lip service to becoming more open, honest, and transparent. No corporate leader that I know directly lies to applicants.

However, if you consider omitting information that could directly help the applicant successfully understand the process or land a job to be a lie, then there are quite a few areas where corporations are omitting the complete truth.

from Dr. John Sullivan


Dubbed "dirty little secrets" due to insiders being well aware of them, while most applicants and business reporters haven't a clue. Let's sift through several areas where corporate recruiting could seek improvement.

• The corporate black hole — because of recruiter overload, the volume of applicants, and technology problems, a resume submitted to a corporate career site may actually have a zero probability of being reviewed. In the industry, it can be referred to as “the black hole.”
• Looking for an excuse to drop you — there are books written about the need to focus on the positive aspects of individuals, but the entire screening process is often focused on finding a single error or lack of “fit” to quickly eliminate any applicant. If you are categorized as a job-jumper, you are unemployed, you have bad credit or Klout scores, you live in a distant zip code, or they find weird things on Facebook about you, you will be immediately rejected without knowing why. As a result, those who fail to make a single mistake during the process, rather than those who are the best, are the ones that are most likely to get hired.
• The rejection letter is designed to avoid complaints, not accuracy – if you actually get a rejection letter or e-mail, you should be aware that canned phrases like “we decided to move in another direction” or “there were other more qualified candidates” are pretested or lawyer-approved phrases that are designed to quiet you and keep you from making a follow-up inquiry. In many cases, the person sending the letter won’t even know the actual reason for your rejection.
• The interview process will likely be disjointed – applicants invited in for interviews routinely complain about disorganized interviewing, death by interview (having to go through 10 or more interviews), continually getting the same repeat questions from different interviewers, and having to return multiple times on different days. If the process seems poorly managed and disjointed, it is probably because it usually is. The overall corporate interview process is more often more whimsical than scientific and integrated.
• Some jobs are not really available to outsiders — although legal requirements may require an organization to post all open jobs, in some cases, the hiring manager has already predetermined that they will hire internally. There is no way for an external applicant to know when a job is “wired,” so applying can only lead to frustration and you will never know that you did nothing wrong.
• Some companies are blocked — if you work at a company covered by an informal “non-poaching” arrangement where two firms agree not to hire from each other, your chances of getting hired are near zero. Even though these agreements are illegal, they are secret, so your application will never be considered and you will never know why.
• Recruiters won’t know if you are a customer – you might think that being a loyal customer might help your application, but most corporations have no formal way of identifying an applicant as a customer.
• We will keep your resume on file (but we will never look at it again) – is certainly true that when they tell you that your rejected application will be “kept on file” it will be. However, it will be kept almost exclusively for legal reasons. The odds of a recruiter scanning through a corporate database of thousands of names in order to revisit a resume that has previously been rejected are miniscule. Unless a recruiter remembers you by name, assume that your resume has been dropped into the “black hole.”
• You will never know the real odds – although corporations regularly calculate the percentage of all applicants that are hired, you will never find that number on the corporate website. Although the lotto is required to publish your odds of winning, corporations keep it a secret. For some jobs, the odds are well over 1,000 to 1.
• Technology may eliminate you — and most large organizations, resumes are initially screened electronically. Unfortunately, if the software is not fine-tuned, the recruiter is not well-trained, or if you fail to use the appropriate keywords and phrases, no human will ever see your resume. In one test, only 12% of specially written “perfect resumes” made it through this initial step, although in theory, 100% should have made it.
• Busy people are forced to take shortcuts — during a down economy, the volume of qualified applicants can force recruiters and hiring managers to take shortcuts. For example, recently a coordinator asked the recruiter which one of a handful of resumes should be invited in for an interview. The response was “I don’t have time to look at them; just flip a coin and pick them.” Hiring managers are also known to make choices based on snap judgments or stereotypes that add a degree of randomness to getting a job.
• Don’t call us, we’ll call you — if an applicant is rejected at any stage, there is no formal process to help you understand where you need to improve in order to be successful when applying for a job in the future. Unlike in customer service, there is no 1 -800 number to call, and because of weak corporate documentation, recruiting might not actually know (beyond a broad reason) why you are rejected and how you could improve your chances.

When Applicants Hear Nothing, They Talk and You Get Hurt

You’ve written a compelling job ad that hits all the hot points. You’ve distributed it widely. You’ve even managed to get it high up on search results pages. Despite all that, the number of applications is disappointing. So what went wrong??

According to Careerbuilder, this could very well be a technical issue. Bad links, computer or Internet difficulties, and cumbersome applications are the top reasons cited by interested candidates for not responding to a job posting.

“Sometimes it’s those little things you overlook,” says Dr. Sanja Licina, senior director of talent intelligence and consulting at CareerBuilder. When an interested job seeker clicks on an ad, and then has to click through from there to another location, an ATS for example, things can break down, she says.
That experience can leave a sour taste with potential candidates, some of whom will then go on to complain about the experience. CareerBuilder’s ongoing Applicant Experience survey found that 78 percent of candidates said they’d be sure to tell family and friends about a bad experience with a potential employer. Seventeen percent said they’d post about it on a social media site.

While technical glitches may not push most candidates beyond a little grumbling (though it might be very bad mojo for something like that to happen to a technical firm), the “black hole” application process causes 44 percent of those who hear nothing to have a worse opinion of the non-responsive employer.

Licina said many employers explain why they’re not responding, saying “We do get a lot of applications,” and thus it’s “really hard” to respond.

Any number of surveys and articles confirm that large numbers of employers never acknowledge an applicant — not even to say contact has been made. CareerBuilder, whose Applicant Experience audit now has some 5 million surveys involving 5,000 employers, reports that somewhere around half the applicants say they never heard anything after submitting an application.
Even when they do, radio silence often follows. Among the 57 companies vying for top honors in the still-new Candidate Experience awards, a mere 44 percent followed up their acknowledgments with details about the next steps in the process.

Recruiters, too, are faulted by the surveyed job seekers; 15 percent of them have a worse opinion of the employer after hearing from a recruiter. Says CareerBuilder:

When asked to assess the recruiters who contacted them, one-in-five job seekers (21 percent) reported that the recruiter was not enthusiastic about his/her company being an employer of choice. Seventeen percent didn’t believe the recruiter was knowledgeable and 15 percent didn’t think the recruiter was professional.

“How your employment brand is presented to job seekers from the moment a job is posted can have a lasting effect not only on your ability to acquire talent, but your business overall,” Licina says. “First and foremost, it’s important to acknowledge candidates and keep them informed.”

The consequences of a negative candidate experience go beyond the potential loss of quality talent and injury to the employment reputation. The widely held belief is that there is a direct economic impact from treating applicants poorly. A separate CareerBuilder study from a few months ago found nearly a third of respondents saying they are less likely to purchase a product from a company that didn’t respond to their job application.

Now, in conjunction with a university research group, Licina said CareerBuilder is attempting to put a dollar figure on the negative experience. “It’s difficult to attribute (the impact) to the candidate experience,” she explained, which is why the study development will take time. But, she says, with companies beginning to accept that there are economic consequences, determining the actual cost is growing more urgent.

Incidentally, it’s not money that first attracts a job seeker to a job posting. It’s the company’s location, report 45 percent of the candidates in CareerBuilder’s experience surveys. After that it’s industry and company reputation. Salary is sixth.

Layar: The next step from QR Codes?

Imagine the possibilities for recruitment. Pass out brochures where people hover over people to receive video fo their testimonials or a chance for recruiters to tell people about the company rather than people having to read through an extensive brochure. People are much more likely to sit through a video rather than read through several paragraphs. While this might be on the horizon, it never hurts to keep an eye on the coming technology and keeping in mind how we can apply it to HR and Recruitment Alternative Methods.

Employees in ads

Employees are not always found in just recruitment ads but they also help define a personal face to your company in general marketing and branding. At the same time they also help foster the understanding that your company takes an interest in the employees and empowers them. Most people are going to have exposure to your company before they even start looking for a job. What message are they receiving right now?

Images via http://adsoftheworld.com/

Kings of Leon Music Video Casting

Kings of Leon have called attention to the casting agency ad that requested that applicants have physical deformities. The post was listed on newyork.craigslist.com.

via:
http://adweek.blogs.com/adfreak/2010/12/ad-seeking-freaky-actors-irks-kings-of-leon.html

http://www.nme.com/news/kings-of-leon/54201

PRINT - Marico "Uncommon Sense"

Marico's ads are a bit on the nontraditional side in their print approach due to the headlines. The ads draw the attention with brainteasers and then in their body copy describe how their employees have to problem solve and keep at challenges which is what has brought their company to success. Check out the campaign below. Click to enlarge the text and better view the body copy. Via: http://www.adsoftheworld.com/

PRINT - Creative Recruitment

Stumbled across more versions of this campaign for the AAA School of Advertising.

via: http://got-ads.blogspot.com/

Adding on to: http://patriotadvertising.blogspot.com/2008/09/print-creative-recruitment.html

QUOTE - Advertising and Relationships

"Advertising becomes a dialogue that becomes an invitation to a relationship."
--Lester Wunderman, member, Advertising Hall of Fame
I received this is one of my daily e-mails from AAF SmartBrief and I can't help but completely agree. It doesn't matter what industry you are in for advertising, whether it be product sales or human resources, but advertising really is what assists in opening the door between the relationship between suppliers and consumers or companies and candidates.

Advertising's job is to create and open the connection between two people and lead them to a discussion. Ads persuade people to guide their interest to an item or service. This is why it is so hard to gauge definitive responses and results from advertising. The product or service must be able to be sold effectively by the supplier otherwise advertising only leads to a one sided discussion resulting in clutter for your target.

Effective advertising not only falls on creating good-looking and memorable ads but also sales teams and representatives. Building brand names and marketable identities is only half of the power behind effective relationships between an audience and a company.

Creating effective ads comes down to figuring out what separates your company from the rest (defining the unique selling point) and what means the most to your candidates at this time. There are a variety of ways to connect with your targets including humor, emotion, direct competitor comparison, and education; but, they are not limited to those categories. Finding the unique approach that captures the majority of potential candidates' attention is the goal to opening this large discussion.

What factors would you say fall into the equation of this discussion between consumer and company?