Enhancing Candidate Experience Principles

I stole this presentation. I stole all of these ideas from a fantastic book by this gentleman, Matt Watkinson, published several years ago about the 10 principles behind great customer experience. Because we don't have to just follow the literature on recruiting to find great examples of hiring practices. When you look at recruiting and you look at candidates, they're almost the exact same as customers in a customer-centric view of the world. Candidate-centric view from... from a recruiting point of view, or a customer-centric view from an organization. And Matt's book outlined 10 fantastic principles I think any of us can live by around candidate experience. So I'm going to share with you my version, my interpretation of those experiences for the recruiting and hiring world. That cool? All right, let me start with, that's cool. Thanks, Bill. Bill's approval. So I want to talk about great experiences. I want to share with you some insight around this brand here. So when you look at this brand here, Uber, How many of you think amazing experience? Hands in the air. One, two, so okay two or three of their hands up. So what are you thinking about when you think of an amazing experience with Uber? You're in the minority here this morning. What is the amazing experience? Easy to access. And your name? So Thomas is talking about the app. The app is a fantastic experience. I agree with you. How about riding in an Uber, being in the actual car? Hansapu has amazing, memorable experiences of riding in an Uber by two or three, right? We have two or three kindred spirits. The rest of you are like, it's just a vehicle to get you from A to B, yeah? It's like every other taxi cab. It's, you know, it's fine. You get in the car, you go from A to B, right? I have been in so many Ubers all around the world, and most of them are pretty much the same. I share the same. experiences as the rest of you in that they're ordinary, they're mundane. But occasionally, you come across an experience. I came across an experience in an Uber earlier this year that just blew me away. And what I love about really great experiences, they aren't overly contrived. They don't require a lot of money or investment. Because I've been in Ubers where the driver tries to give you shots, or she's giving you free gifts, or free mints, or water. And that's nice. you know, it raises the game a little bit. But I had the fantastic experience of driving in a car with the wonderful Travis in the US recently. We were in Memphis, I think, and Travis was our Uber driver. And we got into the car, and I'd seen as I get into the car, and I was with some attendees at a conference, we had a recruiting conference for Sherm, and I'd seen on the app as I got in that he was the highest rated driver in Memphis. I'm like, all right. And as we start driving, He seemed like a nice man. The car itself though, the vehicle I got into was a beaten up old Ford. It was a Ford Explorer, I'd say 15 years old. It kind of smelt grimy and dusty, like it takes lots of people every day in dirty clothes and they mess it all up. But it was okay, it was neat, well nothing special. And I said to Travis about two minutes into the ride, I said, Travis, I said, do you mind me asking, I saw on the app you're the top rated driver, and this is lovely. But I'm just struggling to understand why. Would you mind sharing with me why you're the top rated driver? And he goes, hey, Johnny, I'm so sorry. You know, the way you guys got into the car threw me a little bit. I didn't start this journey the way I'd normally start the journey. Let me reset. Now, we're driving about 70 miles an hour, about 120 kilometers an hour down a freeway in the US at this point, right? And there's about seven of us in this big seven-seater Ford Explorer. And all of a sudden, Travis... look straight ahead and music turns on from nowhere. And we got a little bit of this. I'll share with you 30 seconds of my Uber ride. We get some audio? To my girl, you know, and she said, if I ever stopped that she would leave me. So I told her, I said, listen, honey. I know you wanna leave me. So we stayed in that car for about 13 minutes and we heard about 50 songs. Travis told us his life story about meeting his wife, how they got married, his kids, told to song. Every single word he used was the lyrics of a song that instantly came on at just the right moment. as he launched into that next sentence. And it was the most amazing experience we'd ever have. We pulled up outside our hotel, the seven of us, and we didn't want to get out. We're in the middle of a Michael Jackson song and we didn't want it to end. We had to finish the Michael Jackson song because the story wasn't over. It was amazing. Travis got an amazing tip from us that night. Travis created an experience that was unbelievably memorable. And he didn't give us free gifts. He had a creative thought. He did something different. He put himself out there and shared an amazing story. And it was just the best Uber ride we'd ever had. And it's an example to me of what a great experience can be and how easy it can be to put one on. when you actually think about it. So these principles, they reminded me, again, because this is something I read many years ago, and I came back to it recently, because I was thinking these principles, they hold true. I read this book about seven years ago, and today I think you can still learn from these principles and build amazing candidate experiences. So let's go on the seven, and let me give you some insight in terms of how I think you can create amazing, memorable experiences for candidates in your hiring process. So the first of the principles to understand is that Great candidate experiences strongly reflect the candidate's identity. We're all about the employer brand, what our EVP is, but it's important to understand that a candidate experience is really about the person we're dealing with. And I'll bring you back to a French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, and his proposition of value. He said there's an object value system, that things have different values depending on the context. So things can have a functional value. So, for example, I might have a phone. And the functional value of this phone is to call somebody, to communicate, yeah? So it's a functional value of I can communicate with my kids at home through this phone. That's its functional value. But somebody else could look at this phone and say, well, this phone has an exchange value. What could I get for this phone? I could probably get maybe 400 or 500 euros for this phone. So maybe I look at the value of this phone not by its function, but its value in terms of its exchange. I could exchange this for 400 or 500 euros in cash. Another way to look at value is to look at the symbolic value. So the symbolic value of something is, for example, if you were to run a race. I was talking to my friend Jolie, who's speaking next on the main stage, and she's doing a 10K next week. I sometimes do 5 and 10Ks, and you win little awards, medals, and cups. Those medals are completely useless. They serve no functional value. They're worth nothing. No one's going to give you any money for them. But to somebody who's ran a race and competed, They have amazing symbolic value. You'll put that up on your living room wall, by your fireplace with pride. I completed that race, that 10k, that 5k that I trained so hard for. Amazing symbolic value. But most things, when you look at what's really important to people, it's when something has a sign value. So I'll go back to my phone example. Again, this has a functional value. It also has an exchange value. But it has a massive sign value because it's an Apple. Hands up here, users, an iPhone. Hands up here who uses an Android phone. And let the battle begin. So those of you who use Android phones, why do you use an Android phone? Anyone a volunteer? Why? Pardon me? They pay more tax than Apple, perhaps. Why do you use an Android phone and not an iPhone? More freedom, software, it's an open architecture software. What about the Apple group? What about the Apple fans? Why do you use an Apple phone? User-friendly, and the Android isn't? Pardon me? Consistency? I'll tell you why I use an Apple phone, and I'll tell you why I use an Android phone. It's about sign value. I'm an iPhone user. I'll tell you I like it because of consistency, I love the user experience, etc. It costs a fucking fortune. It is not worth the money, but... Using an iPhone says something about you. It says I buy into the Apple culture, the systems. My Apple Mac, my iPhone, my Apple Watch, my goddamn Apple AirPods. So that's about sign value. Although I might not admit it most of the time, it's about I am proud to be a person who identifies with Apple. Whereas if you have an Android phone, for a lot of people, it's about identifying with open architecture, open systems. It's the anti-Apple. That's what sign value is about. People who have a Dolce & Gabbana bag, Louis Vuitton bag or jacket. It's not about the functional value. You can get a cheaper bag or cheaper coat. It's not about the exchange value. You're not going to sell it. It's about what it says to other people when you have that brand, that label, that logo. So it's really important when you think about experiences, what the person's identity is and what's important to them. When you look at employer branding, this comes into play because experiences that reinforce our self-image appeal to us on a deeper level. If I can resonate with an employer brand in a way that brings out what I believe to be my true self, I'm going to buy into that. So Apple do that really well. What they stand for is, for example, what I believe I stand for, or share some of the values, not paying tax, for example. So I'm going to buy into their ecosystem. You want employees to potentially think the same thing. Apple did this really well many years ago. Who remembers this ad? PC versus Mac, hands up. Gosh, we're the only old people in the room. Oh, God, Kevin, Dominic, myself, and a few others. So the years ago, they did this ad. Apple were kind of coming up against PC, and they had PC man who was in his suit, very conservative, and Apple man who was like in jeans and relaxed and cool. Now, interestingly, Apple were telling the world that we're this guy on the right. That wasn't the majority of computer buyers. The majority of computer buyers looked like this guy. So if you want to sell loads of computers, you would think you'd go for this. We're business, we're suits, we're ties, you should buy us. That's where the mass market was. Apple said, no, no, no, no, no, we're this guy. I know it's a tiny part of the market, I know it's not for everyone, but we don't really give a shit. Fuck is all, this is us, okay? And this succeeded and allowed Apple to eventually become the largest valued business in the world. Because people didn't see anything, you couldn't really sign up for that. Like, who is that? That doesn't represent anybody. It represents everybody and therefore nobody. Great brands define themselves by being something that not everyone wants to be part of. That's the secret. They are a unique club. They have extreme values. They have unique values. And not everyone wants to sign up to that. And that's what makes a really strong brand and what makes a really strong employer brand. It isn't vanilla. It isn't the same as everybody else. You think about these two airlines. Which airline would you prefer to work for? All the salary was the same. If you are going home to your family, your parents, your cousins, your sisters and said I got a new job with an airline. Do you go home Ryanair or KLM? Why not Ryanair? It could be an amazing job, better salary, better conditions but the sign value of working for Ryanair is not brilliant. The sign value working for KLM and the aviation industry is much better. Again, we don't look at necessarily the job itself, the salary, the conditions. We are bought into the brand and what it represents and what it says about us. You're not a Ryanair person. You're a KLM person, right? That's what you think you are. You're a Singapore Airlines person, right? You buy into being a certain brand. We all do this, like it or not. We like in and out groups. So when you look at employer brand, it's understanding that, that it's about someone's identity. The best employer brands combine that. personality and sincerity. They know what they are, they stick to it. And building an employer brand reality is much stronger than an image, an image that you think people will want to work for versus what are we, what do we actually stand for? And those core principles of your organization need to permeate every aspect, therefore, of the candidate experience. I'll use an example of Tesla. A friend of mine, Lee Yeap, who runs the EMEA team for Tesla here in Amsterdam, invited me to his conference with his recruiters about two years ago. And Lee was relatively new to the organization. And he was telling me about the employer brand challenge that Tesla had when they first set up in Europe. I don't know if you've ever interviewed with Tesla or know anyone who works for Tesla in Europe. All right, so at the time, Tesla were attracting lots of people from LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, all those big tech companies wanted to work for Tesla. And Tesla was like, this is amazing. What a great employer brand. But they were consistently failing in the organization and they had a massively high turnover. Because in Tesla, Tesla's not like LinkedIn and Google and Facebook. Two years ago when Lee was telling me about their European head office, he said, we have an espresso machine, like one of them, like the little crops one that just makes one coffee at a time. That's it. No free food, no other free drinks, one little tiny espresso machine. We don't do free lunches, we don't do canteens. Everyone here works extremely hard. We don't do work-life balance either. Got kids, want to go home and see them? Don't go work for Tesla. Because Tesla's mission is to save this planet. Elon Musk believes this planet is dying. We need to get off the planet, try and fix the resource problems we have. And if you will go work for Tesla, the assumption is you believe in that mission. And that mission is so important, it goes above everything else. And people who are coming from Google and LinkedIn and Facebook didn't get that. They were like, well, it's a cool kind of fancy brand. And until they change their employer branding to start... showing this reality and saying, this is us. Want to change the world for this most important mission? We're the place for you. Want a lovely place with nice perks? Go work somewhere else. And it wasn't until they started changing their employer brand reality that they really started winning. We most admire businesses with a strong inner direction, a clear set of values, integrity, and a sense of purpose. I don't want to work for Tesla, but I admire what they're doing. They're honest about what they are. Apple are the same. They don't have a work-life balance. And recently, they changed their employer branding to... Be honest about that and own that and say, but we make an amazing, amazing products that will change the world. So if you want to do that, come work for us. Work-life balance, somebody else does that. That's okay. So you've got to think about employer brand and what you're doing. When you look at second thing, great candidate experiences satisfy what I'm talking about, calling your higher objectives. So often we see surveys of candidates who say, this is what I want from my employer. I want more money, greater opportunities for advancement, work-life balance, etc. These are surface needs. They aren't the true needs that somebody's looking for. You've got to dig deeper. And if you build your employer branding, around these messages, I think you'll fail. So what you want to focus on is what we call a super objective. So when someone says, I want to earn better compensation and benefits, what they really probably mean is something like this. They have a super objective, and that super objective could be, actually, I want to afford a better education for my kids, so that needs a better salary. Or I want to move out of home into my own place, so I need more money. More money is not the objective. That's the kind of superficial approach. objective. The super objective is what underlines that. And when you understand your potential candidates' real true super objectives, you can build an employer brand image and experience around that. That's a much better reality. Because wants and needs are derivative and it's satisfying the higher objective behind them is the foundation on which great customer and candidate experiences are built. So how you do this, it's really simple. Your career site and your job descriptions, I need to showcase more employee stories, stories of people who've actually achieved their super objective. Not going, I like working here, it pays great. People saying, I joined this company and it allows me to then do this in my life, which is really important. So photos of your CSR efforts, if they're important, volunteering opportunities, if that's, again, what aligns to your brand. And then connecting your candidates with employees who have had similar experiences. Again, if you understand someone's super objective, connect them to an employee who's achieved something similar. They'll talk and that person is going to be bought into the brand that is true in your organization and what people can actually achieve. Number three, great candidate experiences set and then meet expectations. So the Candies, the Candidate Experience Awards, the number one thing that they find in all their surveys around the world that defines great candidate experiences is experiences that define and then meet expectations. And this is unbelievably simple because happiness... equals reality minus expectations. So if my expectations are 100 and my reality is 90, what's my net result? Do maths. Don't ask me to do maths, Johnny. It's early. Minusing. Which one am I minusing? The 90, the 100? What am I doing? Expectation is 100. Reality is minus. That's a minus 10 score. Expectation is 90. Reality is 100. I'm winning. I'm a plus 10. It's actually much simpler than you think. It's about... Just setting an expectation. So for example, when somebody applies to work in your organization, they upload their CV or resume to your career site. Do you define there and then to that candidate how long it's going to be until you get back to them and what the process will be? Hands up who clearly defines time frame and process as you apply. Three, four, five, ten of us in the room. Why is this important? You set expectations. If you don't do this, you can have dissonance. You have the concept of, I have an expectation, and then you don't deliver on that, and I have this dissonance, this difference between my expectation and your reality, and that causes pain and anguish to me. The absence of information can lead to somebody inferring that there is a 14-day feedback, because that's what I get from every other company, or it's 7 days. If you tell candidates you'll get back to them in 28 days, and you call them in 21, that's a good candidate experience. You tell them you'll get back to them in 14 days, and you get back to them in 20 days, bad candid experience. It isn't about the speed you get back to them within. It isn't about the fact that you sent them free gifts. It's that you simply set an expectation and met it. Like, that's genuinely one of the most important things to do in candid experience at each stage. But don't make the mistake of trying to exceed expectations all the time. If you constantly exceed expectations, that becomes a new expectation. And then when you only deliver on them, people are disappointed. So get it right. Figure out what you can actually deliver and just tell people that and they'll be happy. Next thing, we look at this concept of Danny Kahneman, the University of Chicago psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for psychology several years ago. Danny Kahneman came up with a concept many years ago called the peak-end rule. Who here has heard the peak-end rule? Awesome. We've got a cool person in the background, right? Pecan rule basically was an observation that when you remember events, you typically only remember two parts of the event. Let's say your holiday, your vacation, your trip. You remember the best part and the end. the best part of the trip and the end of the trip. So this is a really important concept. People remember the best part and how it ended. Typically, in a candid experience, it doesn't end well. So creating good endings is really important and then try and deliberately create a peak in the experience. You don't have to get the whole thing right. If you just focus on a great peak and a good end, that's going to be everything people remember. A good friend of mine, Oscar Mager, is based here in Amsterdam. Several years ago, he went to work for Sonos. He's back working as a recruiter in Sonos. That's why he's not here today, because he's recruiting. At the time, Sonos had a really, really good experience from a peak-end process. If you went for an interview in their Amsterdam offices, this was several years ago, I'm not too sure if the practice still holds, but the first thing they would do is bring a candidate in and ask you what your favorite song is. You might go, With or Without You by U2, or The Rolling Stones, one of their songs. They'll bring you into a room where they have all the Sonos speakers in the whole room laid out, and they put your favorite song on and blast it. And you hear this amazing audio of your favorite song. It's like, that's cool, isn't it? That's what we make. You're like, wow, that's great. Then you go into your interview, right? So that's the peak. Create this amazing peak around their products. And then later on, after several processes, you get rejected. Sorry, you didn't get a job in Sonos. They would send you a voucher for 50% off any Sonos speaker. And Sonos speakers are bloody expensive, all right? What a brilliant ending. Didn't get the job, but look, I can save 200 euros on a speaker. This is awesome. Maybe I'll give it to my friend. Created an amazing peak and a fantastic end. That's what people will remember about the organization. And they make money out of it. They sell more speakers. They track this stuff, right? But the main thing was that you gave a great experience, which was awesome to do. Fourth thing, great candid experience or stress-free. Stress can lead to errors. Error can lead to stress. Has anyone ever heard of the Japanese manufacturing concept, pokyoka, yeah? So lean manufacturing, pokyoka. Pokyoka is about mistake-proofing. So for example, when you get into a vehicle, a lot of modern vehicles, you'd have to basically put the clutch down before you could start the engine. Have you got a car like that? You got to depress the clutch before the engine will start. Do you know why that is? It's to make sure you don't jump when you start. Remember old cars, you'd be in gear and you turn the engine on, the car would jump forward and the handbrake would stop you? That's pokey-yoke. They make sure that cannot happen by designing the process so that you can never have that. You can't start the engine. whilst you're engaged in gear. Your clutch is depressed, which means you're not in gear, which means you can't jump forward. That's an example of Poka Yoka, how you design to remove the errors. They never happen in the first place. You can do this in an interview context in tons of ways. So for example, you can send candidates interview tips and guides when you're confirming the interview, giving them address. Really simple things to do. These are the common mistakes we interview our hiring managers. They tell us candidates keep making these mistakes. So don't make them. Here's some tips on how to be better. Or simple things like making sure that when you're communicating with candidates about arriving on an on-site interview, for example, tell them where to park, give them advice on what bus to get, how to get there, really basic stuff so that they're not stressed because they're late. Well, I share this with them. I was in India a few months ago with the IBM recruiting team, and I'd arrived at the building in Delhi. And when I got there, there was a security hut outside the building. It's very common in India in tech companies. You go to the security hood outside to get your badge. And it was 8.30 in the morning, and there was a massive line of people, like 20, 30 people waiting for their badges. Now, my colleague had already got my badge. It was great. And when we started talking about candidate experience, I asked them, do people come in for interviews? Oh, yes, we do a lot of interviewing in this building, a huge amount of interviewing. I said, does anyone tell candidates that they're going to have to wait 30 minutes in line for a badge to get into the building? Everyone looked around and went, no. I was like, well... imagine the scenario. I arrive at 8.45 a.m. for a 9 a.m. interview. I am not going to make that interview. How does that make me feel? I'm going to be stressed, sweating. I'm not going to perform to my best. That's not a good thing. How can you design around that? And we workshopped, and they just changed. They have an automated email, and they just basically put a note in for that address, a field that said, there is a hut. Give yourself 30 minutes to get past security. Super simple. How you can mistake-proof to prevent the error in the first place. So thinking about how we can... get around these is really important. I'm running to my last couple here before we get kicked off. But great candle experiences also indulge the senses. Who here has flown Emirates? Do you remember the Emirates smell? Emirates have a perfume they commissioned 20 odd years ago. It's sprayed all over the cabin, in the bathrooms. It's also sprayed at the check-in desk. It's sprayed when you board. They have this unique smell that relaxes you. It's an Emirates smell. From the second you check in, you start smelling the Emirates smell. Most people don't even notice it. But it relaxes people, makes you happy. You get onto the aircraft and you remember that smell. Even if you don't consciously remember it, it's an important thing. There's good examples of using the senses, vision, touch, scent, hearing, taste in the candidate experience world. I'll give you an example of what LinkedIn did a few years ago. For senior hires in LinkedIn, what they would do is rather than phone you or email you with an offer, they would send you a gold envelope. It was a really beautiful, heavy-weighted gold envelope and it was gorgeous, really, really nice design. They spent some money on these envelopes and a hard card in the middle. So imagine you get home. You get the post. Most of us don't get posts these days. There's a gorgeous gold envelope with your name on it. You open it, and inside there's a card that says, you're in, right? The sensation, the experience around that getting a job offer made you just so happy. Super simple thing to do, but created a great sensory kind of experience for potential candidates as they get their offer, versus you just email them the package with the letter and everything else, right? Putting some of the thought into it. Our last two, great candidate experiences put the candidate in control. Two great simple ways to do this. One is the control of where, and the second is control of when. So for example, scheduling tools, right? Scheduling tools are a no-brainer. Who here uses automated scheduling tools for interviews? All right, you should all use them. It's so, so simple. Things like Calendly and Schedulee and others that just integrate and allow the candidate to pick the time that suits them. It saves you a lot of effort, but it's about candidate control and choice. I see the diaries, I pick the slot that suits me. Or better still, use asynchronous video like Sonru or HireVue or one of those tools that says, pick any time you want in the next seven days at your leisure to conduct the asynchronous video interview. Again, the candidate feels in control. Or you've got bigger budgets like IBM with their Watson Candidate Assistant. You can go onto their website. You can type into Watson any question you want, anything you want, and it will tell you where the jobs are, what the benefits are. So do I have any SAP roles in Bangalore? Yes, we have these. ask you more questions, you can interact. Different to interacting with a human. A human has to answer your phone, be there. You're conscious that what you might say to that human might be remembered and held against you. This is a bot. You can ask any questions you want, anytime you want, and if it doesn't have the answer, fair enough. Again, putting candidates back in control of more of the process. And the seventh and last thing I want to leave you on is that great candidate experiences leave nothing to chance. The total candidate experience is a really important concept to remember. is really just the sum of the smaller interactions. What I've demonstrated, hopefully, this morning, is that canned experience isn't one thing. It's not a budgetary thing. It's not a case of we need to buy a brand new system. It's being considered at every small step. And it's remembering that for a candidate, the candidate experience to them is just the sum of all those small steps. So the more of those small steps you get right by simple processes, better thinking, the better the overall candidate experience feels. And there's no element, literally no element of the canned experience that is too small to make a difference. So I challenge you as a group to go back to your teams, and if you genuinely care about canned experience, I encourage you to do this exercise with your team. I do this with groups. It's a really good workshop activity, and we come up with amazing ideas, or they do. And it's a process where you think about your hiring process, and you break it into stages. So most of us, we have five or six stages. You know, we approve the rec, we go to market, and we... search for talent or advertise. We interview, assess them, we offer them, and we onboard them, right? So something like that. Each of those stages has steps. You break down the stages into steps. What are the discrete individual things that have to happen at each step? I got to book the room, book the interviewers, let the candidate know, tell security they're coming, confirm, all these different steps. Define what success would look like. What would success look like? Got to the interview on time. relaxed, had an opportunity to go to the bathroom and had a glass of water. That might be, for example, your success criteria. And then you basically map out all the touch points and model what is our current state, but what's our current reality and what could it be? And then put in a list of actions of who can actually take some of those actions to fix those things. Super simple to do. You do it in an hour and you create loads of opportunities to build a better candidate experience. So I'm going to leave you on one idea, which I love. Has anyone ever heard of the John Deere onboarding story from India? So you hopefully know the John Deere brand. Who knows the John Deere brand? John Deere brand is pretty well known in Europe, very well known in the US, not very well known in Asia. So massive farming machinery brand. Again, the US doesn't have an issue. In India, they had a massive issue around their employer brand. People didn't know it was a good brand to go work for, and they were growing massively in India. So they tried to focus on doing one thing right. Again, thinking about those moments, those peak experiences that Kahneman talks about. And they built... a first day experience that was quite simple but super powerful. So on your first day in John Deere because they had a high attrition rate in the first six months in Asia, you'd arrive into work. And when you first arrive, there's a big, huge screen at reception saying, Welcome, Johnny. It doesn't say Johnny for everyone, by the way. Just if your name is Johnny, just to be clear. So, Welcome, Johnny, if Johnny's your name. It's like, oh, they were expecting me. Because how often does a candidate arrive at the office and the reception doesn't even know this person is starting? You feel uncomfortable from day one. So, massive Welcome, Johnny. You're brought to your desk and there's a six-foot cardboard cutout of a person. And there's an area in it saying, Welcome, Johnny, handwritten in a marker. right at your desk it's awesome you sit down there's a box of chocolates there you open your laptop you log into your email your first and only email is an email from the ceo of john deer with a little personalized video saying welcome to the company and why he hopes you should enjoy working there in your calendar you'll see the first appointment booked in is a an appointment with your manager for lunch that day and then the afternoon you have meetings with other managers to share that hear their stories about why they work there and then you go home and you have this whole day has been designed around having the perfect first day So you go home and go, I made the right choice. It's an amazing stuff for John Deere around reducing attrition. And all they did was create a simple peak event around a candidate's first day. It is not difficult to do this well. On that note, I'm going to leave you. And hopefully you'll be inspired to try and think of great ways you can give a better candidate experience through simple methods, simple thinking in your organization. Thanks, folks.

When you look at recruiting and you look at candidates, they're almost the exact same as customers in a customer-centric view of the world. Candidate-centric view from... from a recruiting point of view, or a customer-centric view from an organization. And Matt's book outlined 10 fantastic principles I think any of us can live by around candidate experience.

So I'm going to share with you my version, my interpretation of those experiences for the recruiting and hiring world. That cool? All right, let me start with, that's cool.

Thanks, Bill. Bill's approval. So I want to talk about great experiences. I want to share with you some insight around this brand here.

So when you look at this brand here, Uber, How many of you think amazing experience? Hands in the air. One, two, so okay two or three of their hands up. So what are you thinking about when you think of an amazing experience with Uber? You're in the minority here this morning.

What is the amazing experience? Easy to access. And your name? So Thomas is talking about the app. The app is a fantastic experience.

I agree with you. How about riding in an Uber, being in the actual car? Hansapu has amazing, memorable experiences of riding in an Uber by two or three, right?

We have two or three kindred spirits. The rest of you are like, it's just a vehicle to get you from A to B, yeah? It's like every other taxi cab.

It's, you know, it's fine. You get in the car, you go from A to B, right? I have been in so many Ubers all around the world, and most of them are pretty much the same.

I share the same. experiences as the rest of you in that they're ordinary, they're mundane. But occasionally, you come across an experience. I came across an experience in an Uber earlier this year that just blew me away. And what I love about really great experiences, they aren't overly contrived.

They don't require a lot of money or investment. Because I've been in Ubers where the driver tries to give you shots, or she's giving you free gifts, or free mints, or water. And that's nice.

you know, it raises the game a little bit. But I had the fantastic experience of driving in a car with the wonderful Travis in the US recently. We were in Memphis, I think, and Travis was our Uber driver. And we got into the car, and I'd seen as I get into the car, and I was with some attendees at a conference, we had a recruiting conference for Sherm, and I'd seen on the app as I got in that he was the highest rated driver in Memphis. I'm like, all right.

And as we start driving, He seemed like a nice man. The car itself though, the vehicle I got into was a beaten up old Ford. It was a Ford Explorer, I'd say 15 years old. It kind of smelt grimy and dusty, like it takes lots of people every day in dirty clothes and they mess it all up. But it was okay, it was neat, well nothing special.

And I said to Travis about two minutes into the ride, I said, Travis, I said, do you mind me asking, I saw on the app you're the top rated driver, and this is lovely. But I'm just struggling to understand why. Would you mind sharing with me why you're the top rated driver? And he goes, hey, Johnny, I'm so sorry.

You know, the way you guys got into the car threw me a little bit. I didn't start this journey the way I'd normally start the journey. Let me reset. Now, we're driving about 70 miles an hour, about 120 kilometers an hour down a freeway in the US at this point, right? And there's about seven of us in this big seven-seater Ford Explorer.

And all of a sudden, Travis... look straight ahead and music turns on from nowhere. And we got a little bit of this. I'll share with you 30 seconds of my Uber ride.

We get some audio? To my girl, you know, and she said, if I ever stopped that she would leave me. So I told her, I said, listen, honey.

I know you wanna leave me. So we stayed in that car for about 13 minutes and we heard about 50 songs. Travis told us his life story about meeting his wife, how they got married, his kids, told to song. Every single word he used was the lyrics of a song that instantly came on at just the right moment.

as he launched into that next sentence. And it was the most amazing experience we'd ever have. We pulled up outside our hotel, the seven of us, and we didn't want to get out.

We're in the middle of a Michael Jackson song and we didn't want it to end. We had to finish the Michael Jackson song because the story wasn't over. It was amazing.

Travis got an amazing tip from us that night. Travis created an experience that was unbelievably memorable. And he didn't give us free gifts.

He had a creative thought. He did something different. He put himself out there and shared an amazing story.

And it was just the best Uber ride we'd ever had. And it's an example to me of what a great experience can be and how easy it can be to put one on. when you actually think about it. So these principles, they reminded me, again, because this is something I read many years ago, and I came back to it recently, because I was thinking these principles, they hold true. I read this book about seven years ago, and today I think you can still learn from these principles and build amazing candidate experiences.

So let's go on the seven, and let me give you some insight in terms of how I think you can create amazing, memorable experiences for candidates in your hiring process. So the first of the principles to understand is that Great candidate experiences strongly reflect the candidate's identity. We're all about the employer brand, what our EVP is, but it's important to understand that a candidate experience is really about the person we're dealing with. And I'll bring you back to a French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, and his proposition of value. He said there's an object value system, that things have different values depending on the context.

So things can have a functional value. So, for example, I might have a phone. And the functional value of this phone is to call somebody, to communicate, yeah?

So it's a functional value of I can communicate with my kids at home through this phone. That's its functional value. But somebody else could look at this phone and say, well, this phone has an exchange value. What could I get for this phone?

I could probably get maybe 400 or 500 euros for this phone. So maybe I look at the value of this phone not by its function, but its value in terms of its exchange. I could exchange this for 400 or 500 euros in cash. Another way to look at value is to look at the symbolic value. So the symbolic value of something is, for example, if you were to run a race.

I was talking to my friend Jolie, who's speaking next on the main stage, and she's doing a 10K next week. I sometimes do 5 and 10Ks, and you win little awards, medals, and cups. Those medals are completely useless. They serve no functional value. They're worth nothing.

No one's going to give you any money for them. But to somebody who's ran a race and competed, They have amazing symbolic value. You'll put that up on your living room wall, by your fireplace with pride.

I completed that race, that 10k, that 5k that I trained so hard for. Amazing symbolic value. But most things, when you look at what's really important to people, it's when something has a sign value. So I'll go back to my phone example.

Again, this has a functional value. It also has an exchange value. But it has a massive sign value because it's an Apple. Hands up here, users, an iPhone. Hands up here who uses an Android phone.

And let the battle begin. So those of you who use Android phones, why do you use an Android phone? Anyone a volunteer?

Why? Pardon me? They pay more tax than Apple, perhaps.

Why do you use an Android phone and not an iPhone? More freedom, software, it's an open architecture software. What about the Apple group? What about the Apple fans? Why do you use an Apple phone?

User-friendly, and the Android isn't? Pardon me? Consistency?

I'll tell you why I use an Apple phone, and I'll tell you why I use an Android phone. It's about sign value. I'm an iPhone user. I'll tell you I like it because of consistency, I love the user experience, etc.

It costs a fucking fortune. It is not worth the money, but... Using an iPhone says something about you.

It says I buy into the Apple culture, the systems. My Apple Mac, my iPhone, my Apple Watch, my goddamn Apple AirPods. So that's about sign value. Although I might not admit it most of the time, it's about I am proud to be a person who identifies with Apple.

Whereas if you have an Android phone, for a lot of people, it's about identifying with open architecture, open systems. It's the anti-Apple. That's what sign value is about.

People who have a Dolce & Gabbana bag, Louis Vuitton bag or jacket. It's not about the functional value. You can get a cheaper bag or cheaper coat. It's not about the exchange value. You're not going to sell it.

It's about what it says to other people when you have that brand, that label, that logo. So it's really important when you think about experiences, what the person's identity is and what's important to them. When you look at employer branding, this comes into play because experiences that reinforce our self-image appeal to us on a deeper level.

If I can resonate with an employer brand in a way that brings out what I believe to be my true self, I'm going to buy into that. So Apple do that really well. What they stand for is, for example, what I believe I stand for, or share some of the values, not paying tax, for example.

So I'm going to buy into their ecosystem. You want employees to potentially think the same thing. Apple did this really well many years ago. Who remembers this ad?

PC versus Mac, hands up. Gosh, we're the only old people in the room. Oh, God, Kevin, Dominic, myself, and a few others. So the years ago, they did this ad.

Apple were kind of coming up against PC, and they had PC man who was in his suit, very conservative, and Apple man who was like in jeans and relaxed and cool. Now, interestingly, Apple were telling the world that we're this guy on the right. That wasn't the majority of computer buyers. The majority of computer buyers looked like this guy.

So if you want to sell loads of computers, you would think you'd go for this. We're business, we're suits, we're ties, you should buy us. That's where the mass market was.

Apple said, no, no, no, no, no, we're this guy. I know it's a tiny part of the market, I know it's not for everyone, but we don't really give a shit. Fuck is all, this is us, okay? And this succeeded and allowed Apple to eventually become the largest valued business in the world. Because people didn't see anything, you couldn't really sign up for that.

Like, who is that? That doesn't represent anybody. It represents everybody and therefore nobody.

Great brands define themselves by being something that not everyone wants to be part of. That's the secret. They are a unique club. They have extreme values.

They have unique values. And not everyone wants to sign up to that. And that's what makes a really strong brand and what makes a really strong employer brand.

It isn't vanilla. It isn't the same as everybody else. You think about these two airlines.

Which airline would you prefer to work for? All the salary was the same. If you are going home to your family, your parents, your cousins, your sisters and said I got a new job with an airline.

Do you go home Ryanair or KLM? Why not Ryanair? It could be an amazing job, better salary, better conditions but the sign value of working for Ryanair is not brilliant.

The sign value working for KLM and the aviation industry is much better. Again, we don't look at necessarily the job itself, the salary, the conditions. We are bought into the brand and what it represents and what it says about us. You're not a Ryanair person.

You're a KLM person, right? That's what you think you are. You're a Singapore Airlines person, right? You buy into being a certain brand. We all do this, like it or not.

We like in and out groups. So when you look at employer brand, it's understanding that, that it's about someone's identity. The best employer brands combine that.

personality and sincerity. They know what they are, they stick to it. And building an employer brand reality is much stronger than an image, an image that you think people will want to work for versus what are we, what do we actually stand for?

And those core principles of your organization need to permeate every aspect, therefore, of the candidate experience. I'll use an example of Tesla. A friend of mine, Lee Yeap, who runs the EMEA team for Tesla here in Amsterdam, invited me to his conference with his recruiters about two years ago. And Lee was relatively new to the organization.

And he was telling me about the employer brand challenge that Tesla had when they first set up in Europe. I don't know if you've ever interviewed with Tesla or know anyone who works for Tesla in Europe. All right, so at the time, Tesla were attracting lots of people from LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, all those big tech companies wanted to work for Tesla.

And Tesla was like, this is amazing. What a great employer brand. But they were consistently failing in the organization and they had a massively high turnover. Because in Tesla, Tesla's not like LinkedIn and Google and Facebook.

Two years ago when Lee was telling me about their European head office, he said, we have an espresso machine, like one of them, like the little crops one that just makes one coffee at a time. That's it. No free food, no other free drinks, one little tiny espresso machine. We don't do free lunches, we don't do canteens. Everyone here works extremely hard.

We don't do work-life balance either. Got kids, want to go home and see them? Don't go work for Tesla. Because Tesla's mission is to save this planet.

Elon Musk believes this planet is dying. We need to get off the planet, try and fix the resource problems we have. And if you will go work for Tesla, the assumption is you believe in that mission.

And that mission is so important, it goes above everything else. And people who are coming from Google and LinkedIn and Facebook didn't get that. They were like, well, it's a cool kind of fancy brand. And until they change their employer branding to start... showing this reality and saying, this is us.

Want to change the world for this most important mission? We're the place for you. Want a lovely place with nice perks? Go work somewhere else.

And it wasn't until they started changing their employer brand reality that they really started winning. We most admire businesses with a strong inner direction, a clear set of values, integrity, and a sense of purpose. I don't want to work for Tesla, but I admire what they're doing. They're honest about what they are. Apple are the same.

They don't have a work-life balance. And recently, they changed their employer branding to... Be honest about that and own that and say, but we make an amazing, amazing products that will change the world. So if you want to do that, come work for us.

Work-life balance, somebody else does that. That's okay. So you've got to think about employer brand and what you're doing. When you look at second thing, great candidate experiences satisfy what I'm talking about, calling your higher objectives. So often we see surveys of candidates who say, this is what I want from my employer.

I want more money, greater opportunities for advancement, work-life balance, etc. These are surface needs. They aren't the true needs that somebody's looking for. You've got to dig deeper. And if you build your employer branding, around these messages, I think you'll fail.

So what you want to focus on is what we call a super objective. So when someone says, I want to earn better compensation and benefits, what they really probably mean is something like this. They have a super objective, and that super objective could be, actually, I want to afford a better education for my kids, so that needs a better salary.

Or I want to move out of home into my own place, so I need more money. More money is not the objective. That's the kind of superficial approach. objective. The super objective is what underlines that.

And when you understand your potential candidates' real true super objectives, you can build an employer brand image and experience around that. That's a much better reality. Because wants and needs are derivative and it's satisfying the higher objective behind them is the foundation on which great customer and candidate experiences are built.

So how you do this, it's really simple. Your career site and your job descriptions, I need to showcase more employee stories, stories of people who've actually achieved their super objective. Not going, I like working here, it pays great.

People saying, I joined this company and it allows me to then do this in my life, which is really important. So photos of your CSR efforts, if they're important, volunteering opportunities, if that's, again, what aligns to your brand. And then connecting your candidates with employees who have had similar experiences.

Again, if you understand someone's super objective, connect them to an employee who's achieved something similar. They'll talk and that person is going to be bought into the brand that is true in your organization and what people can actually achieve. Number three, great candidate experiences set and then meet expectations.

So the Candies, the Candidate Experience Awards, the number one thing that they find in all their surveys around the world that defines great candidate experiences is experiences that define and then meet expectations. And this is unbelievably simple because happiness... equals reality minus expectations.

So if my expectations are 100 and my reality is 90, what's my net result? Do maths. Don't ask me to do maths, Johnny. It's early. Minusing.

Which one am I minusing? The 90, the 100? What am I doing?

Expectation is 100. Reality is minus. That's a minus 10 score. Expectation is 90. Reality is 100. I'm winning. I'm a plus 10. It's actually much simpler than you think.

It's about... Just setting an expectation. So for example, when somebody applies to work in your organization, they upload their CV or resume to your career site. Do you define there and then to that candidate how long it's going to be until you get back to them and what the process will be?

Hands up who clearly defines time frame and process as you apply. Three, four, five, ten of us in the room. Why is this important?

You set expectations. If you don't do this, you can have dissonance. You have the concept of, I have an expectation, and then you don't deliver on that, and I have this dissonance, this difference between my expectation and your reality, and that causes pain and anguish to me. The absence of information can lead to somebody inferring that there is a 14-day feedback, because that's what I get from every other company, or it's 7 days. If you tell candidates you'll get back to them in 28 days, and you call them in 21, that's a good candidate experience.

You tell them you'll get back to them in 14 days, and you get back to them in 20 days, bad candid experience. It isn't about the speed you get back to them within. It isn't about the fact that you sent them free gifts. It's that you simply set an expectation and met it.

Like, that's genuinely one of the most important things to do in candid experience at each stage. But don't make the mistake of trying to exceed expectations all the time. If you constantly exceed expectations, that becomes a new expectation.

And then when you only deliver on them, people are disappointed. So get it right. Figure out what you can actually deliver and just tell people that and they'll be happy.

Next thing, we look at this concept of Danny Kahneman, the University of Chicago psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for psychology several years ago. Danny Kahneman came up with a concept many years ago called the peak-end rule. Who here has heard the peak-end rule? Awesome. We've got a cool person in the background, right?

Pecan rule basically was an observation that when you remember events, you typically only remember two parts of the event. Let's say your holiday, your vacation, your trip. You remember the best part and the end. the best part of the trip and the end of the trip.

So this is a really important concept. People remember the best part and how it ended. Typically, in a candid experience, it doesn't end well. So creating good endings is really important and then try and deliberately create a peak in the experience.

You don't have to get the whole thing right. If you just focus on a great peak and a good end, that's going to be everything people remember. A good friend of mine, Oscar Mager, is based here in Amsterdam. Several years ago, he went to work for Sonos.

He's back working as a recruiter in Sonos. That's why he's not here today, because he's recruiting. At the time, Sonos had a really, really good experience from a peak-end process. If you went for an interview in their Amsterdam offices, this was several years ago, I'm not too sure if the practice still holds, but the first thing they would do is bring a candidate in and ask you what your favorite song is.

You might go, With or Without You by U2, or The Rolling Stones, one of their songs. They'll bring you into a room where they have all the Sonos speakers in the whole room laid out, and they put your favorite song on and blast it. And you hear this amazing audio of your favorite song.

It's like, that's cool, isn't it? That's what we make. You're like, wow, that's great. Then you go into your interview, right? So that's the peak.

Create this amazing peak around their products. And then later on, after several processes, you get rejected. Sorry, you didn't get a job in Sonos. They would send you a voucher for 50% off any Sonos speaker.

And Sonos speakers are bloody expensive, all right? What a brilliant ending. Didn't get the job, but look, I can save 200 euros on a speaker.

This is awesome. Maybe I'll give it to my friend. Created an amazing peak and a fantastic end.

That's what people will remember about the organization. And they make money out of it. They sell more speakers.

They track this stuff, right? But the main thing was that you gave a great experience, which was awesome to do. Fourth thing, great candid experience or stress-free. Stress can lead to errors. Error can lead to stress.

Has anyone ever heard of the Japanese manufacturing concept, pokyoka, yeah? So lean manufacturing, pokyoka. Pokyoka is about mistake-proofing. So for example, when you get into a vehicle, a lot of modern vehicles, you'd have to basically put the clutch down before you could start the engine. Have you got a car like that?

You got to depress the clutch before the engine will start. Do you know why that is? It's to make sure you don't jump when you start.

Remember old cars, you'd be in gear and you turn the engine on, the car would jump forward and the handbrake would stop you? That's pokey-yoke. They make sure that cannot happen by designing the process so that you can never have that.

You can't start the engine. whilst you're engaged in gear. Your clutch is depressed, which means you're not in gear, which means you can't jump forward. That's an example of Poka Yoka, how you design to remove the errors. They never happen in the first place.

You can do this in an interview context in tons of ways. So for example, you can send candidates interview tips and guides when you're confirming the interview, giving them address. Really simple things to do. These are the common mistakes we interview our hiring managers. They tell us candidates keep making these mistakes.

So don't make them. Here's some tips on how to be better. Or simple things like making sure that when you're communicating with candidates about arriving on an on-site interview, for example, tell them where to park, give them advice on what bus to get, how to get there, really basic stuff so that they're not stressed because they're late. Well, I share this with them. I was in India a few months ago with the IBM recruiting team, and I'd arrived at the building in Delhi.

And when I got there, there was a security hut outside the building. It's very common in India in tech companies. You go to the security hood outside to get your badge. And it was 8.30 in the morning, and there was a massive line of people, like 20, 30 people waiting for their badges.

Now, my colleague had already got my badge. It was great. And when we started talking about candidate experience, I asked them, do people come in for interviews? Oh, yes, we do a lot of interviewing in this building, a huge amount of interviewing.

I said, does anyone tell candidates that they're going to have to wait 30 minutes in line for a badge to get into the building? Everyone looked around and went, no. I was like, well... imagine the scenario. I arrive at 8.45 a.m.

for a 9 a.m. interview. I am not going to make that interview. How does that make me feel? I'm going to be stressed, sweating.

I'm not going to perform to my best. That's not a good thing. How can you design around that?

And we workshopped, and they just changed. They have an automated email, and they just basically put a note in for that address, a field that said, there is a hut. Give yourself 30 minutes to get past security. Super simple.

How you can mistake-proof to prevent the error in the first place. So thinking about how we can... get around these is really important. I'm running to my last couple here before we get kicked off. But great candle experiences also indulge the senses.

Who here has flown Emirates? Do you remember the Emirates smell? Emirates have a perfume they commissioned 20 odd years ago.

It's sprayed all over the cabin, in the bathrooms. It's also sprayed at the check-in desk. It's sprayed when you board. They have this unique smell that relaxes you.

It's an Emirates smell. From the second you check in, you start smelling the Emirates smell. Most people don't even notice it. But it relaxes people, makes you happy.

You get onto the aircraft and you remember that smell. Even if you don't consciously remember it, it's an important thing. There's good examples of using the senses, vision, touch, scent, hearing, taste in the candidate experience world.

I'll give you an example of what LinkedIn did a few years ago. For senior hires in LinkedIn, what they would do is rather than phone you or email you with an offer, they would send you a gold envelope. It was a really beautiful, heavy-weighted gold envelope and it was gorgeous, really, really nice design.

They spent some money on these envelopes and a hard card in the middle. So imagine you get home. You get the post.

Most of us don't get posts these days. There's a gorgeous gold envelope with your name on it. You open it, and inside there's a card that says, you're in, right?

The sensation, the experience around that getting a job offer made you just so happy. Super simple thing to do, but created a great sensory kind of experience for potential candidates as they get their offer, versus you just email them the package with the letter and everything else, right? Putting some of the thought into it. Our last two, great candidate experiences put the candidate in control. Two great simple ways to do this.

One is the control of where, and the second is control of when. So for example, scheduling tools, right? Scheduling tools are a no-brainer.

Who here uses automated scheduling tools for interviews? All right, you should all use them. It's so, so simple.

Things like Calendly and Schedulee and others that just integrate and allow the candidate to pick the time that suits them. It saves you a lot of effort, but it's about candidate control and choice. I see the diaries, I pick the slot that suits me. Or better still, use asynchronous video like Sonru or HireVue or one of those tools that says, pick any time you want in the next seven days at your leisure to conduct the asynchronous video interview.

Again, the candidate feels in control. Or you've got bigger budgets like IBM with their Watson Candidate Assistant. You can go onto their website.

You can type into Watson any question you want, anything you want, and it will tell you where the jobs are, what the benefits are. So do I have any SAP roles in Bangalore? Yes, we have these. ask you more questions, you can interact.

Different to interacting with a human. A human has to answer your phone, be there. You're conscious that what you might say to that human might be remembered and held against you. This is a bot.

You can ask any questions you want, anytime you want, and if it doesn't have the answer, fair enough. Again, putting candidates back in control of more of the process. And the seventh and last thing I want to leave you on is that great candidate experiences leave nothing to chance. The total candidate experience is a really important concept to remember. is really just the sum of the smaller interactions.

What I've demonstrated, hopefully, this morning, is that canned experience isn't one thing. It's not a budgetary thing. It's not a case of we need to buy a brand new system.

It's being considered at every small step. And it's remembering that for a candidate, the candidate experience to them is just the sum of all those small steps. So the more of those small steps you get right by simple processes, better thinking, the better the overall candidate experience feels. And there's no element, literally no element of the canned experience that is too small to make a difference.

So I challenge you as a group to go back to your teams, and if you genuinely care about canned experience, I encourage you to do this exercise with your team. I do this with groups. It's a really good workshop activity, and we come up with amazing ideas, or they do.

And it's a process where you think about your hiring process, and you break it into stages. So most of us, we have five or six stages. You know, we approve the rec, we go to market, and we... search for talent or advertise.

We interview, assess them, we offer them, and we onboard them, right? So something like that. Each of those stages has steps.

You break down the stages into steps. What are the discrete individual things that have to happen at each step? I got to book the room, book the interviewers, let the candidate know, tell security they're coming, confirm, all these different steps.

Define what success would look like. What would success look like? Got to the interview on time. relaxed, had an opportunity to go to the bathroom and had a glass of water. That might be, for example, your success criteria.

And then you basically map out all the touch points and model what is our current state, but what's our current reality and what could it be? And then put in a list of actions of who can actually take some of those actions to fix those things. Super simple to do. You do it in an hour and you create loads of opportunities to build a better candidate experience. So I'm going to leave you on one idea, which I love.

Has anyone ever heard of the John Deere onboarding story from India? So you hopefully know the John Deere brand. Who knows the John Deere brand? John Deere brand is pretty well known in Europe, very well known in the US, not very well known in Asia.

So massive farming machinery brand. Again, the US doesn't have an issue. In India, they had a massive issue around their employer brand.

People didn't know it was a good brand to go work for, and they were growing massively in India. So they tried to focus on doing one thing right. Again, thinking about those moments, those peak experiences that Kahneman talks about.

And they built... a first day experience that was quite simple but super powerful. So on your first day in John Deere because they had a high attrition rate in the first six months in Asia, you'd arrive into work.

And when you first arrive, there's a big, huge screen at reception saying, Welcome, Johnny. It doesn't say Johnny for everyone, by the way. Just if your name is Johnny, just to be clear.

So, Welcome, Johnny, if Johnny's your name. It's like, oh, they were expecting me. Because how often does a candidate arrive at the office and the reception doesn't even know this person is starting?

You feel uncomfortable from day one. So, massive Welcome, Johnny. You're brought to your desk and there's a six-foot cardboard cutout of a person. And there's an area in it saying, Welcome, Johnny, handwritten in a marker. right at your desk it's awesome you sit down there's a box of chocolates there you open your laptop you log into your email your first and only email is an email from the ceo of john deer with a little personalized video saying welcome to the company and why he hopes you should enjoy working there in your calendar you'll see the first appointment booked in is a an appointment with your manager for lunch that day and then the afternoon you have meetings with other managers to share that hear their stories about why they work there and then you go home and you have this whole day has been designed around having the perfect first day So you go home and go, I made the right choice.

It's an amazing stuff for John Deere around reducing attrition. And all they did was create a simple peak event around a candidate's first day. It is not difficult to do this well.

On that note, I'm going to leave you. And hopefully you'll be inspired to try and think of great ways you can give a better candidate experience through simple methods, simple thinking in your organization. Thanks, folks.

Transcript for:Enhancing Candidate Experience Principles

Transcript for:
Enhancing Candidate Experience Principles