“Non-Customer Users” and Recruiting

When we tell our grandchildren about the pandemic, we’ll tell them about hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and masks. And when we tell them…

When we tell our grandchildren about the pandemic, we’ll tell them about hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and masks. And when we tell them about The Great Resignation, we will tell them about the Applicant Tracking Systems of yore. And they won’t believe us.

Customer focus means asking “who is my customer?” In B2B and Enterprise we need to take the extra step of asking “Who are my customers’ customers?”

Recruiting tools are sold to recruiters, obviously. But it must be clear to all of us in the Product world that the recruiter’s customer is the candidate, and the *candidate experience* needs work.

I have received many surveys asking me about an employer’s overall recruiting process. It is quite amusing to be sent 3 or 4 reminders to complete a survey about the recruiting process of a company that ghosted me after three interviews some months ago.

At least this reveals that companies are concerned about how their interviewing process is impacting candidates’ perception of them, as they should be. There is some customer focus there, and I hope they’ll take a Product Manager’s mentality to improving it.

Strangely I’ve never been asked specifically about whether their Applicant Tracking System made me more or less likely to want to join the company. I think it would be very brave and customer-focused for the ATS vendors to integrate this survey directly into their candidate drip. Actually, I am going to go ahead and dare them to do that.

I heard recently about a candidate who received an automated rejection notice email from a firm they’d been interviewing with. No reason, no feedback. They then heard from a previous manager that the same employer had called to check their reference *the next day*. Why would an ATS make this experience possible? (They never heard from the employer again.)

I got an email from an ATS asking me click on a link to provide my availability for an interview. It asked me to please remember to include my timezone in the notes field at the bottom of the form. Was this product really designed to be used by people in a single timezone? What could possibly go wrong with that?

“Users who aren’t our customers” are a persona that need our extra attention. Often they are going to fall outside the bullseye of our research efforts, and we may design and build their experiences with somewhat less empathy than we employ for the user who buys from us.

But these are so important to watch out for, because the experience of the end-user impacts how they perceive our customer. In B2B, I like to think that I have been entrusted with a duty of care for looking after how our customers are perceived by their customers.

I have no doubt these things aren’t easy to get in recruiting, and I don’t mean to undermine the many useful advances in the field. With empathy for more of our customers, we can deliver better experiences in more places.