A recent report from Forrester Research shows that customer experience is closely tied to customer loyalty, and that the correlation between the two has been increasing. In the report, customer experience was measured by whether the company meets a customer's needs, whether the company is easy to work with, and the enjoyability of a consumer's interactions with the company. Bruce Temkin of Forrester also states that the most fundamental customer experience principle is that "every interaction creates a personal reaction, simply put, experiences are totally in the eyes of the beholder."
According to a related study from SAS Institute and Peppers & Rogers Group, only 20 percent of companies today even try to know the state of their customer experience by measuring it holistically across all channels.
Throughout my consulting career, I have been helping companies to recognize that it is the summary of all customer touchpoints, not solely advertising and marketing activities, that form that customer brand experience. I believe one major, "under-the-radar" result of this economic recession and competitive jobs market is the new and growing impact that HR (now sometimes called Talent Acquisition) is having on the company brand experience.
Over the past six months, I have interacted (or attempted) with HR/Talent Acq. recruiters at over 100 companies. Based on my own personal job search, the typical "experience" has been a general lack of acknowledgement, status or response to job applications, even sometimes when after actually going through the interview process. I miss the days of rejection letters in the mail, which at least provided closure. Likewise, I have heard very similar and frightening stories from others. In my opinion, the millions of job-seekers out there today, who may also be potential current consumers, as well as future company business leaders, vendors, partners or industry peers, are experiencing very poor interactions with many companies that will stick with them (and everyone they tell). It's too early to tell just yet the longer-term impacts on company brands from this current phenomena, but I think it's worth noting the importance and influence of company HR/Talent Acq recruiters who are on the front-lines.
Whether you have interacted with company recruiters recently or not, how much does the role of HR impact, whether positively or negatively, the customer brand experience in today's bad economy?
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Rich: Thank you for addressing this point. The long-term strategy of brand building via ALL-points-of-brand-contact should be reinforced (with or without a recession). What are your recommendations to address the issues you mention above?
ReplyDeleteThe key for companies to enable the HR recruiting function to reinforce a positive, customer-centric brand experience, much like any other company interaction it has with any of its many other stakeholders, is
ReplyDelete(1) To be responsive,
(2) Set clear expectations acceptable to the consumer/job-seeker and deliver on them, and
(3) To humanize the interaction so it feels more like a relationship between two people and not between one person and a faceless company
First, I have experienced all too many companies being completely unresponsive. The primary factors are companies failing to even acknowledge receipt of an online resume and next, company HR recruiters ignoring repeated emails or voicemails left by job-seekers who simply wish to learn their status after already beginning the initial interview process in some way.
Recommendations #1:
-always have templated, generic emails triggered upon receipt of a resume, to acknowledge it's been received. I only find about 25-50% do this. It should be 100%
-for all job candidates who have already had some company interaction (ie. phone interview), their status or next steps should be clearly communicated via a recruiter's brief email or voicemail to job-seeker in a timely manner, to eliminate that radio silence spewing from companies today. If and when a job-seeker does send an email or voicemail to check status, the recruiter should actually respond. It's only courteous. A slightly more technical, advanced solution is to provide the recruiting status on a secure, login-password website, which some companies do today. These are self-serve for job-seekers and easy for them to obtain your status, whenever they want. However, it is still dependent on the company keeping it up-to-date.
Secondly, job-seekers nowadays don't expect personalized, frequent interactions with a company HR recruiting department all the time. Although it would be nice, it is just not practical, and I think most job-seekers just want to be treated respectively. It's ok to receive that generic email acknowledging receipt of my online application or for a recruiter to actually tell me I should expect to hear back in 3 weeks. Just set my proper expectations and deliver on them. If for some reason you fail to let me know the job status after those 3 weeks is up, please return my follow-up email with a quick explanation, because I will certainly ask. Our expectations have all been lowered over the years...please at least meet them now!
Finally, the heart of any relationship is the human interaction. Sure, there are many technical and impersonal solutions that will greatly improve this company HR recruiting - brand experience from where it’s at today, some of which already noted, but you simply can't eliminate the human touch completely if you want to reinforce that the company cares about you, whether you are a current customer, potential customer, vendor, industry partner, influencer, job-seeker or any/all of the above.
Job-seekers certainly want to get back to work. As well, most companies have their work cut out for them to greatly improve the company experience across all touch points and to keep building the brand for the future.