Have you ever asked yourself why providing a positive recruitment experience is important? Have you ever asked yourself IF providing a positive recruitment experience is important?
Perhaps you haven’t. If that’s the case, allow me to ask another question: how you think people feel after they speak with you, either in person or on the phone. How do you think they feel after they correspond with you via text, chat, or email? (Wait, that was two questions, wasn’t it? I’m already breaking rules.)
Consider this quote by motivational speak Jay Danzie:
“Your smile is your logo, your personality is your business card, how you leave others feeling after having an experience with you becomes your trademark.”
With this quote in mind, do the people with whom you interact on a daily basis come away with positive feelings? Are they wary? Confused? Do you know the answer for sure, or do you only hope that you’re you’re providing the type of recruitment experience you want to provide?
And why does any of this matter? Because recruiting is a people business all the way around. If you can’t provide positive recruiting experiences with everybody you deal with, then your chances of achieving long-term success fall dramatically.
The recruitment experience and personal branding
This is, in a word, personal branding. How people feel about you after they interact with you constitutes your personal brand. Whereas recruiters may not have thought much about this once upon a time, branding is more important in this day and age. (So is employer branding, but that’s a topic for another blog post.)
As a recruiter, you work with people ALL of the time. There are people at the start of the search process. There are people in the middle of the hiring process. And yes, there are people at the end of both the hiring process and the search process. If you work in an agency with more than one employee, there are people involved there, too. You can’t get away from people!
And since you can’t get away from people, then personal branding is your profession. So then it stands to reason that the better that you brand yourself through a positive recruitment experience, the more success you’ll ultimately enjoy.
You’ll enjoy more success with clients, with potential clients, with candidates, and with placing those candidates.
So where do we start?
The recruiting experience and loyalty
Let’s start with a basic rule of human interaction: people are drawn to those who make them feel comfortable and draw away from those who make them feel uncomfortable or unpleasant.
There’s no denying this rule and there’s no stopping it, either. It’s human nature, plain and simple. That’s why strong-arm tactics with clients and candidates almost never work: because you’re providing an unpleasant experience for them and they immediately feel the need to draw away.
Let’s move to another basic rule, and this one involves the human thought process: people make decisions based on emotion.
And here’s an important corollary to that rule: people often make those decisions subconsciously, without actually acknowledging why they’re making the decision and what role their emotions played in it.
Creating loyalty with clients and candidates should be a priority for any recruiter. Loyalty is how you position yourself for long-term success. Creating satisfaction in hiring managers and candidates simply isn’t enough these days. Satisfaction won’t cut it.
Loyalty, on the other hand, is a different matter. Providing positive recruitment experiences is the first step toward building loyalty with everybody around you.
So we have all of the pieces we need for success. We just have to put them together in the correct order. Doing so underscores why you should provide a pleasant, positive, non-threatening experience with everybody. By doing so, you’ll plant a subconscious, psychological seed that accomplishes the following three things:
- Brands you in a positive fashion
- Draws the person to you (regardless of who they are)
- Starts the loyalty-building process
What does this ultimately mean? It means that in the future, when a decision needs to be made, that person will make their decision based in large part on emotion, and you’ve attached a positive emotion to yourself in that person’s mind. So without even thinking about it, they’ll be leaning toward YOU.
Building loyalty with hiring managers through a positive recruitment experience ultimately means more job orders. Building loyalty with candidates, especially the top candidates within your industry in the employment marketplace, means a deeper pool of talent that you can access at a moment’s notice.
If you’ve built loyalty with these candidates, then they’ll share with you the employment opportunity that would convince them to make a move from their current employer. So then, when that opportunity comes across your desk, you can reach out to the candidate and let them know that you have their next job for them. It’s almost a slam-dunk placement!
In this profession, success with people means success with recruiting. And it all starts with providing the best experience you possibly can.
What are your thoughts? How important is the recruitment experience that you provide to other people? Can providing a positive recruiting experience lead directly (or indirectly) to more placements and better business?