Make Sure Job Applicants Have a Good Experience

  • Share
  • Read Later

Does your company thank job applicants for their time and try to give them a good experience? If not, you should reconsider.

Consider what 4,000 respondents told CareerBuilder in a recent survey:

  • A third of respondents said they’d be less inclined to purchase from a company that didn’t respond to their application.
  • 42% say they’d never again seek employment from a company they felt had mishandled their application.
  • 56% say a good experience – even if they weren’t hired – would lead them to consider seeking a job with the company again.
  • 37% say a good experience would encourage them to tell others to seek employment with that company.
  • 23% say they’d be more likely to buy products or services from a company that provided a good application experience.

So if you view every applicant as a potential customer or reference for other job candidates, a bad experience can have a “ripple effect,” according to Sanja Licina, senior director of talent intelligence at CareerBuilder.

So what do job applicants expect? Two words: Acknowledgement and honesty.

  • 82% of workers expect to hear back from a company when they apply for a job, even if the employer isn’t interested. Yet 75% of people who applied for jobs in the last year didn’t hear back from the company.
  • 60% say the employer never let them know about the decision after an interview.
  • 26% have had a bad experience as a job applicant, such as lack of follow through, inconsistencies, or poor representation of the company’s brand.
  • 43% say the job didn’t match what was written in the job posting.

Adapted from Job Candidates Want Payback for Hiring Snubs by Dennis McCafferty at Baseline Magazine. Follow Baseline Magazine on Twitter.