Applicant experience is buyer experience in recruitment. Buyers are people who come to you once. Based on the experience, they may decide to walk away and never come back. Or, they could come back again and become customers. In some cases, they might tell everyone they know about you.
Your choice whether that's positive or not. Based on what they say, other people may buy, or not.
The roots of complacency
Companies make this mistake all the time. They seem to think that only employee experience and marketing prowess counts to their employer brand for reputation. Top companies to work for lists, nice stories from people who work here testimonials that grace brochures and recruitment web pages are both examples of cherry-picking.
It's easy to see why it would be confusing to think one contact and all contacts should be the same. After all, in customer experience, companies don't typically distinguish between buyers (one time/approach) and customers (many times/relationship). You can see it downstream in the marketing programs.
How many times do companies extend offers to loyal customers that they're willing to give freely to anyone who will sign up? Get 100,000 miles when you sign up to platinum. Meanwhile, if you're a gold customer upgrading. Nothing. Or congratulations for being with us for 25 years. Here's a rate increase. Meanwhile, prospective buyers get a discount coupon.
Because it's a best practice to extend offers to prospective buyers is not a good explanation. Especially when budgets get tight. Usually what happens when making choices on what to ax in tight economics is: people wonder “what have you done for me lately?” It's almost automatic as they go through expenses. And it's not rational.
Come to think of it, it would be interesting to see the rationality of corporate restructurings. Just because they're on a spreadsheet, it doesn't mean emotion and perception are not part of the decision-making. Lest we misunderstand each other, this doesn't mean intuition and emotion are enemies.
It's the story around using intuition and emotion
that prevents you from realizing value through them.
So, when companies think about brand as a marketing function, a veil of ignorance descends upon them. All of a sudden, they stop seeing the totality of actions and messages as part of reputation. The reality is that brand is closer to culture than many suspect. But culture is not just a checklist of things. It's a way of being and doing.
Remember this: people will watch what you, remember what you did.
The value of promises
When agencies and consultants talk about employer branding, they may mention a value proposition. An employer value proposition (EVP, which almost sounds like a job title) is what you get by aligning mission, values, and culture. When all those things work in harmony, they are a magnet for candidates or prospective employees.
Your company benefits from a well-written and communicated EVP. And it does. To a point.
Let's think for a moment about the words, because they have a strong bearing in my argument. Workforce planning and human resources replaced the much more accurate terms recruitment and personnel. Because how do you undo recruitment? When you can say workforce reduction and have better positioning.
The discussion about seeing humans as resources has been ongoing. It harks back to the industrial age, mechanical view of work. There's a reason why we continue using the word: it distances us from regarding individuals as persons. What's funny is that we see human elements in objects and animals all the time.
Language is important. And so is simplicity. Missions are useful shortcuts to figuring out what we're working on. Values are subjective and in many organizations a commercialized expression of what everyone else is saying. Because if you're really serious about values, you live them as you would ethical behavior.
Culture is the water you swim in,
what you can't help.
What I find really helpful is for companies to think of their brand more simply as the value of promises realized.
Your brand is the value of promises realized. Which makes creating demand for your products easier through word of mouth. Which makes recruitment of the best people easier through employee referrals. Which makes recovering from a mistake with customers easier through relationship memory. And so on.
The gap between walk—the things you do—and talk—the things you say is the discount to the business. It's also where you're losing energy and thus the ability to keep building capacity to innovate and make better promises in the future. A wider gap between promises made and promises kept is a sign of trouble.
How the employer brand dies in applicants inboxes
I don't like the word applicant. Because it sounds like 'supplicant.' But the meaning is actually preferable to that of 'candidate.' Depending on the context, an applicant can be:
- One who submits or registers themselves as a candidate for something (suggesting aspiration)
- A customer, a buyer or receiver of goods or services (receiving a service as part of the interaction)
- One who participates in an action or event (could be an investor, a sponsor, patron, co-owner)
While candidate sounds more palatable in terms of EVP or positioning, the contextual meaning is actually more problematic overall. Because while it is literally correct, the meaning is tangentially competitive, supplicant, generic-sizeable. Let's take a look:
- A person who applies for a job (literally)
- A person or politician who is running for election (what's the image of the politician it evokes?)
- A person taking an examination (entrant, student)
- A person or thing regarded as suitable for a particular role or treatment (an option)
- A person competing in a contest (winner takes all)
- A direct challenger or opponent (rival, adversary)
- A person presenting a claim or petition (supplicant?)
- Appointment for responsibility (nominee, appointee, favoritism?)
- A person appointed to act for, or to represent, a group (a more political reference)
Since you apply for a job, you're an applicant. And I like the suggestion that you aspire to becoming an employee. While you could still be an investor in the company, a potential sponsor in another company. Finally, once you apply, you receive a service from the organization.
If you've applied for a job, you'll be familiar with the automatic 'thank you' for applying emails. being part of the EVP or employer value proposition, they tend to be cheerful. There are best practices around these as well. They'll typically say some version of:
“Dear ___,
Thank you for your interest in a career at ______. We have received your resume submission for _______.
What happens now? We will review your submission and will contact you if there is a good match.
In the meantime, to view the status of your submission, please go to the following link: _______
Sincerely,
The ____ Recruiting Team”
Before you think isn't this nice, how short and sweet and from a team and so specific, consider that the form is part of the software, the company inserts data fields. The team bit helps keep things impersonal until and 'if'—did you notice the subtle 'get out of contacting you again' jail for free card—they decide you're a 'good match.'
While everyone would like to believe the criteria to assess are solid, it's hard to tell. We leave the match probabilities to an often long list of things you must have (the kitchen-sink approach), or a short and vague list of non-negotiable soft skills you must posses (how to demonstrate in an application through a system) and everything in between.
Most of the time, no news is bad news. In other words, the cheerful and to the point 'thank you' for applying note is all you get. But since that can be problematic for companies that are trying to 'humanize' their brand and build a good EVP, you may receive a follow up note after weeks (sometimes months) of silence.
Let's call these the 'sorry' emails. And you'll be happy to know that I conducted qualitative research to obtain the actual language actual companies have used in responding to real world applications as examples. Because you couldn't make this stuff up, if you wanted to:
“Unfortunately, there are other candidates whose background, education, and experience more closely meet the requirements for the position.” (Wharton for a senior marketing communications role)
“Regretfully, I am unable to take your candidacy forward on this occasion as we have met one or two candidates who more closely match our current needs.” (UK company for a digital strategy and learning role)
“I'm sorry to inform you that your application was unsuccessful and you have not been put forward to the second round of assessment. We had a high volume of interest in these roles, and the quality of applications was extremely high, including many candidates with years of experience in the relevant fields.” (center for effective altruism)
Their brands are part of what you feel as you read these lines wearing the recipient hat.
Let’s be clear, these response say nothing about you and everything about the employer (and their choice of agent). What I dislike most is the complete lack of grace and thoughtlessness – if this is how you treat the people who want to work for you, why do you think I’d still want to work for you.
It takes more than simple tweaks to recover from this kind of brand message. Longevity in a business also depends on the value of its promises. And closing the gap between talk—the promise—and the walk. Your employer brand investment dies in applicants' inboxes.
Why it matters
Applicants are also buyers, investors, friends, relatives of your current or prospective employees, partners, etc. Rationally, we know that. But companies and organizations are not behaving that way. There's no community around applying for jobs. It's still a very messy and opaque process.
But here's what happens in the market:
- 86% of workers would not apply for, or continue to work for, a company that has a bad reputation with former employees or the general public
- 69% of candidates would reject an offer from a company with a bad employer brand, even if they were unemployed
- more than 50% of executives say corporate culture influences productivity, creativity, profitability, firm value, and growth rates
- 40% of passive candidates would accept a new position without an increase in pay if the company had a good employer brand
- companies with reliable employer brands see a 28% reduction in employee turnover and a 50% cut in recruitment costs
These statistics popped up on a simple generic search. Do me a favor and calculate the average salary of the number of people who've left your company in a specific period of time and multiply it by 2.5—that's a real life cost of attrition to your business. And that's only the money.
Companies that keep their promises through everything they do and say accrue more tangible value in the fuller definition of value: money and capacity to do good work over time. And not just when convenient to them. Value is in what they do: their mission or day-to-day work. How they do it: values as in making ethical decisions. And every contact with these companies feels respectful: their culture.
Dan Price has more to say about many of these disconnects. Price puts the money where his mouth is. He's the Founder and CEO of Gravity Payments. The company pays employees living wages and benefits. That's the employer brand: no fancy stories and logos, just make promises and keep them.
A note on humanizing brands and companies: it's a misguided way to commercialize being human and it could backfire. Greed, entitlement, hubris, and many other unsavory qualities are also human. They have no business in entities run according to commercial sense. Trying to associate the two is (mis)thinking our way out of existence.
You can be hard on the business and face reality, yet soft on the people, and have empathy. That's how you're a good business person. Treat individuals as persons. Apply the Golden Rule.