Connecting Your Talent Touchpoints: How to Build a World-Class ... · carried over into onboarding, development, and retention.” Jess Miller, HR Manager at CloudLock “Candidate

Connecting Your Talent Touchpoints: How to Build a World-Class Candidate Experience Step-by-Step Processes and Real-Life Company Examples

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

Step 1 - Define who you are 6

Step 2 - Wow your pre-applicants 15

Step 3 - Deliver a seamless interview experience 20

Step 4 - Onboard like you mean it 26

Step 5 - Embrace measurement 31

Now it’s your turn! 34

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Introduction

What preconception does talent have of your company? What do current and former employees have to say about you? How do candidates feel after an interview?

All of these questions – every single interaction and impression – influences candidate experience. And today more than ever, candidate experience is a bottom line problem.

The best talent is increasingly hard to find

• 36% of global employers reported talent shortages in 2014.1

• 73% of CEOs reported being concerned about the availability of key skills in 2015.2

Your candidate experience helps attract top talent

• 83% of talent says a negative experience can change their minds about a role or company they once liked, and 87% says a positive interview experience can change their minds about a company they doubted.3

• Graduates from top MBA schools are 40% less likely to choose a job in financial services than they were before the recession. Increasingly, they’re opting for jobs with better work-life balance and richer cultures.4

1 Talent Shortage Survey 2015, ManpowerGroup2 18th Annual Global CEO Survey, PwC3 2015 Talent Trends, LinkedIn4 Analysis: More Top MBA Graduates Shunning High-Paying Finance Jobs for Culture-Rich Tech Ones, LinkedIn 3

What is candidate experience?

Candidate experience encompasses every touchpoint a candidate has with your company. A great one increases the chances that the best talent will choose you, and stay with you.

It’s impossible to have a conversation about candidate experience without mentioning employer brand (your reputation as an employer), as your candidate experience simultaneously reflects and shapes your employer brand. Think of the two as on

the same feedback loop, constantly informing the other. A strong employer brand helps build an impressive candidate experience, while a strong candidate experience helps further amplify and reinforce your employer brand.

If candidate experience can help your brand, it can hurt it too. Make sure your experience is worthy of your brand, otherwise you risk tarnishing the reputation you’ve worked so hard to build.

Accepting the “why” and tackling the “how”

Today, the great majority of employers have accepted the “why” behind candidate experience – they understand why they should care – but they’re stuck on the “how.” 93% of CEOs, for example, recognize the need to change their strategy for attracting and retaining talent, but 61% haven’t taken the first step.5

This ebook is for companies who want to learn how to create a great candidate experience and move past the “why” to put their learnings into action. We’ll go through five critical steps to creating a great candidate experience, and share what a handful of Lever customers are already doing along the way.

EMPLOYER BRAND

CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE

5 17th Annual Global CEO Survey, PwC 4

Why HR professionals prioritize candidate experience

“The market has entirely shifted. In order to even attract people these days you have to cater to their needs. Above that, candidate experience is the first step to creating a culture that’s open, transparent, and collaborative. When you start off with that mindset, it’s carried over into onboarding, development, and retention.”

Jess Miller, HR Manager at CloudLock

“Candidate experience is the entire entry point into an organization. If the candidate experience is good, it follows through to employee experience.”

Jennifer Tress, Talent Team Director at 18F

“We’ve all been through gruesome interview experiences and know how painful they can be. It’s incredibly important not to be that company. Instead, we should create a great candidate experience and treat everyone as humans.”

Kathleen Kiang, Talent Pipeline Manager at Eventbrite

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“At the end of the day, just remember that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff – including building a great brand – will fall into place on its own.”

Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos

Step 1 - Define who you are

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How would you define your culture, and what values should shine through in a candidate’s experience with you?

Answering these questions is critical to the candidate experience because it’s that essence which will make the experience uniquely yours. By embodying your values and culture during the candidate experience, you’ll naturally attract the right people. You also give people who don’t feel an affinity with your culture the opportunity to self-select out.

However important, defining who you are isn’t quick or straightforward. Nor does it mean guessing a few words that you think describe your company and plastering them on a wall. As leading Internet television network Netflix points out in their famous Culture deck, just about any company, even corrupt ones, can pay lip service to values. It’s how employees internalize your values and live them every day that really matters.

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Below, we’ve outlined five key steps to define and amplify your values.

1. Gather evidence: have a lot of conversations

You can’t fabricate values out of nowhere, or force your company to embrace values you wish you embodied. The best way to get a true pulse on your company culture is to open up lines of communication with employees and find out what they’re thinking. Collect employee feedback through:

• Team-wide surveys• New hire surveys• 1:1 chats or emails• Group brainstorms • Feedback tools like Tinypulse• Hiring an outside firm to conduct interviews with the executive team

Remember: Don’t rush the process. At Zappos (the company famous for creating unique approaches to talent management like abolishing bosses and paying employees to quit) CEO Tony Hsieh says it took a full year of emailing the company multiple times, gathering suggestions, and welcoming feedback to hone in on the values that were the most important to his employees.

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Sample questions:

s: What values best describe [company]?

What values don’t describe [company]?

How would you describe the culture at [company]?

Think of employees / coworkers who represent your culture well. What qualities do they have? What about ones who don’t?

What behavior does [company] reward?

What is your favorite thing about working at [company]? Least favorite?

Would you refer friends / connections to [company]? Why?

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Once you’ve collected all of the feedback, look for patterns. What recurring themes do you find? Are people expressing the same sentiment in different ways? Are there values you are definitely not?

It’s okay if you can’t walk away with a polished set of values the first time around. Whittle your list down, and circle back to your employees. Ask them which values resonate most. Talk to new hires, even candidates. Keep honing your list until you end up with a set of values you’re confident represent employee sentiment and the spirit of your company.

2. Dig for patterns, iterate, and finalize

Pro tip: Keep your values succinct. You want them to be pithy and repeatable. Two helpful questions to ask yourself are:

• Will people remember this? • Will people say this around the office?

For example, one of LinkedIn’s six core values is “Act like an owner.” It so embodies the LinkedIn work ethic that one ex-employee (Lever’s CMO, Leela Srinivasan) says it was a high compliment during office meetings. “Joe really did a great job of acting like an owner on this one.”

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3. Put a bow on it

After involving the whole team in defining your values, make sure they don’t only exist buried in a Google Doc. Find ways to share your values and incorporate them into everyday life.

At the ridesharing company Lyft, for example, celebrations of their four core values are celebrated all throughout their San Francisco headquarters.

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4. Reinforce through recognition

Finding ways to reinforce and amplify your culture and values is perhaps the most important step in the entire process. Your hard work will quickly be forgotten, and your posters and powerpoints will ring hollow if you don’t.

So, how do you save your values from obscurity? What works: highly visible and frequent employee recognition. Here are three real-life examples.

Celebrating the quirky

Eastwick, a technology-focused communications company, gives a monthly Quirky Award to an employee who embraces and displays the company’s core brand attributes – one of which is “quirky.” In a collaborative awarding effort, employees nominate peers, and the executive team chooses the winner.

Even better, the award itself is a 3D print of their CEO’s dog, Lucy, which carries much more meaning for employees than a trophy purchased from a store would. Lucy isn’t a contrived effort to enforce values. Rather, she’s an example of how small, fun efforts that capitalize on existing culture can further amplify it.

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Employee of the fortnight

Lyft has an Employee of the Fortnight Award. In their bi-weekly company meetings, Lyft takes a moment to recognize an employee who has gone above and beyond their core duties while embodying one of their four core values.

It’s panda time

At Lever, we wrap up every “Meeting Monday” with a peer recognition tradition: The Giant Panda. The recipient from the previous week says a few words of appreciation for a coworker who has gone out of their way to display Lever values like collaboration and cross-functional empathy, and awards the panda through a giant panda hug. It’s an ongoing way to give colleagues a shout-out for embodying Lever values.

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Defining who you are isn’t a one-and-done process. Make sure you balance a desire to reinforce your values with a willingness to let them evolve. Lines of communication with employees should stay open through ongoing surveys, chats, and open discussion.

An annual survey can help reinforce your existing company values, and help you gauge any changes in company-wide sentiment. You can also time the survey with a company-wide meeting where you take the time to celebrate your values.

5. Calibrate

Helpful tools for reinforcing and amplifying your values and culture:

• TINYpulse - Anonymous employee survey platform (surveys generated once-weekly on your behalf), with built-in peer recognition features.

• Culture Amp - People analytics platform with customizable engagement, onboarding, and exit surveys.

• Bonusly - Peer recognition platform through instant micro-bonuses.

• Brand Amper - Brand communication platform that collects employee-generated content for use in recruiting and marketing.

• VoiceStorm - Internal brand advocacy tool to involve employees in social content sharing.

• LinkedIn Elevate - LinkedIn’s tool for increasing a company’s brand reach through encouraging employees to share content with their networks.

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With the wealth of information available online, your employer brand is working for or against you to shape candidate experience before you even know it. It’s important to be aware of the areas your brand can show up to talent, and how it can influence the conversation.

Step 2 - Wow your pre-applicants

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• Company review sites like Glassdoor and Indeed • Public website and careers page • Company blog • Social presence on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook• A presence at industry events and meetups• Press coverage • Word of mouth

You can always influence the outcome indirectly through efforts like investing in employer brand and culture, but there are tangible ways you can take the pre-candidate experience into your own hands. Here are a few:

1. Build a recruitment marketing team

Central to the recruiting philosophy of Eventbrite, the world’s largest self-service ticketing platform, is the belief that relationships rule. As their director of recruiting, Mike Bailen, says, he wants to shrink the overall pipeline by filling it with warmer, more qualified talent at the very top of the funnel so that recruiters have more time to create relationships with candidates throughout the rest of the process.

Employer branding channels:

While much of the pre-candidate experience is out of your direct control – like what appears on company review sites and the things current and former employees say about you – much of it is under your control. Here are seven areas you should care about:

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To make that vision a reality, Eventbrite has more than a recruiting team, they have a recruitment marketing team too. The full-time team is dedicated to building out “warm” talent pipelines through efforts like blogging, social branding, and events. Their talent pipeline manager (which is a position Eventbrite actually invented), Kathleen Kiang, says that this approach is what “sets us apart from other recruiting teams. Even if prospects aren’t looking for a role today, we treat everyone as if they’re an active candidate.”

By building such a strong online presence and positive reputation in the tech community, Eventbrite has less “selling” to do once the best people officially become candidates.

Leverage video

CloudLock, a cloud security company, has a careers page that makes their culture shine. It’s packed full of the awards they’ve won (like ranking #3 by Glassdoor for best places to work in 2016 for small and medium companies), photo after photo of team outings and activities, blurbs sharing their culture and values, and even fun facts about the team.

One of the most unique parts of CloudLock’s approach is how they use video to differentiate. “People need to start thinking about how to redesign their careers page to capture interest. Writing a bullet point description of a candidate’s responsibilities is not enough anymore,” says CoudLock’s HR manager, Jess Miller.

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The story of the “chicken llama” is a pristine example of the way video brings a company’s culture to life in a way that text, or even photos can’t. The fun, two-minute video describes how CloudLock’s co-founder and CTO, Ron, tried to draw a dinosaur on a whiteboard while on a call with a customer to convey the message that the person on the other line was stuck in their ways. It looked more like an odd combination of a chicken and a llama – thus, the chicken llama. Forever after, the drawing has become a symbol at CloudLock reminding employees that they’re part of a transformation, helping customers take advantage of what the future has in store. By turning it into a video, it’s now a story that candidates can appreciate, too.

Of course, writing about CloudLock’s chicken llama doesn’t do the culture quirk justice – that’s why there’s a video.

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Provide transparency

18F, a civic consultancy inside the General Services Administration (GSA), focused on modernizing the way government approaches technology, also invests heavily in their careers page. Whereas CloudLock leverages video, 18F focuses on radical transparency, providing great detail on their mission, benefits, and pay.

Companies all over are thinking of innovative ways to attract top talent and generate inbound interest. We’ve provided only a tiny set of examples, so don’t be discouraged if you’re not positioned to initiate these three efforts immediately. A simple audit of your social presence on sites like Glassdoor and LinkedIn is a good place to start.

18F even sets interview expectations upfront by explaining the process step by step, giving candidates a level of transparency that they wouldn’t receive at most other companies. When you interview at 18F, you know you’ll have a preliminary screening, followed by an in-person or video chat interview. You know the qualifications you’ll be evaluated for. You can even find information on the specific team you’re interviewing for. If you’re applying for the content team, for example, you can expect a technical, problem-solving, and core values interview.

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When almost nine in every 10 candidates6 say that a good interview experience can change their minds about a company they had doubts about, every detail counts.

Step 3 - Deliver a seamless interview experience

5 2015 Talent Trends, LinkedIn 20

“Recruiters can’t do it all by themselves. The interview team, hiring managers, and maybe a VP are all people who you need to get on the same page. That alignment is so important because anything you do without buy-in is doomed from the get go.”

Jess Miller HR Manager at CloudLock

“We make sure our interviewers are prepped, have deep clarity on the role, and understand the criteria they’re evaluating for. From the candidate side, we try to provide that same deep clarity through things like role profiles that include time-boxed objectives for the first year so candidates know what they’ll be expected to accomplish, as well as details on what they can expect during interviews, all in the vein of our emphasis on transparency.”

Jennifer Tress Talent Team Director at 18F

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Here are questions for you to consider in diagnosing whether your candidate experience is buttoned up in the right places: • Do candidates have to jump through hoops just to apply?• Job hunting is time-consuming and candidates appreciate a smooth experience. It’s easy to forget that an

unpleasant application process can leave a sour taste, but it’s something we’re frequently reminded of at Lever when people email our general support line or apply with comments like, “I’m applying to internships right now and your website is 1000x more pleasant to use than some of the other interfaces.” Your application process should attract applicants, not repel them away.

• How long does it take you to reach out to candidates when they apply?• You risk tainting your relationship with a candidate right off the bat of it takes you more than a few days to

respond. You’ll hurt your employer brand more deeply if you never get back to candidates who aren’t a fit.

• Who does the phone screen?• It’s common for recruiters to conduct the initial screen because hiring managers have very limited time.

However, it can be influential to have hiring managers hop on the initial call for top candidates, so candidates feel valued right off the bat.

• How do you adapt the phone screen for active (they applied) vs. passive (you sourced them) candidates?

• Be sure to adjust your phone screen for sourced candidates, because the ball is in their court. Instead of peppering them with qualifying questions, make sure you educate them about the role and company, and be ready to answer their questions.

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• How do you set expectations for timeline and interview stages up front?• Interviewing is nerve-wracking. You can help mitigate your candidates’ anxiety by providing them with

transparency into the process straight away. Let them know what next steps will be, and when they can expect to hear from you.

• Do you consistently ask candidates to come onsite more than twice?• It’s often difficult enough for a candidate to take a day or half day off of work. Asking them to do it more than• twice, especially if it’s because of an unorganized process on your part, can leave a poor taste in their mouth.

• Do candidates know what’s in store when they come onsite? • Candidates will appreciate as much transparency as you can provide, like the agenda, who’s interviewing

them, and how long they can expect to be there.

Lever’s calendar and email integrations facilitate painless interview scheduling and generate automatic reminders to ensure that no interview goes missed again. No more frantically digging for a resume two minutes before an interview. Everything an interviewer needs is right in their inbox.

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• Do interviewers know when they have interviews? • Interviewers forget about interviews more often than recruiters would like. This risks sending the wrong

message to the candidate (that they’re not very important) and looks unprofessional on the employer’s part.

• Who greets candidates when they arrive onsite?• A simple but powerful way to show a candidate that you care is to greet them as soon as they walk in the

door. It’s best when the hiring manager can do this, but it’s great if the recruiter does it too. What really matters is that someone is there to give a warm hello instead of the candidate having to fend for themselves.

• How do you prepare interviewers?• It’s hard enough to reach the right decision on a candidate with the most streamlined of interview

processes; an unorganized process is just asking for poor results. To help make sure you gather the information you need to make an informed decision and compare candidates as objectively as possible, interviewers should be trained, know what type of interview they’re giving (culture fit, skills fit, etc.), and know what qualities to evaluate for.

• How do you collect feedback in a timely manner? • Speed, especially with top candidates who might have multiple offers, is essential - but gathering interviewer

feedback and reaching a quick decision can feel like pulling teeth.

In the old recruiting world, these details might have sounded like more effort than they were worth. But in today’s market where employees rule, providing an organized, professional, and attentive interview experience is table stakes for entry.

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Lever interview kits help you get the actionable data you need for your hiring decisions. You can build customized interview processes and minimize repetitive tasks with pre-formed panels; leave customized interview instructions and get granular with details (like writing a list of questions that you’d like the interviewer to cover); capture high-level insights in scorecards; and even include code directly in feedback forms.

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Just because a candidate accepts an offer, it doesn’t mean your job is over. Your candidate experience is a promise of your employer brand. So now it’s time to deliver on that promise.

Step 4 - Onboard like you mean it

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New hires (as anyone who’s started a new job knows) are often a combination of excited, nervous, and hopeful. Onboarding is your opportunity to put a new hire’s nerves at ease, reaffirm their decision to join the team, and help them prepare for future success.

The process will look different from company to company, and can also vary from department to department. Facebook, for example, has a six-week bootcamp just for engineers, while onboarding at Lever is one week and isn’t team specific.

Regardless, an effective employee onboarding program should:

Reduce employee anxiety and stress through clear expectation setting and a welcoming environment

Educate employees on where the company has been and where it is going

Provide insight into the value and role of every department

Prepare employees for their day-to-day responsibilities

Cover logistics (like benefits) so employees can focus on work without distractions

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Tips for an effective onboarding process:

• Assign a buddy so new hires have someone to show them the ropes and ask questions they don’t want to ask their boss.

• It’s helpful to put a group lunch on a new hire’s calendar the first few days, or ask their buddy to invite them out, so they don’t have to worry about “tagging along.”

• It’s easy for salespeople to bond with salespeople, engineers with engineers, etc. Scheduling 1:1s, like getting coffee or going on a walk, with people outside of a new hire’s team can foster cross-functional bonds and remind everyone at the company that they’re on the same team.

• Project management tools can help you stay organized and give employees an extra level of transparency into their first week of activities.

• Starter projects – value-adding projects that can fall by the wayside in light of more pressing tasks – kill two

birds with one stone. Asking a new account executive to do a competitive analysis, for example, lets new hires make an immediate impact and equips the sales team with important intel. We’re big proponents of using starter projects to set new hires up for success at Lever. Read more about how they work and our reasoning behind them in this post written by an employee who went through the process herself.

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Sample One-Week Onboarding

Below, we’ve outlined one way to structure an employee onboarding program. Keep in mind that these are only guidelines, and the exact structure will always vary based on multiple factors (like your company’s product, values, size, and more).

Day 1: HR / admin dayMake day one all about setting employees up with everything they need – walk them through benefits, introduce them to company tools, and perhaps give them a few articles about your company and industry. As our Chief of Staff Jennifer Kim says, day one should be the “let’s have you figure out where the bathroom is,” day. The hardest part should be remembering everyone’s names.

Day 2: Customer dayEducate your employees on the customers for whom your company builds a product – after all, without them, you wouldn’t exist. Sessions can include helping employees understand the pains you’re solving, taking them through the customer lifecycle, and having them sit in on a sales call with an account executive.

Day 3: Product dayHere’s your chance to bring employees up to speed on the thinking behind how you build your product. Give them context for why you made certain product decisions, explain your core differentiators and how you prioritize features, and share the roadmap for what’s ahead.

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Day 4: Team dayBy now, new hires have had to absorb a lot of information. Let this day be a time for new hires to get to know the members of their own teams, and sync with their hiring managers. Day 5: Culture day On the final day of onboarding, make new hires really feel like they’re a part of the team. Share your company’s origin story, have them meet the leadership team, and illustrate your culture however it fits.

At Lever, for example, we talk about our commitment to diversity and inclusion, play a “Lever lore” game with inside company jokes, and unveil everyone’s “color” by adding them to the color wheel. (Our colors are the results of a personality test that we have every employee take so we can all better understand each other’s communication and work styles)

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It’s tough to measure something as subjective as candidate experience, but there are metrics that can help you track your progress. When they’re improving, your candidate experience likely is too.

Step 5 - Embrace measurement

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It’s not always clear which recruiting metrics matter, and how to put them to use. With Lever’s reports automatically running in the background, you’ll always have easily accessible insights on how well your team is working and where you can improve your process. No more late nights at the end of a quarter scrambling to make sense of your spreadsheets.

Acceptance rate Whether candidates accept your offers is a telling reflection of your candidate experience. Of course, other factors like salary and location can affect the decision, but if your acceptance rate improves over time while factors like compensation are constant, it’s a good sign you’re buttoning up your candidate experience in the right places. Time to hire A fast time to hire (from when the candidate first applies to when they accept an offer) is typically a good indicator of candidate experience. It signals that the team is attentive about responding to applicants, placing a precedent on finding time in their busy schedules to interview, and that candidates feel confident enough to accept their offers relatively quickly.

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While metrics can help you detect whether there is room for improvement, it’s direct lines of communication, like surveys and employee 1:1s, that will help you identify what needs to be done. Survey candidates to find out where you could improve the process, new hires after onboarding, and even interviewers to make sure they feel well-equipped for the process. Gathering feedback through 1:1s is also an option for current employees. After all, the only way you’ll know what to change is by asking.

Ultimately, what’s important is not that you have troves of quantifiable metrics to point to, but that you are in touch with your candidate experience and always looking to improve it.

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Any company can get lucky with a few great hires every now and then, but to build a team of top performers across the board, a great candidate experience is a must – from making sure every part of the process runs smoothly, to letting your employer brand and values shine.

You’ve gotten a taste for what other companies are doing to create a fantastic experience at every stage of the candidate lifecycle. Now, it’s your turn to impress.

Now it’s your turn!

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About the author

Jess MillerHR Manager at CloudLock

Jennifer TressTalent Team Director at 18F

Kathleen KiangTalent Pipeline Manager at Eventbrite

Kiran DhillonContent Marketing Manager at Lever

Kiran runs content marketing at Lever, connecting talent professionals with resources to help them be more strategic and successful.

With a huge thanks to our panel of experts

Marisa MayerHead of Talent Management at Eastwick

Ron StornVP of People at Lyft

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About LeverFounded in 2012 and headquartered in downtown San Francisco, Lever is the world’s first truly collaborative applicant tracking system. We’ve designed our software to be easy, clean, data-driven and hiring manager-friendly.

Lever supports hundreds of companies around the world from five employees to 10,000 in proactively sourcing, nurturing and hiring the right talent. Among the factors that make Lever different from traditional ATS products:

ATS meets CRMAs well as including all the functionality you’d expect in an applicant tracking system, Lever offers comprehensive tools to help you source and nurture passive talent until they’re ready to become candidates.

Built for collaborationAs your company grows, half the battle is keeping everybody on the same page. Lever helps hiring managers and recruiters stay in touch through multiple features like @ mentions, job following and two-way email sync.

Organized around the candidateTo increase your chances of success with a candidate, it pays to have a complete view of their every interaction with your team. See your company’s full history with each candidate over time, helping you personalize your outreach and improve their impressions of your organization.

We’d love to show you why hiring teams are raving about Lever.

For a free demo, email [email protected], call +1.415.458.2731, or visit https://lever.co.© Lever 2016. All Rights Reserved.