Recruitment is much more than just finding the right Talent!

A pertinent concept that is finding more and more acceptance in the world of Marketing, Brands and Management is ‘The Customer Journey Mapping’. There are more related terms like Customer Experience (CX), Customer Touchpoints and Customer Lifecycle, which more or less are trying to build around the same philosophy i.e.

• Decoding the entire customer journey map through your product & services mix
• Providing a consistent and positive customer experience and brand messaging across the entire value chain
• Joining up all your internal processes & functions like branding, marketing, sales, delivery, operations, after sales, etc. that ‘touch’ the customer anytime through his/her journey and let these functions visualize and understand their larger role in the jigsaw from a customer point of view and
• From a customers’ standpoint, it’s a singular ‘Brand’ that is honoring its set of promises and not a disparate set of entities abandoning them in the complex web of internal processes to wade their way through.

Now here’s extending this philosophy a bit further and looking inwards. It’s widely accepted that your customers are not just ‘external’ target audience that you cater to, but also your internal ‘customers’ i.e. your Employees that need to experience the entire culture and promise of your Brand. In that case, how serious are we in extending the concept of ‘Customer Journey Mapping’ to this important and integral set of internal customers?

It starts with recruitment. The first window when your potential internal customers i.e. employees get to touch and feel your Brand. And how often have we seen this entire process of recruitment being a bureaucratic set of long-winded processes that just set out with a singular objective of ‘Identifying and Onboarding the best Talent’.

Organizations are often seen gloating about their stringent recruitment processes and powerful brand pull that allows them to select the best of the best. A conversion ratio of anywhere between 5% or 10% for every open position! In other words, your ability to scout and scan through 100 or 200 potential candidates for every 10 open roles. While it’s a relevant metric to track the efforts of your recruitment machinery, your brand pull and the goodness of your selection process, an important metric we often miss tracking is the ‘Customer Experience’ of all those 190-odd potential candidates that didn’t meet the cut amongst those 10 open roles.

It’s time we start looking at this entire recruitment process as a great opportunity to exhibit the culture of our organization. The promise of our brand. These 190-odd potential candidates that may have dropped off at various stages of your selection funnel have experienced your brand ‘up, close & personal’.  The end-result is incidental of whether they made it or not, but the bigger goal for us as recruitment teams and as culture custodians is to ensure that every candidate who has gone through this recruitment funnel goes back with a fantastic experience. Despite not being selected, they need to go back with a much stronger affinity towards your brand & organization, than the moment they had applied for it.  

It’s much easier said than done. Recruitment can be a very time-consuming and draining experience. For selection managers, it is often an additional task over and beyond their day jobs. And that’s where it can take a toll. So engrossed are we in running against tough timelines to bring in the best talent through the door, that we often end-up missing the ‘customer experience’ bit. Our quest to identify that ‘Best 10’ can be so single-minded that it eventually turns out to be a filtration and elimination process. Nothing wrong with that, but let’s make sure that each of these funneling processes are real, inclusive and as less ‘stereotypical’ as possible. Let’s make sure we aren’t dropping off candidates on flimsy and superficial grounds of ‘too aggressive’, ‘too ambitious’, ‘very unstable’, ‘failed entrepreneur’, ‘stopgap seeker’, ‘cultural misfit’, ‘lives too far away’, etc.  The more deep-rooted biases of gender and the reverse trend of force-fitting gender ratios, sexual orientation, attire, marital status, body type and ethnicity still play at many levels and are more difficult to detect. However, it’s for the selection managers to keep challenging and taking a firm stand against such biases & stereotypes throughout the entire recruitment value chain. At the same time, be sure to hold a mirror and make sure that they themselves are not subconsciously falling prey to the same biases. 

Beyond all such biases, let’s accept that recruitment needs a lot of patience, compassion and empathy and it is easy to get distracted by the pressures of onboarding. However, Great organizations are not just about Great products and services, but also about their people practices, culture and Customer Experience. They don’t just stop at nurturing the talent within, but continue cultivating the larger ecosystem.  Here is a quick checklist of Dos and Don’ts to ensure we continue to leverage Recruitment as a great opportunity to further enhance our Customer Experience & Brand Equity -

1. It all starts with a well fleshed-out Job Description (JD) which needs to be real and fluid. Don’t make it too water-tight, impregnable and search words’ driven.  Avoid platitudes like ‘fire in the belly’ and ‘willing to stretch’.
2. Encourage diversity, rather than building a uni-dimensional workforce. For e.g. why should only candidates with prior research experience be considered for research openings? Why not those from Journalism, mass media, PR, advertising or even sectors as diverse as Logistics be consciously considered. From a personal experience, it is this Diversity that has worked the best for our team!
3. Try to reduce the various ‘filtration’ rounds and let them exist only for a specific purpose.
4. Continue challenging the rationale for all those candidates who got filtered-out at each stage, right from profile identification to screening.
5. Make it conducive & convenient for the candidates. Do we really need to call them over physically for each of the rounds? Make it as ‘Virtual’ as possible till the final round.
6. Do our assessment tests need to be ‘speed tests’? Rather, why can’t these be about understanding your knowledge and skillsets in a more conducive and relaxed environment.
7. Are your processes efficient and time-bound OR do they keep potential candidates on an infinite ‘On Hold’ loop with a cliched phrase like “We’ll get back to you”. And yes, we are all guilty of this indecisiveness syndrome. A candidate ‘On hold’ for many weeks is definitely NOT what you were looking for. Why then to keep him/her in waiting for so long? Better to provide a succinct and clear feedback and drop his candidature (even if you haven’t identified any alternative candidate). It’s better to build a strong pipeline than to keep open too many ‘not too sure’ choices for too long.
8. Are you making sure to provide a detailed feedback at each stage? Or leaving candidates with an arrogant, “sorry, you haven’t gone through our next round” message relayed by your recruitment teams.
9. If you realize during an interview itself that this is definitely not the candidate we are looking for, be courageous enough to provide a prompt, direct and constructive feedback at that stage itself, rather than relaying an indirect and impersonal feedback through your recruitment teams.
10. Finally, People are not inanimate Products. They constantly evolve and get better through right coaching, mentoring, direction and guidance. Avoid tagging them as Selects and Rejects and abruptly ending the entire process.

Eventually, the 10 selected candidates that will onboard will become a part of your culture. They’ll naturally get to experience the Organization in due course. However, a larger part of your responsibility also lies towards the 190-odd who didn’t meet the cut at various stages. The onus is on you to leave them with an absolutely professional and Inspirational experience. They were not rejects – as they are still living, breathing and evolving. They simply weren’t most suitable at that moment or because there were others more experienced, relevant and mature AT THAT MOMENT! Make sure these 190-odd do receive that constructive feedback before they return back to their worlds – more confident and assured about what they need to do to get better, rather than feeling disheartened, demotivated or ‘rejected’.

The job-seekers are as much looking for a job, as much as the organizations are looking for the right talent. We opened up the new roles and invited applications. The candidates invested their time, efforts, traveled and appeared for our various rounds and undertook our tests. It’s an irresponsible and terrible customer experience if we leave them waiting and looking for answers. It’s unfortunate if they have to wade through our departments, websites, contact us numbers to gain the final feedback. And this happens across all levels right from the most senior roles till the entry level profiles. Its arrogance and bad corporate citizenship if an organization doesn’t bother to provide you with a detailed rationale and feedback despite having taken you through multiple selection rounds and then suddenly doing the vanishing act.

To sum it up, the onus is on us to either leave the potential candidates feel bitter, demotivated and rejected. Or leverage this opportunity to guide them and offer a few lines of constructive feedback that enables them to keep evolving and build on their competencies.  The same applies for our existing employees who’ve decided to move on for better opportunities. Let’s not look at them as attrition, betrayers or a lost cause. There is no need for us to feel bitter or reduce our compassion quotient with them during their notice period. The nurturing needs to continue right till their last day. And in fact even after let’s continue maintaining a proud alumni network rather than treating them as outsiders or those who abandoned us. Let’s keep it positive, evolving and inspiring! It’s always about people and careers.

This is the ‘talent pool’ we keep referring to. There is a fair possibility that the potential candidates who didn’t meet the cut right now, might return back as much improved, evolved and terrific professionals a few months down the line. Even if not, they might become your evangelists and promoters amongst their peer group for the way you made them feel. Your ex-employees too can be a potent network that can be counted on for expanding your ‘talent pool’. There is no bigger joy than seeing many of your star performers returning back as they believed this was the best ‘Experience’ they ever had!

Eventually, it is this Customer Experience that becomes the biggest competitive differentiator with all other tangible features and benefits acquiring parity. And this holds true as much as for your external customers as your internal ones…and for all those who continue aspiring to get associated, simply because the way you made them feel!