Top 10 Expectations in the recruiting process

What goes wrong for candidates and for recruiters? What do they perceive as a solution to their problems, a way to improve the process, in the sense of making it a better experience? We will explore issues such as time lost, frustration, oversimplification, bureaucracy, inhuman tech.

When a problem is framed with a “how might we improve” sentence, a good design thinking exercise to use is the “Rose, thorn, bud.” Identifying positive experiences (rose), negative experiences and issues (thorn) and a new goal or insight (bud) is a structure providing an opportunity to scope a problem by revealing focus areas and allowing to plan next steps. The general idea of this exercise is to spot the positive aspects in place that we should keep, and the negative ones we should try to remove.

ASPIRATIONAL NEEDS

Hypotheses on Positive Experiences

To know how willing to move to another product our target will be, a good practice consisted in gauging the level of satisfaction of both recruiters and candidates. Our hypotheses are the following:

• ‘There might be a cultural difference to take into account when comparing French satisfaction and American satisfaction; the US will be more satisfied with their recruiting process than France.’ According to ThisWayGlobal, 52% of organizations are dissatisfied with the hiring process (ThisWayGlobal, 2018).
• ‘Active and passive candidates are unhappy about the recruiting process.’
• ‘The passive candidate target represents a large percentage of candidates’ According to Yobs, “over 70% of Americans are unhappy about their jobs.” (Yobs, 2018). According to Elevated, only 32% of employees are actively engaged in their jobs (Elevated, 2018).

EXPECTATIONS

Hypotheses

What are the existing solutions on the market? What are their positioning? Their added value?

• If solutions help save time, what’s the basis taken as a reference? According to VCV, it takes 21h (VCV, 2018). According to Rebric, “it takes 23 days” (Rebric, 2018). For Yobs, it is an average of 40 days (Yobs, 2018). For Fortay.ai, it takes 52 days (Fortay.ai). For Appii it takes about 70 days to hire talent (Appii, 2018).

Search results

Figure 11 — Candidates and job seekers pain points (netnography)

According to our netnography in which 38 companies wrote about candidates’ expectations (see fig. 11 and 12), the main expectations of candidates would be the following:

1. For the recruiters to go beyond resumes, and discover their personality, story, and preferences (x7);

2. Get feedback on applications, updates on the application treatment, and answers about the decision taken (x6);

3. Job matching expectations (x6);

4. Enter in contact with a human recruiter, or mentor (x4)

5. Avoid the discrepancy between what is described in the job offer and the reality of the job; salary upfront (x4)

We know, however, from the survey we conducted with recruiters, that more than 83% of candidates are rejected on CV alone (based on 17 responses), and only 72% of received CVs are never looked at (Monikl). On 33 responses in our candidate survey, we collected that a majority of 55,3% never hear back from companies.

Figure 12 — Clustering of candidates’ expectations (netnography)

Clustering the candidates’ expectations showed that the companies’ online communication confirmed our hypotheses to focus on transparency, feedback and human complexity, however, compared to our survey results, the order of importance was inverted. Transparency came in the fifth position, feedbacks in the second position, and human complexity in the first. Our first interpretation is that there is a major communication goal in advertising for personality assessment while admitting there is a trust issue coming from recruiters’ side looks less appealing. In any case, we will later focus on the ideas examining how to enrich CV/resumes’ data, how to solve the problem of misleading information and how to give more visibility on application statuses.

Solutions envisioned; opportunities

What are the existing solutions on the market and in the academic world?

How can we optimize the use of candidates’ data to offer them the ideal job?

• ‘Bring UX to jobsearch websites.’ According to SmartDreamers, 65% of candidates are lost due to a poor experience (SmartDreamers, 2018).
• ‘The way recruiters contact and engage passive candidates gives hints on to build a “passive-candidate”-friendly platform.’
• ‘The problem of the amount of attention is crucial.’ According to Rebric, “HR professionals spend 6 seconds per resume”; according to JobsMarkt, “Recruiters spend less than 6 seconds deciding whether your resume or CV is worth a second look”. (Rebric)

Are verification and credentials’ automated systems plebiscite by recruiters?

How do recruiters perceive the referral system? According to Drafted, “referrals are 7x more likely to get hired.” (Drafted, 2018). Is it a good thing or is it unfair?

If we were to design a KPI dashboard on the recruiter’s portal. What items are currently useful for monitoring performance?

Conclusion

We’ve reviewed the interpretation of what recruiters think the candidates expect and now we need to control if it’s true by asking the candidates themselves.

Not that it’s big news, but we’ve learnt to what extend CVs are a bottleneck.

We’ve also learnt that maybe 70% of companies employees are dissatisfied in their current job and could accept an offer. So the recruiting market is huge.

We’ve also learnt that a good recruiting process should not be longer than 50 days.

We conclude that, to build an attractive recruiting solution, importing a CV should be super easy, as well as adding more info that are criteria of selection, if missing in the CV (to go beyond resume). Building an automated feedback should be appreciated. And making sure that the majority of candidate has a contact with a human being should also be appreciated.