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If Employee Experience is the new Customer Experience, why isn’t anyone paying attention to hiring practices?

Simon Hall By Simon Hall

After hearing the stories of people I know searching for a new career, I have to say I’m shocked at the way job applicants are being treated these days. And with all this talk about how Customer Experience starts with Employee Experience, perhaps a revisit of your hiring practices is in order.

The way you treat potential employees is just as important as the way you treat your current employees. Job applicants are not numbers, or submissions. They are not keyword-scanned digital resumes. They are people (maybe even customers!), who have expressed an interest in working for your company and should be treated with dignity and respect.

Having said that, I thought I’d provide some tips for all the Human Resource departments and Hiring Managers out there.

Tip #1: If someone has taken the time to research your company and the position they’re applying for, customized their cover letter, checked out your Glassdoor ratings and employee profiles on LinkedIn and slogged through the online form process you’ve developed, at least have the decency to acknowledge that you have received their application. A simple automated email would suffice. I'm amazed at how many companies don't do this.

Tip #2: Provide applicants with at least a general idea of when they can expect to hear from you or when the job is expected to be filled. In that ‘Thanks for Applying!’ automated email you send out (see Tip #1), how hard is it to mention that potential applicants will be contacted by a certain date? This will at the very least provide the applicant with a date when they know for sure they have not been selected to move to the next stage. (One friend I know received a call for an interview 3 months after they submitted their online resume - really??!!!)

Tip #3: If you’ve scheduled a phone interview with a potential applicant, be courteous enough to actually call when you said you would. If you can’t, again, a simple email rescheduling the call would be the polite thing to do here. Unless your office is on fire, there’s absolutely no excuse for not sending a quick email asking to reschedule.

If your Human Resources department is guilty of any of these, they're not deserving of using the word ‘human’ in their title.