2iC Global

You are here: Home / Archives for employers

employers

Why Candidates should be treated like Customers

by

Candidates are also customers! Bad recruitment experiences cost brands millions in lost customers

Giving job seekers a poor experience could turn them off a brand from a consumer perspective.

Interviewees may feel like they are in the spotlight during the recruitment process but the brands conducting the interview are under just as much scrutiny, as new research suggests a poor recruitment experience could turn candidates off that brand for life.

Recent reports have revealed that one in four British jobseekers have either entirely stopped purchasing (12%) or purchased less (11.5%) from a brand because of a negative candidate experience.

Poor candidate experience cost Virgin Media £4.4m in 2014, the study claims. More than 130,000 candidates applied to work at Virgin Media that year, 18% of which were existing Virgin Media customers. However, as a direct result of poor candidate experience more than 7,500 candidates cancelled their subscriptions and switched to a competitor, resulting in millions of pounds in lost revenue, according to the analysis.

The brand has since brought its recruitment function in-house, which allows it to “take a lot more control and engage with individuals on a one-to-one level”, says Neil Chivers, employer brand and marketing manager at Virgin Media.

He adds: “It wasn’t all just about the money but the saving to the business really helped us get the support from our CMO and head of finance to say that we could change the way we do things.”

 

Focus on candidates’ needs

Virgin Media has also invested in technology with a candidate portal that maps the recruitment experience. It looks at how candidates are going about their application process and explores what they want rather than Virgin Media leading. The process also features inspirational voice messages from brand ambassador Usain Bolt.

The brand was able to identify quick wins that cost nothing to change and improve but made an immediate impact.

“We have to make sure whatever we say to a candidate at that first touchpoint stays with them all throughout their life here.” – Neil Chivers, employer brand and marketing manager, Virgin Media

Chivers adds that changing recruitment practices is just the first step: “In order for this to be a success we have to deliver on what we promised those candidates. Giving them a great experience through the application process is just one facet of the whole employee life cycle.

“We have to make sure whatever we say to a candidate at that first touchpoint stays with them all throughout their life here.”

 

Positive Impression

Bryan Adams, CEO and founder of Ph.Attraction, says: “The recruitment process needs to be people-first. Every brand experience is as valuable as the next – whether it’s recruitment or anything else it’s an opportunity to delight, retain or attract a customer.”

The study of 1,200 British-based workers also shows that nearly a third (29.3%) candidates would consider becoming a customer of a brand if they had a good experience.

Given that more than 75% of respondents aged 16 to 24 have applied for a job at a company where they are already a customer, it is vital that brands look at how they treat applicants or they could risk losing their business.

In order to attract talent, particularly candidates aged under 24, brands need to advertise what they stand for. A separate study by LinkedIn shows that an organisation’s purpose is a deal-breaker for 52% of UK professionals when considering a job offer but businesses generally fail to include their values on their website or LinkedIn company page. That number rises to 56% among those aged 16 to 24.

Brands should also be thinking about the future work force in employer branding. There are projects and companies already helping young people make the right recruitment choices. Rise To, for example, matches 16- to 24-year-olds with suitable purpose-driven entrepreneurial companies.

Employers build a LinkedIn style brand profile and pre-vetted ‘matched’ talent is served to them automatically. Those aged 16 to 24 sign up for free and are guided through building a digital CV. As they refine their profile, the algorithm matches them with the companies and opportunities that best suit them.

Duncan Cheatle, co-founder of Rise To, who also co-founded Start-Up Britain and the Supper Club, says: “Companies learned decades ago they needed to build an ongoing brand. With employer branding they don’t do that. They just put a job ad up for 30 days hoping the talent they want to attract will be remotely interested.”

Business in the Community (BITC), a responsible business charity supported by the Prince of Wales, conducted a survey of 4,000 young people, which again finds that after a negative recruitment process one in five young people are put off that company.

BITC works with a number of large employers and educators, including City & Guilds, Barclays and Whitbread, on recruitment and promoting the importance of constructing an employer brand that is open and accessible for young people as part of its Future Proof campaign.

Creating positive experiences for candidates is vital for Costa-owner Whitbread as it relies on a large number of employees to grow in the UK.

Sandra Kelly, head of education at Whitbread, which owns Premier Inn and Costa, believes creating positive experiences for candidates is vital for the company as it relies on a large amount of employees to grow in the UK. It aims to make the process “fair, accessible and transparent”.

Kelly believes this is “particularly important for young people who will form an increasing part of the future consumer market”. She says: “We have worked hard to open up different routes into our business, focusing on attitude, values and motivations in our expanding apprenticeships programme.”

“We have an ageing population so young people will become a scarcer resource than they are today,” adds Chris Jones, CEO of The City & Guilds Group. “If businesses don’t make changes now to break down the barriers young people face when entering employment, their futures – and indeed our economy – will be at risk.”

“If businesses don’t make changes now to break down the barriers young people face when entering employment, their futures – and indeed our economy – will be at risk.” – Chris Jones, CEO of The City & Guilds Group

Jones is backing the BITC campaign because he wants “businesses to take a look at their practices, be honest about how youth-friendly they really are, and commit to changing for the better”.

 

Treat talent like consumers

The Ph.Attraction report states that 22% of British workers believe a brand’s candidate experience is more revealing about brand culture than its customer experience. It therefore makes commercial sense to treat potential recruits the same as potential consumers.

“These days, recruiters are marketers, they just sit in a different department,” says Joe Wiggins, head of communications, Europe at reviews-based recruitment platform Glassdoor. “Employer brand is a product of employee engagement, which is in itself a product of employee experience.”

Brands are using the platform as a marketing tool by linking reviews to profiles on careers pages, and using social platforms to show employee-generated content.

Wiggins adds: “The lines between internal and external communications are blurring. Smart organisations are using social to give a look inside their organisations.”

Once those candidates are attracted to roles and companies it is up to the brand to deliver on what that employer marketing has offered. One way of improving candidate experience is adjusting the power balance in the process.

Cheatle at Rise To says many employers view recruitment as a one-way process. Employers want to attract talent but the moment they start recruiting it comes down to deciding whether to give someone a job “instead of recognising that they are going to be assessed the other way round”.

He adds: “The whole approach needs to be seen as one of embracing in a much more equal way.”

Being asked the right questions and receiving feedback from a prospective employer can improve how that company is viewed, according to Cheatle.

He says: “Too often the recruiter doesn’t get any training or steer so they will come in with questions that aren’t quite appropriate or are not exploratory.”

The sentiment is mirrored in the Ph.Attraction research, which reveals 18% of respondents felt more valued by a receptionist than the interviewer during their last job application. Furthermore, one in four believe interviewers do not care about their goals or aspirations and 37% believe it is more likely they will win the lottery than receive detailed job feedback.

It is clear that employer branding takes effort, but failing to consider the recruitment process could cost a brand both talent and customers.

 

A large number of Businesses fail to consider the importance in providing a good candidate experience in their recruitment processes for reasons such as time limitations & lack of HR Staff.

This is when Recruitment Companies such as Graffiti Recruitment become a highly useful, cost effective solution. Our Recruitment Consultants are all trained to give the highest possible standard of experience to both Clients & Candidates. We understand the Recruitment Process can be extremely stressful, therefore our goal is to extinguish that stress by streamlining the recruitment process and provide a unique, premium quality experience along the way.

Find out what our clients and candidates think of our unique service here!

 

 

Top-15 Most Shocking Recruitment Stories

by

Check out 15 of the most shocking and strange recruitment stories revealed by hiring managers!

Things do not always go to plan during the recruitment process.

This isn’t suggesting bad CVs full of spelling errors or candidates who say the wrong thing.

This is suggesting jaw-dropping, shocking, bizarre, maddeningly frustrating things that would be hard to believe if they weren’t true.

Take a look at these odd stories – and count yourself lucky they didn’t happen to you:

 1. During a phone interview, a recruiting manager heard a candidate’s mother giving the applicant answers to her questions. The interviewer asked him, “Who’s feeding you the answers to my questions?” He said no one. The manager told him she could hear his mother in the background. The applicant got flustered and hung up.

2. At the beginning of an interview, an applicant told an interviewing team that if he should pass out during the interview, his mobile phone was in his pocket and that they should call the emergency number.

3. An applicant showed up for a job interview wearing a noticeably greasy, see-through white dress shirt and bottle-lens eye glasses being held together by tape. He also sported a comb over covering only the front half of his head, so when he turned to the side, there was a large, exposed bald area. The icing on the cake? Severe skin shedding. During the interview, the candidate repeatedly scratched his head and arms, causing large flakes of skin to fall onto the table and onto his clothing. By the end of the interview, the table was covered with a thin layer of skin flakes.

4. A recruiting manager found a candidate he really liked who interviewed well over the phone. He also interviewed well in person, though the candidate did say he had an appointment to run to and asked if he could take the job application with him and return it completed later on along with his references. He returned both the next day, the company checked his references and hired him. On his first day, the company gave the new employee a short telephone script and asked him to make some phone calls. Strangely, when someone would answer his call, he’d ask for a person whose name wasn’t on the script sheets. After a few calls, he stopped asking for anyone by name and just said, “Who’s this?” After a few more of these incidents, the company realised the man couldn’t read. The manager found out later that the handwriting on his job application was that of his girlfriend. The firm felt so bad for him they gave him some phonics books and asked him to study up and come back when he felt he was ready to give it another try. He never returned.

5. After an interview, one candidate asked a recruiting manager if she could borrow some money to get her car out of the car park. She didn’t have any money with her and didn’t know how she was going to be able to get her car through the barrier. (Happy ending: She did end up paying the manager back!)

 6. An applicant showed up late for an interview wearing a long trench coat with his hair slicked back in a pony tail. As the interview progressed, he answered the recruiting manager’s questions, sipped on his Starbucks coffee and tilted the chair on the back legs. When asked the question, “Why should I hire you?” he responded by taking a sip, leaning way back, running his hand along the side of his hair and saying, “Because I’m so good looking.”

7. A recruitment manager hired a woman to help out with typing proposals. The woman said she could type 75 words per minute and, in a crunch, the manager hired her on a trial basis without giving her a test. Rushing past her desk to an important meeting, the manager happened to notice that new hire’s computer screen was completely filled with spelling errors and mistakes. He asked her what she was doing since she seemed to be ignoring the spell check warnings. Very calmly, she replied, “Oh, I do that at the end. How else could I type 75 words per minute if I stopped every time I made a mistake?”

8. A female recruitment manager and her team thought they’d found a great male candidate. The applicant eagerly accepted the offer – and began emailing and calling the recruiting manager every day for two weeks until the first day of work. Then came the cards, unsolicited breakfasts, joke emails and statements of “being friends forever” – all within the first two weeks. Management eventually had to counsel the employee about appropriate behavior in the workplace.

9. A Human Resources manager worked with an outside agency to place job adverts in the local newspaper. The agency got the job adverts in the newspaper without a problem – except they went in newspapers 30 miles from the store. Potential candidates began calling to enquire about train schedules and which part of town the store was in. Worst of all: This happened twice – to the tune of a huge financial loss each time.

10. A recruiting manager hired a receptionist who during her employment used the emergency room as her primary care physician and ran an escort service on the side.

11. A recruitment agency helped a company hire a new IT technician based on his CV alone. The new employee arrived on the job the very first day, looked at the company-issued laptop and said, “What is this?” Needless to say, the company promptly and respectfully returned the new employee to the Recruitment agency.

12. One applicant for an attorney position giggled the entire time during the phone interview. The manager thought it was probably nerves, so he asked her for a writing sample. She submitted a detailed legal brief that used the names of characters from the cartoon “The Family Guy” and placed them into horribly violent situations.

13. A recruiting manager hired a promising candidate with two master’s degrees. Upon being hired, however, she shooed people away from her desk when they tried to train her. (She said she knew how to do the job better by herself.) She also spoke over everyone else in the office when they tried to talk to her, frequently screaming, “What?!” Finally, she sent strange Youtube videos to other staff members about race horses for no apparent reason.

14. One company hired what they thought was a qualified, excited applicant. But 10 days after the employee started, he resigned – and moved to a larger company. Turned out he’d used the company’s salary as leverage.

15. A police department hired a new recruit who successfully made it through the academy and field training. A few weeks later, though, he quit. Why? He had to touch a dead body and said he didn’t think he could do that ever again. The icing on the cake: The recruit’s family’s business was the community’s only funeral home and mortuary.

Well there you have it! 15 of the most shocking recruitment stories. If you’d like to elimate the chance of you experiencing any of these scenarios, check us out to see how we can help you by clicking here!

 

– ProgressiveBusinessPublications

10 Great Examples of Interview Horror Stories

by

A Job Interview may not always go smoothly. But to what extent can an interview go wrong and how badly?

How you present yourself in a job interview is the determining factor in whether or not you will land a job. According to a study by Anderson & Shackleton in the Journal of Occupational Psychology, people who are perceived as “relaxed, interesting, strong, ambitious, mature and pleasant” are the ones who tend to get hired.1 That is a vibe that employers can pick up quickly. In fact, a survey of 2,000 employers revealed that 33% of interviewers know whether or not they will hire applicants within 30 seconds of meeting them.2

“33% of interviewers know within 30 seconds of meeting someone whether or not they will hire them”

This is an alarming statistic and for many people it is difficult to maintain composure under the stress of an interview. It’s no wonder there are a number of job interview horror stories. Here are ten noteworthy interview fails, each accompanied by tips to help you prepare for your next interview and avoid similar mistakes. Integrate these interview tips and skills into your repertoire, and next time you will have the know how to ace that job interview.

  1. Bomb the First Impression

One interview candidate was running late and so frazzled that he left home for the interview wearing two different shoes, and his prescription sunglasses instead of his eyeglasses! Suffice it to say, the cool “hipster” look came off as unprofessional and he did not get the job.

Advice: While it’s hard to believe that someone could actually do that, the message here is clear: Make a good first impression. In most cases, opt for business attire, understated makeup and jewelry, good grooming, and excellent hygiene.

  1. Be a Negative Nelly

Another interviewee when asked about her last job, went off on a tangent ranting about her old boss and spent a good portion of the interview badmouthing him – only to find out that he was a relative of the interviewer!

Advice: Even if you have strong feelings about someone, there are ways of being authentic without being negative. Sometimes a short, polite answer can speak volumes. At any rate, be respectful when talking about your former employers and coworkers, as bashing an old employer creates a negative vibe and can tank your interview.

  1. Make Yourself at Home… Literally!

Believe it or not, there are a number of reports of people falling asleep during job interviews! One job interview candidate even removed their socks and shoes during an interview, because she felt it was too hot in the room!

Advice: While it’s great to be calm and collected during an interview, don’t over do it. The interviewer has just met you, so remain professional and be aware of appropriate boundaries. Don’t start getting casual until you have landed the job, but generally speaking, you probably don’t want to fall asleep or take your shoes off if hope to keep your job for a long time!

  1. Don’t Think Before Speaking

A job candidate was asked one of the standard interview questions, “What is your greatest accomplishment?” She replied, “Writing my first novel.” When the interviewer said, “We mean something you have accomplished in a work setting.” she replied, “Well, actually I wrote most of it while at work!”

Advice: While this is an amusing anecdote, a prospective employer does not want to hear that you work on your own projects while on their clock. When asked a question, be sure to pause for a moment or two and consider the impact your answer might have.

“When asked a question, be sure to pause for a moment or two and consider the impact your answer might have.”

  1. Tell a Few Politically Incorrect Jokes

One job interview candidate was reported to have made derogatory comments about a Country. Sure enough, the interviewer was from the same Country!

Advice: While it’s natural to want to break the ice with a joke, stick to neutral topics that have no risk of offending anybody. Avoid topics like religion, politics or anything that might offend a particular group.

  1. Bring your Cell, so You Can Phone a Friend for the Hard Questions!

After being asked a particularly tough question, one woman stopped her interviewer, and asked if she could dial her therapist! Needless to say, she did not get the job.

Advice: An interview is not the time to “phone a friend.” Be sure that you are as prepared as possible when walking through the door. If you’re hit with a question that seems out of left field, trust your instincts and give your best answer.

  1. Break a Law or Two, and Tell the World About it!

As one interview was getting started, the candidate revealed that by crossing the state line to attend the interview, he was in violation of his probation, but that he felt the interview was worth risking the possible jail time. Yikes!

Advice: Maybe it goes without being said, but you should not break the law to attend an interview, and you should also be selective about what you reveal from your past. Everyone has a few skeletons in their closet. If it’s not relevant, don’t share it.

  1. Don’t Waste Your Time Preparing

Almost every interview includes some form of the classic question, “What is your greatest weakness?” Some not-so-great answers on record are: “I have a bad temper, and when I get really angry have been known to throw things,” or “I love to gossip.”

Advice: Interviewers have heard all of the canned, cheesy answers like, “I’m a workaholic,” or, “Some might say I’m loyal to a fault.” The best way to approach this interview question is to state a true weakness and moderate it with steps you have taken to counter it. Here are some examples:

  • “Being organized just wasn’t my strongest point, but now I’ve implemented a time-management system that has really helped me stay organized.”
  • “I’m somewhat of a perfectionist, so in the past I have gotten caught up in checking every little detail and wasted a lot of time. However, over time I’ve developed a balanced approach that is less time consuming.”
  • “I used to want to control every aspect of a project myself, but now I’ve gotten really good at delegating appropriately.”
  1. Don’t Plan for the Unexpected

Recently, many companies like Google and other high profile tech companies are mixing it up with some seemingly oddball interview questions. When one applicant was asked, “What person would you like to have dinner with, living or dead?” He replied, “The living one.” Probably not what the interviewer had in mind! Here are some other examples of non-traditional interview questions:

  • “If you could be any superhero, who would it be?”
  • “What animal best represents your personality, and why?”
  • “How would you move Mount Vesuvius?”
  • “What color characterizes you, and why?”
  • “What was your best McGyver moment?”

Advice: The purpose of this type of question is not to stump you, but to see if you can think on your feet, and how creative you are. Many employers want to see a bit of your character along with your credentials, so have fun with these questions (within reason!) and let your personality shine.

  1. Part in Awkward Manner

One job applicant made quite the exit when he got up to leave the interview and walked straight into a glass door, shattering it into pieces! Fortunately, he was not hurt, but his chances at getting the job were.

Advice: Your final impression is just as important as your first. Exit the interview as gracefully and professionally as possible.

“Do your homework and research the company you interviewing with.”
So there you have it — ten of the biggest interview fails reported on the Internet. Could you imagine being in one these situations? Maybe the sheer embarrassment and awkwardness of it all is enough to help you avoid the situation in the future. If you’re still unsure, check out our interview hints and tips page by following this link. They will no doubt help you avoid making the same mistakes. Do your homework and research the company you interviewing with. Practice makes perfect. Find a partner and do some mock interviews using the job interview tricks explained above, and you will have the know-how to ace the job interview and land your dream job!

 

– Brad Zomick

© 2025 2iC Global. All rights reserved. Sitemap

Website Design by Yellow Marshmallow.