Every year, brands across the country are unknowingly losing millions of pounds, as rejected candidates and poor candidate experience jeopardises consumer loyalty. The classic example goes something like this: Pepsico published a study that revealed 8% of rejected candidates ditched Pepsi and switched to Coca-Cola, costing them over four million dollars a year. Spiteful? Maybe. Expensive? Absolutely.
At Ph.Creative, we asked ourselves: how can brands improve candidate experience so that rejected applicants don’t vent their frustration with brand disloyalty? After hours of discussion and multiple cups of coffee it hit us – the candidate mapping experience is a perfect parallel for what we refer to in marketing as the customer experience journey. We needed to think outside of the box. Here’s how we did it.
The Crossover
In 2014, Virgin lost 7,500 customers as a result of direct candidate rejection or poor candidate experience. Working alongside Virgin, we discovered this figure translates to roughly £4.4 million in lost revenue. The challenge lies in the way we approach the problem; it’s not about candidates, customers, B2B or B2C, it’s about the basic principles of understanding people, their behaviours and what drives and influences them. This is where we crossover from marketing to HR and see that both can be addressed in the same way.
“Recruitment Marketing”
Recruitment marketing is a growing term, and for good reason. The recruitment industry is changing rapidly as companies wake up to the reality that, in many cases, candidates are also your customers (or potential customers, or at the very least influencers of potential customers). Just as a business needs to understand the full life time value of a customer, so too does recruitment. Simply replace the word “customer” with candidate and you can immediately see the correlation between the two.
Modern recruitment processes can reap great rewards by ‘marketing’ future roles to silver or bronze medal candidates; it’s much cheaper to fill roles with people you know and trust. This is only possible if you know more about your candidates than a simple pass/fail, and hinges on whether you bother to stay in touch with them and even help them upskill and prepare for future roles.
The Candidate Experience
In marketing, we’ve been ‘conversion rate optimising’ websites and shop floors to improve how people flow through a brand experience in order to increase the ROI. Candidate experience mapping is essentially the same thing. We are trying to create an experience that will not only keep candidates (customers) interested in a brand, but one that lures new customers in as well. The talent (customer) pool is already there – the smart brands will realise more needs to be done to engage and excite prospective candidates from initial contact through to on-board activation.
As this talent pool increasingly strives to gain a sense of fulfilment from their work it’s crucial for brands to adapt the journey to begin and end with the candidate at the heart of the plan. The sooner brands wake up and recognise the gravity of their recruitment initiatives, the sooner they can begin to save lost money. Unique and engaging recruitment marketing feeds directly into a happy, persistent and talented work-force. Which brand wouldn’t want that?
By Bryan Adams, CEO & Founder, Ph. Creative
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