This week we return to the popular topic of improving the Candidate Experience. There is a lot of talk at the moment about the importance of treating candidate’s as customers but what happens when your candidates actually are your customers!
My guest this week is Ben Gledhill, Talent Acquisition manager at retailer Sofology. Sofology is going through a digital transformation process at the moment to fulfill its aim of being an omnichannel retailer. They have been looking hard at their candidate experience and Ben offers some great practical insights into their learning and the improvements they have made.
In the interview we discuss:
• How a negative candidate experience can affect Sofology’s business
• Building an emotional link with candidates
• How to achieve total visibility on the candidate experience
• Mandatory hiring manager interview training
• The vital importance of a mobile optimized ATS
• Using NPS ratings for candidate experience measurement
• The value of explaining the recruitment process up front on the corporate career site
Ben also talks about what’s next for talent acquisition at Sofology and gives us his view on emerging recruitment technologies.
This episode of the podcast is kindly supported by HireVue
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from HireVue. HireVue’s team acceleration software combines digital video with deep learning analytics to help companies build and coach the world’s best teams. Team Acceleration Software is a modern digital answer to antiquated recruiting and training software that has placed barriers and bias in the way of finding, selecting and coaching a company’s most important asset, its people. Visit hirevue.com that’s spelt H I R E V U E to learn how organizations like Vodafone, Unilever, Nike, Red Bull, IBM and JP Morgan Chase are modernizing the way they work.
Matt Alder [00:01:08]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 72 of the Recruiting Future podcast. So we haven’t had a new episode of the show for a couple of weeks. I’m currently writing a book at the moment, collaborating with my good friend Mervyn Dinnen, and it’s taken a lot of my focus in the past few weeks. It’s now nearly done and is being published in the UK and the US next May, and I’m sure I’ll be telling you a lot more about it in the new year. So onto this week’s show and a return to the topic of candidate experience. There’s a lot of talk at the moment about treating candidates as customers, but what happens when your candidates actually are your customers? My guest this week is Ben Gledhill, talent acquisition Manager at retailer Zofology. In the interview, Ben gives some brilliant practical insights into how to audit and improve your candidate experience.
Matt Alder [00:02:07]:
Hi Ben and welcome to the podcast.
Ben Gledhill [00:02:09]:
Hi Matt.
Matt Alder [00:02:10]:
So could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do and who you work for?
Ben Gledhill [00:02:17]:
Yeah, of course. So my name’s Ben, got over 11 years experience working in various forms of recruiting, recruitment, agency side RPO and later on internal recruitment acquisition. I’m currently the talent acquisition manager for sofology, who some of our listeners might know. Formerly as CSL and sofaworks. I’ve been basically brought in here to help us on our journey from a out and out sofa retailer to a full omnichannel retail. So we’re taking the best that digital and technology has to offer and bring that into the world of selling sofas to give the customers the best, the best possible journey that they, that they have.
Matt Alder [00:03:06]:
That’s, that’s really interesting. What challenges do you have in doing that? Because I’m guessing you’re sort of mixing Retail challenges with, you know, digital recruitment challenges as well.
Ben Gledhill [00:03:19]:
We are, yeah. So, you know, without wanting to knock this off industry, it’s not seen as a very sexy industry to work in by the people that we are wanting to hire. So if we go back maybe 12, 24 months, our IT team was probably about three or four guys in a broom cupboard. Now it’s about 30 strong. We have a team of developers, testers, 3D, graphic designers, all these type of kind of cool, funky millennial types. And my biggest challenge from an attraction perspective is, is to say, don’t go and work for that cool startup or that cool tech company. Come and work for a retailer making 3D images of sofas. So that’s very much from an attraction perspective. That’s probably the kind of biggest challenge that we have at this moment.
Matt Alder [00:04:08]:
And what have you done to sort of overcome that? What’s worked for you really well in that area?
Ben Gledhill [00:04:15]:
Okay. Well, luckily, both our CTO and our CEO are not only champions of technology, but really cool technology. So our software development is done in all the latest Microsoft stacks, which is really important to other developers out there. And when it comes to attracting R3D and graphic design candidates, we’ve invested a hell of a lot in 3D imagery, really cool technology that kind of Formula One car designers use as well. So when they come in, you know, we don’t have that much of a challenge of selling opportunities. It’s just attracting them from the more bigger kind of cooler technology companies out there.
Matt Alder [00:05:01]:
So I know that you have had a kind of a massive focus on improving and optimizing and understanding your candidate experience. Why did you sort of come to the conclusion that candidate experience was so important?
Ben Gledhill [00:05:20]:
Well, I guess two things really, Matt. I think the first thing, it’s something that’s very kind of sacred to me really, having been a candidate many occasions, some good and bad. So I think that was the first thing. But secondly, I think in today’s world where your employer brand is so important, candidates have access to various bits of information, whether it’s glassdoor, Twitter, Facebook, or even speaking to fellow professionals at a networking event. You the experience that a candidate has during the journey, whether it’s reading a review, a video, interviewing, or even the onboarding process, it has to be absolutely world class in its delivery because if not, if they are rejected, for example, they will go and bash your brand, I think I’ve heard a few people say. Or if they’re successful and the journey hasn’t been good, well, the start of the employee journey Already on the back foot. So for us it’s really important that people that are going through the candidate experience, for us experience the absolute best of what both we can offer as an employer, but also the best of kind of technology that we can use as well.
Matt Alder [00:06:36]:
And I’m guessing that particularly with you guys being a retailer, that’s kind of critical because I’m sure all of these people are probably your customers as well because let’s face it, everyone needs a sofa.
Ben Gledhill [00:06:49]:
Yeah, absolutely. And for me, this is probably the $64 million point. You know, I mean, we did a little bit of analysis similar to a lot of retailers that, you know, our candidates can be our customers and our customers can be our candidates. And I think I carried out a little bit of analysis earlier in the year. So say, for example, if we have 10 negative candidate experiences per week, our average order value is just over £1,300. If that happens per week over the space of one year as a business, we potentially lost out on £676,000 of potential revenue, which for an SME like ourselves, you know, it could spell disaster. Really?
Matt Alder [00:07:33]:
Absolutely. I can see, I can see why that would be so important. So what, what did you do once you kind of done this analysis? What did you, did you look at your current candidate experience? What was your, what was your sort of process from this point?
Ben Gledhill [00:07:49]:
We did, yeah. So we wanted to make sure that, you know, in order for us to really kind of evaluate our candidate experience and improve it, we needed to know exactly what it looked like. So using a lot of what’s coming out of, in particular the US in terms of how a candidate experience looks like now, it’s very similar to a consumer journey. So you’ll have things like awareness, consideration, interest and then after that initial marketing period, they’ll come into what we all know is a recruiting process. So things like the application, the select and the higher stage. So we spent a lot of money on some post it notes from Staples and we actually mapped out every point of the candidate experience and more importantly, the different ways that they can enter that. So for example, the career site events, our own talent pooling. When it comes to the assessment stage, is it an assessment centre, is it a video interview? Eat right through to the onboarding stage. So when we offer a candidate, what happens then? Do we keep in contact? Do we invite them to social events? Can we send them any content on our business? Kind of already starting to build that emotional link. It was a really, really powerful exercise because for the first time as a business, we had total control of that candidate experience because we knew exactly what was happening and when and what the potential impact would be.
Matt Alder [00:09:22]:
And what were the sort of particular problems that you spotted and even more importantly, how did you go about fixing them? Because I think that lots of companies will acknowledge they have problems with their candidate experience, but they don’t necessarily know what they should do to fix them.
Ben Gledhill [00:09:41]:
So when we started to kind of look around how we collated CVs, because we are a retail organization and we do get a lot of passive interest from candidates who will just walk into a store, have a cv, we found that some store managers were actually holding quite ad hoc interviews, which, you know, you’re in a busy store, there’s customers everywhere, and then you’ve been taken to the side just by a store manager. So that was a key thing. And we also found that the quality of the actual hiring process from an interview perspective was very varied. So you had some hiring managers that were great interviewers, could really scuttle a candidate down, ask questions in a really well pitched way, or you had some hiring managers that didn’t make the candidate feel comfortable, didn’t follow any kind of structure, and because his or her interviewing style wasn’t adequate enough, they were getting the information that they needed. Therefore, potentially the candidate was being rejected for the wrong reasons. So for me, those two key elements potentially could be destroying our candidate experience.
Matt Alder [00:10:54]:
Yeah, absolutely. And how did you go about improving them?
Ben Gledhill [00:10:59]:
So the first part of it, when our ATS went fully mobile, it meant that the hiring managers could actually use their phone or their iPad to log any ad hoc applications there and then. So that meant they go through the standard process, the standard assessment centre, meaning that every candidate, whether they’ve applied via Read Total Jobs or they’ve been into our Leicester store, have the same assessment process. The second problem took a little bit more time and a little bit more thinking, but we actually created a hiring managers development course which covered various topics such as how to interview in terms of the questions that you’re using, how to review a cv, what type of feedback that we need for either a successful or an unsuccessful candidate. And what we actually do in outer sophology is a hiring manager can’t hold an interview unless they have passed this training. So now we know that everybody who assesses within the business are at a consistent level, which it’s empowered us to kind of trust that when somebody in IT or marketing or finance holds an interview, we know exactly what they’re doing because they’ve all Been on the same training scheme.
Matt Alder [00:12:28]:
That’s great. That makes perfect sense. Was there anything else that you were doing around candidate feedback? Were there any other parts of the process that sort of needed improvement where you took some kind of action?
Ben Gledhill [00:12:40]:
Yeah, massively so. I think our recruiters will hear this, but there’s nothing worse than getting a simple no on an email or when you meet somebody face to face. So when we receive feedback now from hiring managers, part of the training scheme is we talk about the employer brand and what can happen if we don’t successfully feedback to candidates. So now we make sure that we get very objective feedback that we can pass on to unsuccessful candidates because as candidates we have all been there and there’s nothing worse than just getting a quiet non human like no email or a no other voicemail. So in terms of feedback, every assessed candidate now receives full verbal and written feedback and we will also offer additional feedback if they require it. And the actual response from the response from the business has been really positive because now they can see that it’s not just a paper exercise, but we are promoting and kind of trying to improve our employer brand by making sure that candidates might not of being successful, but because they’ve received this feedback, hopefully they will be successful in their next application.
Matt Alder [00:13:58]:
That’s fantastic. And I suppose the next question is how, you know, how are you sort of measuring candidate satisfaction? Is that something that you’re looking at, that you’re able to able to find data on?
Ben Gledhill [00:14:11]:
So we’ve got a little bit of an unfair advantage over probably a couple of other organizations. So our ATS actually has a tool in there where we can ask candidates feedback. So we really wanted to measure what the experience of our customers in store. So when a customer goes into a store, purchases a sofa, they will get a text message asking to rate their experience through a NPS system. So we do the exact same for our candidates. So we created a wide range of questions. Questions such as can you rate the timelines involved? How would you rate the quality of information provided before the interview? How would you rate the salary? Loads of kind of different questions both on a qualitative and quantitative basis. But the killer question is overall, how would you rate your experience? It’s a simple 00:10 NPS question and for me that will tell us if they’ve enjoyed the experience, they will promote it and if not they will detract it, thus kind of damaging our employer brand. We make sure that it was fully optimized for both mobile as well. And we actually review this on a daily basis, which means we have real live emotive feedback that we can go away and hopefully improve what we’re doing.
Matt Alder [00:15:37]:
And how have the results been?
Ben Gledhill [00:15:40]:
Not gonna lie. There are a couple of talk early issues to start with. I mean I think any organisation that does this has to realise that there will be quite a lot of rough with the smooth. I think we. One example we kept when we started using the system there was quite a lot of comments saying candidates weren’t really in short of the overall process or what was going to happen. So when we revamped our careers site back in March, we created a useful stuff tab, put together a couple of PDFs explaining the whole process, start to finish, what is involved and a very simple chart of if you’re coming in for this role, you’ll have a psychometric. If you’re coming in for this role, it’s a presentation just so our candidates know everything that will be expected of them through the hiring process.
Matt Alder [00:16:35]:
And what advice would you give to another organization who is embarking on a similar candidate experience improvement journey?
Ben Gledhill [00:16:46]:
I think for me, I think you have to be very honest about what you do. I think you will get a lot of negative feedback from candidates. I think you need to be really kind of to receiving that because it’s like anything. The old phrase is feedback is a gift and I think with this exercise it really, really is. I think that’s one thing. But another thing would also. I think it’s really important to leverage what I call the basics versus the hype. So there are some amazing pieces of technology that you can use to enhance your candidate experience, which is video interviewing, real time onboarding. I’ve seen a number of apps that either made or in the process of being made, but if you don’t provide feedback or you’ve got a hiring manager that is asking the wrong type of question in an interview scenario, you kind of do know all the way the cool stuff by not doing the basics. So I think that’s a really important piece of, you know as well as doing all the cool sexy stuff. Don’t forget the basics of good recruitment. Things like interview etiquette, providing good feedback and making sure that you kind of stick to the timelines that you probably told the candidate about the start of the journey. Really?
Matt Alder [00:18:01]:
Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, that’s just 100%, you know, 100% agree with you. I think that one of the, I suppose one of the issues that we face in our sector is that there is so much innovation and Cool stuff and technology coming on board. And I think that sometimes people get a bit blindsided by that and forget about the, the core things that they, the core things that they need to do. And I suppose that leads me kind of on to my final question. My, my final question which is what’s kind of on your RA at the moment from, from, from what you’re looking at in terms of, you know, technology and the way that recruitment’s moving, what would you hope to be sort of using or, or integrating into your, into your strategy in sort of 18 months time?
Ben Gledhill [00:18:48]:
So I think for me the, the big thing that I really want to kind of start kicking off is also we have an ats, but I really want to take some of the good work that is happening in the US for example, at the moment around CRM. So you of build on the employer brand by using a real life CRM system where you can submit all types of content and really concentrate on getting the leads and turning them hopefully into successful hires. Because I think I said at the beginning, over the past 12 months I’ve come to the realization that everything that we do now is very marketing and employer brand led, very similar to the consumer world. So I think if we can take a little bit of the CRM technology and I also think we need to probably look at how our technology process works from start to finish. I know, I think I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago whereby people looking for the Amazon effect, whereby I think from start to finish it’s something like five clicks. We’re probably a little bit away from that. But I think all organisations need to look at how long does it take for a candidate to apply. There’s so much chop out there. You know, if the technology or the process isn’t to their liking, they’ll probably kind of jump off and we’ll lose them in that funnel. So I think for me it’s kind of looking at that kind of whole kind of CRM employee branding piece and kind of making sure that we can use that for attraction purposes.
Matt Alder [00:20:24]:
Ben, thank you very much for talking to me.
Ben Gledhill [00:20:27]:
No problem. Pleasure Matt. Take care.
Matt Alder [00:20:29]:
My thanks to Ben Gledhill. You can subscribe to this podcast in itunes Stitcher or via your podcasting app of choice, just search for recruiting future. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can also 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.
