Over the last 8 years, the folks over at the Talent Board release an exceptional research report around Candidate Experience (CX). This isn’t a small sample report, over 130,000 candidates provided feedback! The 2018 Talent Board Candidate Experience Research Report can be downloaded by following this link.

I love this report because it’s designed to not only give you the data, but also to help every organization, of every size, increase their CX. Turns out there are certain things that companies that win the Candidate Experience awards do, like:

• Acknowledge a candidate’s interest and provide closure. (it’s what every candidate wants – did you get my application and what happened)
• Provide consistent communication to candidates throughout the process.
• Ask for candidate feedback, not only at the end.
• Hold their TA team responsible for CX measures.
• Be perceived by candidates as having a fairer process, in terms of candidates feeling they were able to show you who and what they are.

All of that seems easy enough right? It’s not rocket science, yet so few companies actually deliver on these simple things.

The 2018 report also found a few things that I thought were pretty interesting as well.

1 – Corporate TA shops who outsourced their recruiting function to third-party, RPO, or HRO vendors, candidates actually rated those organizations better for CX! Over in-house TA shops, both centralized and decentralized. WHAT!?! There’s no way, Tim!

Way! Think about how outsourced recruiting vendors survive. They survive by delivering recruiting better and more efficiently than you can yourself, otherwise they wouldn’t exist! It’s built into their contract and SLAs.

While I found this surprising at first glance, it makes sense. It also screams to me as a TA leader that we as leaders fail in-house by not holding our teams accountable to delivering great CX. The good news – that’s actually a simple fix!

2 – Only 7% of Corporate Recruiters and Hiring Managers call candidates who are rejected after an in-person interview. But, that 7 % that do see their CX ratings jump 28% higher than those who don’t.

7% is shameful. You take a candidate all the way through your process to the final step of having that personal interview and you don’t reject with a bit of personalization. You send them a stupid email!?!

We are better than this. You, personally, reading this right now, would be pissed off if this happened to you, yet 93% of us are doing this to candidates. Good news – this is also a super simple fix! Pick up the freaking phone!

Go download the report. Use it as a tool to take your TA team through a session and analyze your current process. One of the main issues you’ll find is your process is actually decent, but the variability of how each recruiter is running that process varies widely. That’s your biggest problem!