Transform Your Employer Brand and Recruiting by Building a World Class Candidate Experience

Imagine transforming your hiring process into an authentic journey that not only entices top talent but also leaves every candidate with a positive impression of your brand. 

I'm Brian Montes, and in this episode, we dive into the heart of effective talent acquisition, sharing personal insights from years on the front lines of interviewing and hiring. You'll discover the artful blend of strategy and empathy needed to manage first impressions, set realistic expectations, and cultivate a talent pipeline that resonates with your company's culture and mission. Whether you're a business owner or a hiring manager, prepare to revolutionize your recruitment approach, ensuring each interaction with candidates strengthens your employer brand and gives you an edge in today's competitive job market.

Say goodbye to ghosting and hello to clear, respectful communication—this episode is all about enhancing every aspect of the candidate experience. We discuss the hidden costs of extended decision-making timelines and how to streamline application processes, delivering clarity and convenience to prospective team members. You'll learn the importance of incorporating genuine interactions with current employees into the interview process, granting candidates a transparent window into the lifeblood of your company. 

Key episode takeaways - 

• A strong employer brand is crucial for attracting top talent.
• The candidate experience begins before the interview and organizations need to curate an honest and engaging recruitment process.
• Lengthy decision-making and lack of communication can lead to a loss of interest from candidates.
• Ghosting candidates and having an overly complex application process can harm the employer's brand.
• Unprepared interviewers and discriminatory practices should be avoided to create a fair and positive candidate experience.

Tune in for a masterclass on not just hiring the right people, but doing so in a way that elevates your business from the inside out, fostering a reputation as an employer of choice.

As a business coach, there are 6 critical mistakes that I see founders and business owners make.

If you nod in agonized agreement to the points below, you’re in a prison cell that many entrepreneurs the world over find themselves in:

• Working endless hours without scaling new heights...
• Working harder to make even less...
• Lying awake, agonizing about your superior competitors...
• Spending more time doused in frustration than sipping the champagne of success...
• Always on the hunt for fresh strategies and new customers...
• Drowning in staff issues when you’d rather focus on business growth…

To help you overcome these 6 critical mistakes, I have written the Six Silver Bullets e-book to guide you through the process. Implementing these Six Silver Bullets are Six Surprisingly Simple and Effective Strategies Smart Entrepreneurs Use to Gain Control of Their Time, Team, and Money and Grow Their Business Profits Fast!

This eBook isn’t just another business manual. It’s your ticket to scaling peaks you’ve only dreamt of. Implementing these strategies isn't optional—it’s a must.

Download your FREE copy today!

https://hub.scaleocityworks.com/ebook

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

Welcome to the Entrepreneur to Employer podcast.

Speaker 1: 0:10

I'm your host, brian Montes, founder of Scalocity Works, and the Entrepreneur to Employer coaching and membership community. So congratulations is in order. If you've built a successful freelance business that has grown to the point where you need to hire, you have achieved a huge milestone. If you're already past the point of making need to hire and you have achieved a huge milestone If you're already past the point of making your first hire and your team is now growing well, congratulations is in order to you as well. So, regardless of where you are with scaling your team and your business, whether you're at employee number one or employee number 100, this podcast focuses on everything related to people operations. We'll cover best practices, strategies and solutions to help you build a sustainable and scalable business that is fueled by great people and a great culture. So if you're enjoying listening to this Entrepreneur to Employer podcast, please subscribe, give us a like and give us a review. Your feedback will help us grow this podcast and we'll be able to positively impact more employers to help them build better work environments work environments. Welcome back to another episode of the I Share to Employer podcast. I am your host, brian Montes, founder of Scalocity Works. Today, we are going to talk about something that is very important and I don't think enough business owners or employers put enough emphasis on what we're going to talk about today, and what that is is. It circles back to the conversation around hiring and that theme of that and that feeling by business owners and hiring managers and leaders that I can never find the right people, nobody wants to work right, I'm recruiting and I can't fill the role and the right people aren't applying, and there are so many things when it comes to your recruitment that are in your control, and the key to this is making sure that your employer brand is strong, because without a strong employer brand, you're going to have a hard time recruiting. Today, we're going to talk about how to transform your hiring process and how you, as the business owner, as the hiring manager, as the business unit leader, can build a better, authentic candidate experience. This is so important that we focus on creating a really good candidate experience, because whether or not they come to work for you is irrelevant. You want them to have that good experience so that they walk away from your company feeling good about your company. Away from your company feeling good about your company. All right. So let's talk about how you're going to curate an honest, efficient and engaging recruitment process that is going to help you set your company apart from everybody else, and if you do this, it will become one of many competitive edges that you can have in your business. All right, let's get into it.

Speaker 1: 2:40

So the recruitment process is often the first glimpse of a company's culture, right? So as much you know, as a company is always assessing talent, all of your prospective hires are also assessing you. These hiring processes are no longer one-way roads. People that are serious about their careers, people that are, you know, taking their career path and have a plan for it. They are looking at the opportunities and deciding do I want to go work here? What's in it for me if I go work for this particular employer? And that is why it is up to organizations to create an honest candidate experience.

Speaker 1: 3:16

And this experience it does not start when the candidate interview starts. It doesn't start at the beginning of the interview process. It's well before that. Okay, that candidate's first perception happens way before they ever apply for your organization, and that perception is going to be reality. And if the perception isn't good, the great candidates that you want are never going to hit the apply button, or they're never going to respond to your LinkedIn message or respond to the recruiter, or, however you're recruiting, they are not going to even respond, so you'll never even know that they're out there.

Speaker 1: 3:49

Now. Candidates have access to a lot of data points, so when they're evaluating their next opportunity, they are going through data and they are looking you up. They assess company websites, they go for word of mouth, they look at company reviews and they look at a whole host of other data that's available to them. Organizations need to think about the message they are conveying, especially if your goal is to attract talent and, let's face it, if your company is growing and you are at the point of hiring and building your team, then you are always going to be in the hiring process. You'll always be in talent acquisition mode. You don't want to wait until you have to fill a role to have a talent pipeline right. You always want to be cultivating this and if you don't have a strong employer brand, you will lose them well before you even get to say hello.

Speaker 1: 4:37

So let's talk about the importance of setting the entire and managing and setting the entire candidate experience. So recruiting is both an art and a science. It's figuring out who you want to attract, finding people from different talent pools, selecting folks that are qualified to do the work and then finding that talent well before it's needed. And you're also looking for people who are going to add value to your organization, value to your culture, value to the mission, value to the why right. So you're looking, that's what you're looking for. So let's focus on managing these expectations, and a lot of organizations fumble this. So if you are able to master managing these expectations, you are going to have a competitive edge.

Speaker 1: 5:20

So first, the candidate experience. Many companies don't give the candidate experience enough thought. They don't give it enough effort. Now, in my career, I have interviewed hundreds of people and I've assessed interview packets. I've done interviews, run through skills tests, you name it, I've done it, and there's a level of formality that's present, but it has very little value when employers ask potential hires to fill out incredibly long applications with full job and educational history, to write cover letters, to provide writing samples and all this other stuff up front. To what end is that? You're making them jump through a lot of hoops before you even had this conversation. Now, in most places that I've worked and now in my coaching career, you know I really recommend the resume and or LinkedIn page. Is what you actually want to work with. All the other materials are typically not. You're not going to look at them, right? They're unnecessary and they're a waste of time for both you and for the candidate. So don't make them jump through all these extra hoops because you're busy. Are you really going to go through all of that stuff, right? Your job is to remove some of the friction from the hiring process. Now. Employers are wasting talent's time and their own when you continue to ask for these items and then you don't make decisions based off of it.

Speaker 1: 6:38

Right Drawn out application processes make for an extraordinarily bad candidate experience. It shouldn't take us four weeks to make a decision when we have a candidate pool at our hands, you know, at our fingertips. So what's missing from this equation is congruence. It's a very one-sided process. Candidates put in a lot of time and they get very little results. The process needs to be a lot more efficient and you need to focus on streamlining it to ensure a better candidate experience, which will also make a better experience for you, because your time is valuable. So when a company has a poor candidate experience. It can hamper the ability to attract talent. Now, there's a lot of contributing factors, but here are my top five.

Speaker 1: 7:21

One lengthy decision making and lack of communication. I've personally known people who have interviewed for roles and the process has dragged on for months without a decision being made. It's crickets. They don't hear anything back. This prolonged process not only leads to a loss of interest for the candidate, but it also encourages a viable candidate to explore similar opportunities elsewhere. They're not going to sit around and wait and all this is doing is showing that your company is indecisive. And then, similarly, I've seen candidates spend extensive time in preparation, scheduling, sitting through multiple interviews. You know the once. Timely updates and feedbacks were replaced with silence. And then the candidate starts wondering about the status of their candidacy and whether their time has been wasted. Okay, so don't have these lengthy decision-making timelines and do not have a lack of communication right. Communicate with your candidates and be very dialed in on what your timeline is. From the time you start recruiting, what is your goal to hire? Two weeks, three weeks, set a timeline and work within that timeline.

Speaker 1: 8:25

Number two, in terms of what we see, that leads to a very bad candidate experience, is ghosting. Some companies don't let candidates know when they didn't get the role and they fail to ever follow up. In my opinion, ghosting is one of the biggest forms of disrespect because it discounts all the time the candidates put into the process, it shows them that their time is invaluable and it makes the whole process messy and that candidate also loses respect for you and your company. So here's an easy solution for you Automation Calendar prompts and tools that can help you avoid ghosting and avoid the lack of communication. There are some wonderful applicant tracking systems out there and so if you're hiring a lot, you can utilize an applicant tracking system to help you stay on top of things and put automation calendar prompts and use the tools to remind you hey, I need to follow up with this candidate, I need to close the gap on this, I need to update them right. Reaching out to someone doesn't have to be labor intensive. It could be a quick email, it could be a call, it could be a text. The most important element is not so much the medium but the timeliness and effectiveness of your updates. People appreciate being kept in the loop. They shouldn't have to run down the recruiter or the hiring manager or the business owner to understand where they're at in the hiring process.

Speaker 1: 9:37

Number three an overly complex application process. When the process is needlessly complicated, candidates are probably going to give up. Right, your strong candidates are certainly going to move on. Now, not only will you lose out on potential hires, but your employer brand is going to get harmed because the process is going to be perceived as a reflection of company inefficiency your inability to make a decision. If you can't make a decision about hiring, how are you making decisions about the rest of your business? So here is a solution for you Assess what information you truly need. Streamline your process around the information required for you to make an informed and timely decision. This is part of your strategic planning. Before you ever go to market, right, you have to sit down and plan out the hiring process for that position and be very clear on what you need to make a final decision.

Speaker 1: 10:26

Number four unprepared interviewers and clarity on the job descriptions. There is nothing worse than sitting down for an interview and the person that works for the company doing the interviewing is not prepared to have a comprehensive and meaningful conversation. And I've gone through these processes where the interviewers were clearly unprepared, the questions, didn't assess the actual qualifications, and I walk away from that conversation feeling that the company didn't take the hiring process very seriously and they weren't even sure what the qualifications were that were going to be required, and they weren't even sure what they were looking for. They were all over the map. Now I've also seen job postings and job descriptions that do not accurately represent what the entire role actually is. Effectively managing candidate expectations is paramount, so you need to really sit down and figure out what is the actual role, what is required? Is it only one job or only one position? Or should this be split into two positions? Is it full-time, is it part-time? All of this needs to be done long before you invite your first candidate for a conversation.

Speaker 1: 11:32

Me personally, I'm a big believer in telling people what it's really like, so that the candidates can make the best informed decision possible. Inviting someone to join a company should be a sales pitch for them. It's a conversation to find alignment on values, alignments on motivation, alignments on ability to future potential. That's what this is about. It shouldn't be them coming in to do the sales pitch. This is about it shouldn't be them coming in to do the sales pitch One of the big recommendations when I'm coaching clients is encouraging them to allow the final pool of candidates to talk to existing employees.

Speaker 1: 12:06

You know, if you are truly building an organization that is running well and again, every day is not utopia. We all have bad days. Employees have bad days, but if, for the most part, they are happy at the job they do and they are happy working at your company, let them talk to a couple of the employees. Let them find out, hey, what's it like to work here? Because, believe it or not, your employees are going to be honest, so they're not going to share code it. They're going to be honest and, you know, hopefully they're telling them look, most of the time, it's great we get to do this, we have this. This is what we're focused on. Give your candidates an opportunity to talk to existing employees so that they can get a firsthand information about what it's going to be like to work their day in and day out, because they can actually sell it better than you can. Right, it's just like a restaurant owner doing his own review. So of course it's going to be biased, right? You as the hiring manager, you as the business owner. There's a bias there, of course. You think it's a great place to work. Let candidates talk to your employees when they get to that final stretch of the process.

Speaker 1: 13:08

Here's another solution for you In terms of preparing create a document that outlines the key responsibilities of the role, the desired qualifications and a set of standardized questions that assess those qualifications. This is going to help ensure that you or your interviewers are prepared and that they are asking relevant questions that accurately represent the role. The other reason why I recommend you create a set of questions is so that you level the playing field. If you do not have a preset bank of questions to ask candidates, the chances of you asking different questions for the same role but with different candidates is very high. I know because that's how I used to operate. I didn't sit down and prepare a bank of questions. I'd interview 10 different people, I'd ask a bunch of different questions and when all the interviews were done, I no longer had a baseline in which to compare data and it wasn't a level playing field for the candidates because nobody was getting asked the same set of questions. All right, number five discrimination. Early in my career, I was asked how old I was. In an interview, I was also asked what my religious preference was. And while I ultimately got the job and which I declined, actually after I got the job, because it really gave me some insights to how they operated it definitely was not a good practice to have those questions being asked.

Speaker 1: 14:31

So you are going to want to make sure, as the employer, that you avoid the look of impropriety. You need to know which types of questions are illegal and discriminatory to ask and you don't ask them. And actually, technically, they're not illegal to ask. It's illegal to act on the information. But why ask if you can't use the information? So make sure that you have a list of questions that are not to be asked and make sure whoever is doing the hiring is trained on that, because if it gets out there that you are asking questions that are discriminatory in nature, you know that shouldn't be getting asked. I got news for you that's going to get back out into the world and it's going to damage your employer brand.

Speaker 1: 15:16

So your solution train people on what they can and cannot ask, to ensure that your interviewers are well-informed and educated about the questions that they are legally permissible to ask, and also train them on how to conduct fair and unbiased interviews. And these are some of the things that we work on when we coach business owners. We help coach on how to create a bank of questions. What questions can they legally ask? What questions can they not legally ask? We help coach on all of this stuff, because recruiting at its core is about curating an experience.

Speaker 1: 15:50

At the end of the day, what kind of experience are you creating for your candidates? If you create a world-class, four seasons type recruitment experience, even if they don't come work for you, they will become fans of your company. They may become a customer, they may refer future candidates to you. You never know how your paths are going to cross again, so why ruin it right? Especially if they give you a glowing review on Glassdoor Indeed. Hey, the interview process and the recruitment process was excellent. The company treated me great. Ultimately, I didn't get the job, or I didn't take the job, but they are a class act. That's the type of information you want out there about your company.

Speaker 1: 16:31

All right, I hope you've enjoyed this episode of the Entrepreneur to Employer podcast where we talk about the importance of developing a top, world-class candidate experience to help your employer brand. If you've enjoyed this episode, do me a favor like, subscribe to the podcast, leave us a review. I read every review and use it to make sure that we are improving the information each week that we share. And if you have a fellow business owner that you believe would benefit from this episode, grab the link to the show, text it over them and say hey, I think you should listen to this particular episode. It's only about 16 minutes in length and you'll get a lot of value of it. The more you share this podcast with everybody, the more business owners we can help and the more employees and great businesses we can help build. All right, that concludes this week's episode. Hope you've enjoyed it. We will see you next week on the Entrepreneur to Employer podcast.