Talent Makers

5Own Every Moment of Your Hiring Experience

We've established that the traditional view of HR and hiring as an administrative function is narrow and seriously flawed. It effectively throttles what is potentially the most powerful engine in your organization, and that is the ability to hire great people.

There's another view that's mistakenly narrow. It's that the candidate experience primarily involves the job application on a website. Although it does involve that, it's so much more, and it deserves your close attention.

In order to become great at the hiring experience, you first have to define its wider boundaries. The experience starts when people become aware that your organization exists—in other words, your brand. Then they apply for a job, and hear (or don't hear) the results. Then hopefully they get an interview, then an offer, and they accept.

But it does not stop there. We consider the candidate experience to go beyond acceptance to their first day on the job, and then through onboarding—that critical first 30 days or so, when a decision to join is either validated or doubt is seeded. There are easily several dozen touch points in the candidate experience, whether organizations realize it or not and engineer those touch points or not. That means dozens of opportunities to impress or to drop the ball and pay for it with your reputation and hiring ability. This chapter is about making those experiences as good as possible, both for candidates and for the people involved ...