It seems like we have been talking about the candidate experience forever, and while some employers have made progress in improving things, there is still a long way to go. One of the issues has always been the lack of a recognized model to explain and then consequently strategically address the candidate experience.
I was therefore delighted to hear that Exaqueo, Career Crossroads and The Talent Board have been working in partnership with several Fortune 500 employers to develop a new employee lifecycle and candidate experience model. To tell us all about this, my guest this week is Susan LaMotte, Founder and CEO of Exaqueo.
In the interview, we discuss:
- Process versus experience
- Phases of the candidate experience
- The unification of candidate experience and employee experience
- Why so few employers are fixing their candidate experience
- Measurement
- Source of influencer versus source of hire
- Talking points and messaging for employee referrals
- Employer Brand
Susan also talks about the role of technology and the importance of the Candidate Experience Awards.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Avature ats, an applicant tracking system that redefines user experience for candidates, recruiters and hiring managers. Just listen to one of the many ways in which L’Oreal USA has improved their hiring process with Avature, as told by Edward Dias, Director of Recruitment, Intelligence and Innovation.
Edward Dias [00:00:25]:
Since we’ve been using Avature ATS globally, we have been able to massively improve our communication rate with candidates during and following their application. Before, over a million people worldwide would never get contacted, but with the smart automation and flexible processes, we’ve been able to change that and that’s been a huge achievement.
Matt Alder [00:00:48]:
Visit avature.net that’s a V A T U R E.net to learn why global market leaders like L’Oreal choose Avature to extend the candidate experience. From shoulder taps to first day.
Matt Alder [00:01:23]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 235 of the Recruiting Future podcast. It seems like we’ve been talking about the candidate experience forever, and while progress is being made by some employers to improve things, there’s still a long way to go. One of the issues has always been the lack of a consistent model to explain and then consequently strategically improve the candidate experience. I was delighted to hear that Exacto Career Crossroads and the Talent Board have been working in partnership with a number of Fortune 500 employers to develop a new employee lifecycle and candidate experience model. To tell us all about it, my guest this week is Susan LaMotte, Founder and CEO of Exactio. Enjoy the interview.
Matt Alder [00:02:15]:
Hi Susan and welcome to the podcast.
Susan LaMotte [00:02:18]:
Thank you for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:19]:
My absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Susan LaMotte [00:02:24]:
Sure. So I’m Susan LaMotte. I’m the founder and CEO of Exact IO. We are an employer brand consulting and experience firm and I started exactio in in 2011. I serve as the CEO and principal brand strategist. So I split my time between leading our business and doing strategic consulting with our global clients. Prior to Exactio, I was the global employer Brand leader for Marriott International and I’ve got about two decades in HR and talent acquisition including places like the Ritz Carlton Hotel Company, the Home Depot and Arthur Andersen. And I work out of my home office in Charleston, South Carolina in the US Where I always say my most important job is as a wife and a working mom to my two young kids.
Matt Alder [00:03:08]:
Fantastic stuff. So I know that you have been working on an employee experience model. Can you tell us a little bit, a little bit about that?
Susan LaMotte [00:03:19]:
Yeah. So, you know, across my career in talent acquisition, employer, brand and hr, I’ve always noticed that there’s been some distinct differences between marketing and human resources. And I remember being back in graduate school, I did an MBA at Vanderbilt in the US Sitting through these graduate marketing classes because I just didn’t have that background or experience at the time. And being in awe of the depth, the strategy, the data, the research that we just didn’t do in human resources. What I uncovered is if you look back to the history of hr, it’s very reactive and process driven. Everything that we’ve done in HR is because we needed to solve a problem or address a particular process. So this will ring really true with you personally when you think about applicant tracking systems. We didn’t invent the ATS in human resources primarily to make candidates have a better experience. We invented it to solve process problems. So whether that’s in the U.S. equal opportunity, equal employment opportunity issues, or to help better our affirmative action planning process, or to, or just overall global compliance. Right. To stop worrying about faxed resumes and things like that. That was our primary reason. And so unfortunately in hr, a lot of what we do is driven by our needs and not by the candidate or the employee’s needs. And so I think there’s been a real kind of shift in the tide, or in the winds, if you will, to really put the candidate and the employee at the center of things. I’ve been working with a number of leaders across our industry for the past many months to build out an industry wide model. We’ll be sharing it, it’s open source, we’ll be sharing it with everyone to help align our industry on how we talk about employment experience, the full employment life cycle, from understanding all the way through to transitioning out of an organization or into another role. And how as organizations we can think about how to make the experience better for candidates and employees so they can find opportunities and organizations where they can thrive. And while they’re there, they can have an experience where they can contribute, impact and thrive. And that’s ultimately the goal is just to advance our industry and better the way we think about these things.
Matt Alder [00:05:47]:
Tell us a little bit more about the candidate experience side of this. How does your model sort of break the candidate experience down? How do you talk about it?
Susan LaMotte [00:05:59]:
We think about candidate experience first as an experience or a journey. So the one thing that I’ve been kind of Yelling from the mountaintops, if you will, is to stop talking about it as a process. Because when we think about job searching, at its very core, it puts foods on our table, right? You might. Whether you make four job decisions or 40 job decisions in your life, they’re still really important and emotional when you make a decision to take and keep or leave a job. So we talk about it from that lens. So the model itself has seven different phases. And the candidate experience side starts with understanding the awareness that an organization exists and that they actually have jobs for you. The second phase is attraction. You have interest in the organization, you’re open to offers and jobs they might have, and you align to them as an employer. The alignment is important because it’s not just values and culture that’s important, but it’s also. Is the commute palatable for you? Can you get to your daycare to pick up your kids at the end of the day or school in time? From a commute perspective, is the pay, right? Those are all the things that we check the research we do ahead of time before we apply to a job. We have to be aligned to them or we won’t apply. The third phase is preference. That’s consideration to apply over other options. It’s the typical process pieces we’re used to in talent acquisition and recruiting. So competing for a job with that employee and then the readiness of both the candidate and the employer to make decisions. And then finally, belonging. Belonging is where both the candidate and the organization are making the decision. Both are committing to each other. So you’re committing as a candidate to the organization, the organization is committing to you. The orientation and onboarding, and then ultimately engagement and contribution. Now that’s where there’s overlap to employee experience. So when we think about belonging, part of that is the candidate, but part of it is also the employee. Our hypothesis and what we would posit is that you’re not truly an employee. You’re still technically a candidate until you make a contribution or make an impact in an organization. You feel like, gosh, I am doing something that contributes to the organization, the job, the customer, the client, the people I’m giving service to, whatever that might be. And that’s why that sort of 36, 90 days are so crucial. And then we get into the employee experience part of the model.
Matt Alder [00:08:35]:
What role does employer brands play within this? Where does that kick in? Where do companies have control over this? Where do companies have influence over this journey?
Susan LaMotte [00:08:48]:
So such an important question, and one I take personally because I’ve been doing employer brand for a long time and we still see it as such a sort of side thing, right? It’s an addition. Do you have an employer brand? Did you do an employee brand project? Did you build one? And the reality is, if we look at our colleagues on the marketing side of the house and you look at any organization, the sales and marketing function, all ladders up to the brand, the brand on the consumer side or the master brand side, if you’re in a B2B or services organization, that brand wraps around the entire sales and marketing experience. So on the human resources or the talent side, we would say it should do exactly the same thing. So your employer brand should govern, should basically wrap around the entire employment life cycle. Successful organizations should be branding and marketing every single touch point of the entire employment experience. And there’s only a few organizations that are doing that really well. When I was at Marriott 10 years ago, I got really lucky because I had partners that were interested employer brand and said, huh, branding, performance management, branding, the benefits or compensation, what does that look like? Do organizations do this? And we had an opportunity to think about how you might brand internal communications, how all of these things are touch points along a journey, just like the way we brand and market a customer journey. When you’ve got internal partners that are open and interested in thinking about employer brand in that way, then you can make really strong advancements in having a strategic and holistic employer brand. Fast forward to 2019, 2020 and I’d argue that Marriott still has one of the best, if not the best employer brand in the business because it’s had so much time to think about how you brand the entire employment experience at exactly with our clients, that’s what we’re helping them think through is how do you, even if you come, even if clients come to us because they want to build employer brand to better hire, in their words, ultimately we want them to think more holistically. And across the industry we want people to think more holistically too and have a model that no matter how big or small your company is, your organization is. You can think about how you can apply it to your own employees journeys. Sort of. Back to your question. I know you probably didn’t mean to use the word control, but we do, right? Branded marketing is about control and we do want that consistency. We can’t control everything, we know that, especially with social media and the way technology drives how we interact with brands these days. But we can control what the consistency is of our messaging and how we as an organization interact with candidates. And with employees. And we should be doing a much better, more effective and a much more strategic job of that in human resources. And hopefully this model is something everyone can use to help start thinking that way.
Matt Alder [00:12:07]:
I suppose one of the issues with the candidate experience is there’s been a huge focus on it in the last few years. Most employers will say that it’s incredibly important to them. And obviously having a model and a consistent way of analyzing it and breaking it down is a, is a very, very useful thing. It seems though that a lot of companies still aren’t doing anything to fix their candidate experience. They’re only sort of paying lip service to it. And actually the reality is very, very different. Why do you think that is and what could actually make that change?
Susan LaMotte [00:12:40]:
I think ultimately it’s still seen as a nice to do. Right. And part of it is because HR is so process driven, so we don’t necessarily measure or think about the impact of some of these things. When I look at most organizations, traditional data methods, if we think about early HRIS systems and how we started collecting data Even, you know, 10, 15 years ago, when engagement surveys were at sort of the height or kind of the high energy of organizations using them, we only collect data in a certain way and so it’s hard for us to see the value of things like this if we’re not measuring them. So the majority, a couple examples. The majority of data we collect as HR organizations tend to be from the time employees walk in the door to the time they leave. If we’re collecting candidate data, it’s oftentimes just as part of the website. Right. And so I’m only collecting data from somebody that’s actually on my website. The problem with that is you’re not collecting any data on the front end. Understanding or attraction. We’ve got a couple of clients, T Mobile, for example, here in the US One of the things we found is that on the Understanding piece we were looking at their technology candidates. Of course, everyone here in the US knows who T Mobile is and they are aware of them as an organization. They’re a really strong brand here. They’re going through a merger right now. So it’s very visible in the news, but most folks didn’t think about them as an employer. So if you’re a technology professional, you’re not thinking about T Mobile. You’re thinking if you live in the greater Seattle area, for example, or Atlanta, where they have offices, you might be thinking about other big, well known employers there, even though you might be a T Mobile customer. So if we’re not collecting data, brand perception data, for example, we can’t measure the value of it. Most organizations, the only candidate experience data they’re collecting is, do you like our website? That is just such a small part, quite honestly, of the entire candidate experience. Therein lies part of the problem, then, I think the other thing is we’re not collecting any data, for the most part, on employees outside of the work window. Whereas on the marketing side, let’s say, Matt, you own a cell phone company, you want to know everything about me as a potential customer. You want to know my salary, you want to know my habits, you want to know where I’m spending my time. You want to know what my family is like, who lives in my home. All of this data that we collect, that we don’t collect on employees. And that’s not data in the sense of, like, we don’t need to know all of their personal habits and connected to them as individuals, but we do need to understand and collect that data anonymously so we can see the value of the candidate experience and see how it more broadly affects our entire talent strategy. And that to us, therein lies the real problem.
Matt Alder [00:15:41]:
That’s interesting. And how do people measure that? What other aspects of their candidate experience should they be measuring? Or what have you seen people measure? That’s been really effective.
Susan LaMotte [00:15:55]:
Yeah, so this is what I mean. I geek out on this data. This is some of the stuff that we’ve really been trying to pioneer in the space to get people excited about measurement. So there’s a couple of things. First is just the practice of measuring the entire journey. So the talent board, talentboard.org and the candidate Experience Awards, nonprofit for those of your listeners that aren’t familiar with them, is such a great first step because it’s really inexpensive. They’ve got global awards, and it’s not about the award itself. We were just talking to a client this morning, and they were saying, you know, we don’t really have a great candidate experience. We’ve never applied. And my response is, you definitely should, because it’s about getting the actual data back for a really nominal fee and not a lot of effort on the organization’s part. You can ask your candidates questions about the entire journey and start with a baseline set of data. So that’s a really easy first step. There’s a lot of other tools and technologies out there that you can use to measure candidate experience. And then there’s also a lot of partners like Exactio and many others who can come in and Help you measure from an unbiased perspective. Now you asked about what to measure. There’s two really big things that we’re passionate about. One or three, I should say. The first is making sure you measure the entire journey. So from understanding all the way through to belonging. Two is making sure that you move away from all of those sort of predispositions that we have to HR data. I’ve been sort of famous for saying long, saying source of hire is dead. There is no such thing as a single source of hire. There is only source of influence. So one of the things that we measure is from understanding to belonging. What are all of the influences throughout the candidate journey? So when you’re learning about an organization, what’s influencing you? And I’ll give you an example. We talked about T Mobile at that understanding phase. I’m actually a T Mobile customer. I would have never considered them for employment because I live in Charleston, South Carolina. T Mobile is based in Seattle, Washington, in the us Very far away from me. So I would never have even thought of them as an employer. But they opened a call center here in the greater Charleston area. The only way that they can understand the influence of the understanding piece for me as a potential candidate would be the fact that I actually learned about the call center by reading an article in our local newspaper. Oh, wow. I didn’t realize that just the news of the call center opening, not even job advertisements or the fact that we’re hiring, is actually helping people realize, oh, wow. T Mobile has a big operation here in Charleston. So part of it is measuring all of these influences along the way. And there’s online influences, like we all know, right? Social media, employee review sites. But what we find in our research is often almost always equally or more important. Are all of these offline influences the people that you talk to? You ask a room of hundreds of people, how many of you made a decision to take a job without consulting a single person? Almost no hands go up. We tend to talk to anywhere between two and 10 people when we consult or make a decision about taking and keeping a job. And as organizations, we don’t measure the influences of those people. So source of influence is really important. What are all of the sources that are influencing a candidate’s decision and journey and how impactful are those sources? Employee review sites are a great example. I know a lot of people believe that they’re incredibly important, and they are in some cases. A lot of our research says that a lot of candidates will look at those employee review sites as just sort of a last check. Are there any major red flags? But they’re not terribly influential. There are other things that might be more influential. Our job as consultants is to help our clients determine what are these sources of influence. And we use qualitative and quantitative data to measure that. And then how can we measure actually how influential these sources are? Because then you can strategically determine where to put your dollars and resources, what’s low hanging fruit and what’s going to be most impactful. And then the third thing that’s really important in addition to measuring the journey, in addition to source of influence, is actually looking at what we call whole self. So I wrote an article about our whole self model for Harvard Business Review a couple of years ago. And the idea is that we need to understand not just work data, you know, what people care about in a job. Do they value compensation over benefits or work life balance over family friendly benefits? But we also need to understand what they value as an individual, what values govern their life. We call that internal self. We need to understand where they spend their time and energy outside of work. We call that external self. We need to understand who are the important people in their life, who do they talk to, who do they rely on, who matters to them. That’s relationships. And then of course, we need to understand the work component. So those are the three things we get really excited about. There’s lots of ways to collect that data. It needs to be unbiased, right? It’s really hard to do it yourself because employees and candidates are never going to be as honest with you as they will with an unbiased party. But it doesn’t mean that you have to spend millions of dollars either to do it. There’s lots of ways to do it. And that’s why I always tell folks, start with the candidate experience awards, because you at least get a sort of a baseline data set that you can start to measure.
Matt Alder [00:21:37]:
One of the things that we’ve sort of talked about a few times on the podcast in the last few months is the relationship between the candidate experience and the employee experience. And that obviously sits at the heart of the model that you’re building out. Give us your perspective on it. How should the two be related?
Susan LaMotte [00:21:55]:
So candidate and employee experience should be considered as the full journey, right? So just like we look at a customer and we think about, we don’t stop when we acquire a customer, we think about how we retain them. We should think about that on the employment side as well. Somebody used an analogy with me today, this morning actually, and said it’s sort of like a bus where sometimes talent acquisition is seen as getting people on the bus. Then we send the bus to you and HR takes care of the rest. And it shouldn’t be that way. It shouldn’t be a pass off or a handoff. We should be thinking about it holistically. And that’s ultimately the goal. I’ll share a visual you can share with your listeners and they can see how you can look at it holistically and break down which elements are most important. So when we think about the phases of this journey or the life cycle from candidate through employee experience, at every step of the way, we want to think about which are the most compelling moments or steps in the journey so that you can really spend your time and energy there. So we think about employee experience. You might find that there are certain elements of what we call management, the day to day job execution that are really impacting retention. That might be compensation, for example. And so you might want to spend time there. Or maybe, maybe it’s on growth, or maybe you find that a lot of alumni are coming back. How can you make sure you’re leveraging your candidate and employee experience to effectively impact that? But if we keep making it a handoff, we don’t think about the role each side plays in the other. Most organizations will tell you if you ask them what sources are powerful for them in hiring, they’ll say employee referrals. Do we do. Do most organizations do anything with their employees to drive referrals? Sure. They run incentives or they’ll set up a website, submit your referrals here. Really good organizations might even call you back and say, matt, I know you referred Susan for this job. I wanted to give you an update. But do we give you talking points? Do we give you messages? Do we say, okay, we’re looking for more women in technology. Here’s what we know matter to them at our organization as you’re talking to them, here’s some things that might be important. We don’t do any of that. So imagine if candidate and employee experience were really unified. We’d have a better perspective and we’d be talking more together and really understanding how one begets the other.
Matt Alder [00:24:24]:
So final question. You mentioned ATS and technology at the start of the conversation. And there does seem to be, for all of the spin and the funding that’s going into HR technology at the moment, there does seem to be some kind of misalignment sometimes between what the technology does and what it’s for and what’s actually needed? What’s your perspective on it? What’s the role of technology in all of this? And how can employers make smart decisions about that?
Susan LaMotte [00:24:52]:
You know, I think technology technologies are tools. Tools don’t work unless you have strategy. If your tool or your technology is driving your strategy, our view is that it’s not going to be effective. In the short term, you might get more candidates, but in the long term, all you’re going to be doing is following the latest trend in technology, like, oh my gosh, we need AI without thinking about why you need AI or ultimately what the goal is. And somebody shared, I wish I had his name in front of me. I don’t to credit him appropriately. I heard a speaker a couple of weeks ago talking about goal setting and he said the goal itself is the what, but what’s really important is the why. And the problem with technology is all of these amazing vendors are pitching us these cool things and they’re saying, here’s what this technology can do for you. But we don’t stop and think why we’re actually using it. So I’m a huge fan of technology. I love that our landscape in recruiting tech and in employment tech has grown tremendously. I love that there’s so many tools to choose from and that there are amazing vendors and technology professionals out there advancing and innovating our space. What I don’t love is when organizations lead with that and they use the tech to drive their strategy without saying, okay, we’ve determined that in our candidate journey, the attraction phase is the most influential and most important. And where we’re really struggling is for people to be interested in us. Because maybe it’s we work in a really unsexy industry or maybe we’re a brand no one’s heard of. And then using technology to say, to answer, what can we do about that? Or if our goal, the why is to we’re doing this because we need to drive more brand awareness. Then a particular technology can be the what to deliver more information or to automate how your ads are posted, things like that. And that’s where I think most organizations, especially on the employer brand side, get stuck. Because you end up with someone who’s junior or new to employer brand. They get caught up in the coolness of technology. Vendors are really smart, especially in Q4, and they’re doing a lot of pitching of cool new tech, which is exciting. They promise to solve all your problems. And a lot of these talented and eager professionals just don’t have the strategy experience to stop and say but the why? What is most important to us? And then why are we doing it?
Matt Alder [00:27:28]:
Susan, thank you very much for talking to me.
Susan LaMotte [00:27:30]:
Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.
Matt Alder [00:27:33]:
My thanks to Susan. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow us on Instagram. You can find the show by searching for recruiting future. If you’re a Spotify or Pandora user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com. on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
