There is nowhere a more emphatic symbol of a corporate policy than the three-ton rock at the entrance to each Stew Leonard’s store in Connecticut and New York. On it is inscribed: “Rule 1: The customer is always right. Rule 2: If the customer is ever wrong, reread rule 1.†This company has been listed in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not as the world’s largest dairy store and chosen by Fortune to be one of the top 100 employers in the US. I love taking out-of-towners to the Danbury store and listen to them “Oooh†and “Ahhh†about the size and efficiency of the operation as well as the Disneyland-like animatronics. You should not be allowed to buy milk in a store where your kids don’t have a button to push to hear a cow moo. I had the privilege of being at a Western Connecticut SHRM meeting a few years ago when Stew himself gave a talk about human resources at his ginormous operation. He is the real deal! The attitude throughout his company regarding employees, their fair treatment and employment practices originates from the top of the org chart and is passed down unquestioned.
The customer is always right, but really? No some customers are jerks. There will always be a self-indulgent egotistical horse’s ass somewhere in the mix to create a bad experience for everybody else. Human nature is too balanced between the good stuff and the bad stuff to assume that a one-size-fits-all demand for respect is valid. In business, survival depends on allowing even the jerks to be treated with some respect even though they may not deserve it. Without an enforceable philosophy of fair treatment from on high, chaos rules and business fails. Customers, employees and candidates for employment are all spawned from our society where diversity of thought is given deference and freedom of expression is assumed to be a right. In recruiting, the reality is that all candidates do not deserve good treatment, but we still must treat them as if they do. If they are wrong, we reread Rule 1.
The bandwagon for a Candidate Bill of Rights is crowded with those who see a pendulum swing in that direction as the only alternative to the problems of the current black holes in the hiring process. Most of the points in drafts of such documents are statements of fact highlighting how bad the process can become in worst case situations. Calling it a “Bill of Rights†is where I take exception. Yes, candidates get lost in the process and failing to fix this issue is unacceptable. Do they have some sort of God-given “right†to be coddled and made to feel that they are super special before we tell them that they were not selected for the job? In adult life, we engage in competition with our fellow-man in almost everything we do, including interviewing for jobs. There is not a trophy for every kid on the team, only a prize for the grown-up who is best qualified to become a new employee.
So how can I call myself a true candidate advocate and not climb up on this bandwagon? I would suggest that an alternative process needs to be considered before creation of any form of written corporate document inferring rights for non-employees which may be illegal as well as inappropriate. Here are the problems with a Bill of Rights and how to fix them:
- Must come from the top. Any policy created within HR or Staffing without the support of the highest level of management will not work. Just as Stew Leonard declares all customers to be right, the CEO must not only agree in principal that the candidate experience is significant he/she must be willing to support tough decisions and apply the resources to make it work. This is not about being nice to candidates as the right thing to do, but an honest belief that it is important to the company image and brand.
- Must be realistic from an ROI perspective. Surveying problem areas with no action to remedy them is commonplace in most companies. After identifying the problems, proposed actions must be considered and financial resources allocated to fix them. Top level support will not come with a blank check. Fiscal responsibility means that the budgeted actions will cause real change and not just whitewash the gaps. Similar to the black hole in space, this cannot be a situation where everything gets sucked in and nothing comes out.
- Must be measurable. A statement of candidate rights is doomed to become a dusty relic unless there is some way to tell if it is working. If the objective is 100% candidate feedback compliance, it is not good enough to state the policy (or rights) without a system of measuring effectiveness. Impact on better hiring acceptance rates and improved retention after hire are some possible metrics to consider. Obviously, continuous measurement of the survey points that were deficient needs to be monitored to ensure that there is no lapse back into the old system.
- Must be consistent, not situational. No policy ever works if it does not apply universally to all employees. Similarly, there has to be some congruity in the hiring of floor sweepers and vice presidents. We rarely allow candidates for senior level positions to be left in limbo while we make a decision about their fate. If there is anything “right†about improving the process it would be to extend the VIP treatment to anybody who is interviewed. If recruiting workloads are abnormally high, additional resources must be allocated to maintain the quality of the process rather than prioritize the higher layers of concern.
- Must have flexibility. Rigid policies not only tempt outright non-compliance they also lure employees into moving the target to hit the bullet. If one aspect of the policy is found to be lacking or was improperly implemented, there needs to be a built-in mechanism to recast that part of the policy without destroying the other positive aspects. We live in an era of scalable processes and this is another example of a living process having more value than a static document.
- Must have penalties for noncompliance. There is usually a work-around employed to expedite situations where a policy gets in the way of the ability to maintain nimble activity. Holes in the process caused by employee inaction must be corrected or the whole policy loses credibility. To combat “lip service†compliance which would cause loss of credibility of the entire policy, there needs to be accountability for individual actions and options to train or retrain offenders.
- Must be forgivable. This is not inconsistent with the point of penalizing those who do not take the policy seriously. In situations as dynamic as the manager/recruiter/candidate interface, any or all of the parties concerned can inadvertently cause something to go awry. There needs to be no-fault insurance of sorts that can move the process forward without playing the blame game.
There are a few points left in my proposal that are important to successfully fixing what is broken today. I am proposing that candidates need a better experience and not a bill of rights. They need consistent attention rather than words. There is also danger in creating an entitlement mentality that we are granting inalienable rights to candidates. This is not a “guarantee†but what the product people would call a “limited liability warranty.†We need to adopt a policy that clearly sets expectations for the hiring process to the candidate. Most of the apparent lapses in the process are simply a lack of communication. We do not need to hammer the recruiting staff with a list of Thou-Shalt-Not decrees but we need to implement behavior modification through training and discipline.Â
Great article Tom. Thanks for the insights.
I’m in absolute agreement that we should not be pushing a bill of rights. Every employer has the right to hire the way they want. We should save the entitlement mentality to those things guaranteed in the Bill of Rights in our constitution …even if we can’t always agree on what even that means without a court of law.
And that is my next point: your ‘principles for developing a solid candidate experience are a foundation I cannot argue with, they could also be applied to almost any change effort (although I would swap ‘penalties for non-compliance’ with the phrase ‘consequences for both compliance and non-compliance’.) So, to me they are principles and lack the specificity inferred by your #2 and #3
But to build on the case you are making, the way to differentiate the firms that have adopted improved candidate experience practices (fully aligned with the business as you’ve shown in your principles) is, IMHO, to make companies employing specific practices more transparent to the job seeker (versus telling job seekers they have a right to be treated in a certain way.)
So, for example, in some magical future assume we all agreed (an amazing notion in itself) that one (just one) best candidate experience practice was that a firm would actually ask all prospects “did you find all the information you need to make a decision to apply or not?” before they actually applied.
Multiply the practice above by more ‘specific’ practices during the prospect phase, the application phase, the pre-finalist stage, the finalist stage and the new hire stage.
Another simple practice that would be measurable might be to “Thank” every person who has submitted an application in any form. That alone would differentiate the more than 50% who fail to do anything or simply acknowledge the receipt of an application.
Then, imagine the firms that did some nominal number of these practices were visible to all job seekers and those that didn’t…were also visible as not exhibiting these practices. (I’ve several thoughts on how this will happen but primitive versions of this are sprouting up in places like glass door)
In my fantasy then, the onus is now on the job seeker where it belongs to choose that a firm they target for a job is important enough to overlook some poorer candidate experience practices…or not
As you know we (a non-profit, talentboard, that Elaine Orler, Ed Newman and myself have started this year) are awarding, probably to 20 or more firms, the first Candidate Experience Awards at the HR Technology conference in Las Vegas. The 60 firms that applied by July 15 included quite a number who met many of the very specific practices we outlined in the survey they had to complete. Currently the firms that went forward have asked their candidates to confirm their practices.
As of today, more than 4,000 candidates have supplied specific feedback…with two weeks to go in this round. We think its indicative that 2 out of 3 job seekers who start the survey, finish it. We are working to make sure that the firms that win are well known to quality candidates.
We also hope to improve and expand the specificity of the practices that constitute a positive candidate experience in the next few years and look forward to your thoughts as we move forward. Later in the Fall we’ll try and bring some folks with your passion for the subject together to develop plans for 2012.
Every single time this conversation comes up, there are a multitude of jobseekers that raise their hands and say “We were treated poorly and here’s what you can do to fix it” and suggest a few simple ideas that reflect Gerry’s points and Tom’s as well. On the other hand, you have loads of busy, overloaded recruiters and HR pros who say ‘We’re seeing just as many unqualified people for this role and if you can’t figure out which jobs you should be applying for, I don’t have time to sort through your resumes much less time to respond to your pray and spray resume techniques”.
It sucks. What I suggest is that we all take some accountability.
1) Candidates need to be educated on the front end about what is appropriate job-seeking behavior, and obviously this varies by company.
2) Recruiters and HR Pros, no matter how busy DO have the automated and even personalized systems to respond to each and every applicant (yes! they do!) if you, as an HR professional have access to a CSV or email address of an applicant, then you can use any email, marketing, sales or CRM automation system to implement a process that tells these folks “thanks, but no thanks”
3) There are multiple ways you can track your candidate experience, the same as you’d track social sentiment or any other branding or marketing metric, but few companies want to pay the piper to learn bad news. However, when CIOs start to see the cost leakage of bad candidate experience, that may change.
Now, I am biased but the aforementioned three things can be solved by employer-centric talent communities. Yes, it takes longer than five seconds, but so does a simple survey about your candidate experience or a pop up question about your informational needs. (Disclosure, I work for BraveNewTalent a platform for free and paid talent communities). Not only can a community manager, acting as company liasion between hiring mgr and candidate, educate the HM how to act, they can also set and manage expectations for the community and subsequent jobseeker. When it comes time to apply, there are tools to list and group candidates who did not receive an offer (or a second interview or whatever) so that you can personally let them know and alert them to opportunities for which they may be more well suited.
I’ve yakked for long enough but the solution is simple, albeit not easy, to implement….
You make some very valid points here Tom. I know which article you are countering in this post and I, too, stated my position on the other blog.
In an ideal world, sure it would be nice, but I can punch some holes in a candidate bill of rights. Frankly, if compliance from both the company AND job candidate are not at 100%, I can see it failing miserably.
This said, are there companies that need to or should be improving the candidate experience… Absolutely without a doubt in my mind! I just don’t see a complete180 coming any time soon.
Tom and Gerry (had to)-
Wouldn’t it be great if SHRM used some of it’s funds to create a “program” that would be free to all companies that measured the candidate experience immediately after “applying”?
Right after the candidate clicks , a survey window pops up that asks for feedback along several variables and when the candidate clicks here, the data does back to SHRM for collective analysis. All each company has to do is create a simple profile, so data can be analyzed across target demographics.
Call it the SHRM Candidate Experience Project – no ANSI protocols required. Companies get a free collective quarterly report but will pay a nominal fee for a customized report.
Thoughts?
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