How important is the Candidate Experience to your organisation?

We've been nominated for an award for the service we deliver to candidates, so it’s easy for me to sit here and say how great we are (that was yesterday’s post). However, I am a little concerned with the candidate experience delivered by the rest of the flat fee recruitment industry. As you would expect, I am a huge fan of the flat fee recruitment model, I think it delivers real value for the customer and is far more efficient than the prehistoric traditional agency model.

But most providers don't deliver a great service to candidates. It's no secret that most flat fee recruitment providers view the candidate as a commodity, something to be passed around to clients with no feedback and no candidate care.

I was interested in seeing the level of candidate care that was delivered by one of the more well known flat fee recruitment agencies, they were early adopters of this flat fee model, so should have had enough time to get this right by now. I decided to "mystery shop" them to see what the candidate experience was like. It was, as I suspected, dismal. The conversation went something along these lines:

Me: Hi, I am enquiring about the Payroll Manager role in Woking (I've changed the details of the role to protect the guilty).
Flat Fee Receptionist: Yes, have you seen the advert online.
Me: Yes, I have
Flat Fee Receptionist: Ok, well if you are interested then you need to apply online for the position.
Me: Ok, but I just had a couple of quick questions that I was hoping someone could answer?
Flat Fee Receptionist: All the information we have is on the advert.
Me: Ok, but I just need to know if the role is in walking distance of Woking train station as I don't drive?
Flat Fee Receptionist: All the information we have is on the advert.
Me: But I don't want to apply for a role then get an interview only to realise I have wasted everyone's time if I cannot commute to their office.
Flat Fee Receptionist: All the information we have is on the advert.

This went on for a bit longer, but I finished the call understanding one of the reasons why this provider is able to offer their service at a cheaper rate than EasyWebRecruitment. Because there is far less service provided than we presently offer. We encourage all our clients to "mystery shop" us, and many do. If you phone our office about a vacancy you will in almost all occasions get your call transferred to the person managing that vacancy, who will be able to intelligently answer all of your questions about the vacancy and the client.

There are two competing models emerging within our industry. The scenario above is a good example one inefficiency in the "automated flat fee recruitment model". There are many more. This model attempts to replace each process that might have involved a well trained recruiter with a robot or a not so clever piece of software. Our organisation and a few others understand that if you take the human beings out of the process what you end up with is a one-size-fits-all service that does not flex to the needs of the client, does not deliver real candidate care and, ultimately, does not reduce costs for your clients (as more roles go unfilled).

You get what you pay for, but flat fee does not have to mean a service delivered by robots.

In tomorrow's post I will highlight the real differences between these two competing models.

Candidate Feedback sees EasyWebRecruitment nominated for RecruitRank Award

It’s almost 4 years since the start of EasyWebRecruitment as a flat fee recruitment agency. When we set out our aims and objectives it was to surpass the service delivered to both candidates and clients whilst dramatically lowering their costs. We have seen lots of happy clients come back to us with positive feedback on our service but we have never tried to precisely measure the experience the candidates using our service find.

We have always worked to a principle of updating every single candidate on the eventual outcome of every single application they make to us we also make sure we reply to every email and return every phone call. It is this approach that has seen candidates using jobsite recruit rank service rate us as one of the best performing agencies in the UK for candidate experience.

Whilst we don’t expect to win on our first outing to the Awards, it feels great to be nominated and free champagne is my favourite champagne.

For more information on all the finalists, see: http://www.recruitrank.co.uk/finalists.html

Which is the best day of the week to post an advert on a Job Board?

Our busy part of the week tends to be a Friday afternoon. I suspect Friday morning is a good time for many of our clients to do weekly meetings and decisions get made on new vacancies that they need to recruit for. By the afternoon, we are normally in full swing turning their job descriptions into optimised advert copy for the job boards we use.

Our clients may be keen to get these adverts live by the weekend, but we’ll tend to advise against posting vacancies on a Friday. Customers can always disregard this advice, but there is a logic behind it.

When posting a vacancy on a job board there are two primary methods by which a candidate can discover it, both methods are less effective if you post on a Friday, and here’s why…

Job Search

Many job boards will display the more recent adverts at the top of the search results. Now I am generalising here, some job boards treat adverts equally regardless of when they were posted, and just try to deliver the most relevant advert to the top of the list based on the search term, but the majority will have some bias towards newer postings.

This means if we post your advert on Friday, your advert will perform best when searched for on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. These are the 3 days of the week when people are least likely to think about job hunting, and this is backed up by the audience figures to all the major job boards on these days. Also, did I mention that Friday is typically the busiest day for posting jobs? So post on Friday and you will have the most competition, competing for the smallest audience.

Jobseekers and Email Alerts

The second method is when a job seeker discovers your vacancy by setting up a job alert with the job board. Normally, after a jobseeker runs a search, the job board will offer them the chance to have the results of this job search emailed to them every day, saving them having to remember to return and run this search daily. If we post our advert for your vacancy on a Friday, then the jobseeker would normally get an email from the job board on Saturday morning.

I check my emails 24/7, it’s like a nervous twitch, whenever I stand in a queue or have to wait for something I have to check my email on my iphone. But will your potential new employee have the time to check their email on Saturday? Even if they do are they really going to have time to apply for your position?


Why we do like Mondays

So what is the best day of the week to post a role? Ideally you want to be posting your jobs the day before job board traffic hits its peak. According to all the job boards I have spoken to over several years, it’s Monday. This is backed up by most UK job board traffic peaking on a Tuesday. I have also previously heard from Jobsite that their traffic peaks at around 11am on this day.


Our Stats for June

We managed 98 vacancies in June, generating 24,059 applications, a whopping 245.5 applicants per role for us to screen out all the irrelevant candidates from.

Our friends at Idibu (our job board posting partner) were good enough to send us the figures on when these applications were made. The graph below shows applications dropping off severely over the weekend and peaking on Tuesday, backing up the Monday posting argument. The second chart shows the peak hours of the day for applications.