What are you?  A job seeker?  A candidate?  A data point?  An asset?  A widget in a transaction?

Are you also a human?  Are you also more than a momentary target so a sales manager or recruiter can earn his or her fee, or meet their internal quota?

Yes you are, and it is the recruiters who understand this who will gain your trust and your collaboration.

I recently attended a technology conference geared towards the Talent Acquisition field, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that a tech focused event had such an extraordinary amount of emphasis on the Candidate Experience.

In short, we (TA professionals) do better in the long run if we do right by you.  That may not always mean getting you the job of your dreams, or getting you any job at all.  It may simply mean that you felt you were heard, that you were treated with respect, and that your questions were answered in a timely fashion.  Short of getting the job they want, many candidates just want feedback.  Getting them that feedback (or not) could make the difference in generating a long term mutually beneficial relationship.

Ease of workflow also makes an impact on the candidate experience.  At www.newyorkcm.com, if you apply to a job, it is fairly straight forward, and is only a two step process – fill out the form and attach your resume.  From there your candidate record and resume is parsed into they NYCM Search ATS / CRM, and I can on my end see your submissions and the jobs to which you applied.  NYCM Search will do more, and we will adopt new technologies to make that experience even more seamless, transparent and mutually informative. We may begin to offer ways for you to pre-qualify yourself, add more detail in our job descriptions, provide training tools and tips, and bring you into the process instead of updating you selectively.

Data analytics aren’t needed for me to know what bothers my candidates most – it’s lack of follow up, lack of feedback, slow moving processes.  In some cases this is out of the recruiters’ hands, in others it may be matter of calculating risk – the risk of pushing a hiring manager too hard for feedback for instance.  But in some cases, there is more a recruiter (my self included) can do to be proactive in following up with candidates – even if it is to say “I have no news”.

I invite you to contact me, though, if you have specific concerns about the recruitment process that you would like to see addressed – either industry wide, or on the corporate side, or even with respect to the way that NYCM Search has handled your applications in the past.

The starting point in the process of self-improvement is achieving openness to the concept that we may need to improve.

Help NYCM Search improve your candidate experience.  Send Feedback to david@newyorkcm.com