Why I’ll never stop banging on about candidate experience
I start our interview training at Street Group asking people what their strongest memories of interviews are. Nine times out of ten, they’re not good.
Once, someone said that they got invited to an interview, only to show up and be thrown into an unexpected assessment centre with 30 other people.
Another said they were sat in the waiting room for 45 minutes past their interview start time with no apology or explanation once the interview got started.
Another person said that they showed up for their interview only to be told that the business had a really big prospective client coming in, and could they please pretend to be on their development team to help them win the client? 🙈
These stories are the reason I feel so passionately about building exceptional candidate experiences. Our approach to CX has matured over the last few years, and although I don’t think anyone is ever an expert, I thought I’d share what’s gone well, what’s not gone so well, and what we’ve learned along the way.
Where it all started: 2020
What a year. I joined Street Group two weeks before the first lockdown started; in my first week I was doing office tours with our Co-Founder, Tom to find us a new office; in my third week, I was working fully remotely, trying to get my head around furlough and figure out how the hell we could support our employee’s wellbeing while they worked from home during a pandemic.
Our customers are Estate and Lettings Agents, and they couldn’t do property viewings, so unsurprisingly, our industry slowed down and we went into a hiring freeze. Luckily, there was still work to be done, as Street Group had gone through a rebrand just before all this happened. Previously called Agent Software, in preparation for the launch of street.co.uk in Nov 2020, we were now Street Group. The problem was, no one in Manchester had heard of us. Not great for trying to attract candidates. I got to work building our employer brand, and I knew that candidate experience would play a huge part in that.
I’ve also had some rough experiences as a candidate myself, so between caring about people and wanting to treat them well, the employer brand work to be done, and my own horror stories — I knew this was an area I absolutely wanted to nail for Street Group as we scaled. Starting with…
Using storytelling in candidate experience
I love reading. I love stories, I love the pictures they paint in my mind and I love that simply reading words on a page can elicit emotions from me. Since we had no brand, and no one knew who we were or what we were doing, I wanted to create a job ad that our candidates could relate to: that painted a picture of the pain of moving house, the promise of what it could be, and how the person reading it could make a difference if they joined us.
I also fleshed out our story; our founding story. Who were we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? (Insert Cotton Eyed Joe tune here). And the thing is, it’s a great story.
It’s the story of a brother and a sister who grew up with parents and aunties and uncles who worked in the property industry, who saw the issues they faced and who wanted to do something about it. It’s the story of Tom putting £1000 of his own money into the idea of Spectre, how Heather left her highly-paid job at KMPG because of their shared vision, and how every month since then, this once small SaaS company has grown month on month by helping agents — to the point we’re 100+ people — all done without raising. It’s not your typical tech start-up story, and (obviously, I’m biased), it feels a little bit special because of that.
On screening calls, I told our story to candidates til I could tell it in my sleep, and every time I told it, I fell more and more in love with the company myself. In our job, in Talent Acquisition, whether you’re a sourcer, recruiter, recruitment marketer — whatever — I truly believe you’re better at your job if you really do love where you’re working. I think candidates can tell — do you really love it? Is it really a great place to work? Or are you just doing your job? Candidates know, and it makes a difference.
Embedding our values into our candidate experience
One of our core values is trust and transparency — as in, we are VERY transparent.
Everything gets shared, every update or business decision and the thought process along the way is made available to everyone. I wanted to show that to candidates — to set expectations of what it would be like to work here from the get-go. That meant being transparent whenever we could, wherever we could, during the interview process. Including:
- Transparency on job ads including salaries and realistic expectations of the job. I’m still SO shocked that posts about salaries being shown on job ads get so much engagement on LinkedIn. Like, so shocked. How this isn’t standard practice by now is beyond me.
- Transparency about the interview process. This is an area we’ve been through a couple of iterations with — we had it on the job ads, then I wrote a blog and we took it off the job ads and directed people to the blog once they’d applied (the thought process being we could go into it in more detail on the blog), now we’ve added it back on to the job ads again and still direct applicants to the blog for more detail — win-win.
- Transparency on phone screenings. This is a HUGE one for me in terms of providing a good CX. Being honest about what it’s like to work here — the good and the bad. I don’t want someone joining and being miserable when things aren’t what they expected, and I especially don’t want to be the cause of that misery. I care about people being happy at work — that’s why I’m in this profession. So, being as honest as possible about everything. If the candidate self-selects out, that’s a win to me. We’ve not wasted precious time (ours and theirs) interviewing, and we’ve not lost £££££ training and onboarding someone who’ll ultimately leave. Even better, it means the people who continue see the challenges they’ll be facing as opportunities for their own growth and professional development. My Dad always says “There are no problems, only solutions” (love you Dad). Definitely a good mindset to have when you work at a start-up.
- Transparency during interviews. I basically waxed lyrical about what I’ve written above to hiring managers, to make sure they understood that mindset when going into interviews. I’ve built it into our interview training — it’s mentioned numerous times 😅
- Transparency about the next steps. At the end of every interview stage, we’ll set expectations as to how long candidates will be waiting for feedback, and when roughly the next interview would take place if all goes well.
Building a speedy candidate experience
Speaking of next steps, another one of our values is Move Quickly. As a startup, our main advantage is speed and agility — and that doesn’t just apply to building products, but to the interview process as well. As a candidate, it is agonizing to be sat waiting for feedback for two weeks — but it can also be really deflating and cause that positive momentum and excitement to shudder to a halt. We try to…
- Give feedback quickly. We aim for feedback at every stage to be within 24–48 hours, and sometimes it’s even quicker than that. We want the feedback we give to actually be useful, and guidance around how to give feedback is built into our interview training for hiring teams.
- Move quickly. As a TA team, we measure and track time to hire (how long from application to contract signed), and have SLAs set within our applicant tracking system so can try to make sure no one is sitting around waiting for feedback.
- Proactively reduce blockers. We book interview slots in the hiring team’s diaries to ensure we can move quickly if we need to progress someone to the next stage
Building an inclusive candidate experience
I don’t think you can have a good candidate experience without it being an inclusive candidate experience. One of our values is Inclusivity is Non-Negotiable, and I wanted to make sure we were showcasing that we are an inclusive and supportive employer to everyone we speak to by…
- Having salaries on job ads like I mentioned above. It’s no secret that having salaries on job ads can help in reducing gender and racial wage gaps. When salaries are kept secret, there’s potential for unequal pay for the same roles based purely on negotiation skills or biases. Having salary bands on job ads makes sure that everyone, irrespective of their background or negotiation capabilities, receives a fair offer if we get to that stage.
- Not asking current salary. We ask “What are you looking for in your next job?”. Not all candidates come with the same level of negotiation skills, knowledge about industry standards, or confidence to ask for a higher wage. And if they can’t do that here, with our ridiculously friendly and supportive TA team — chances are they haven’t negotiated well in previous jobs. Not asking current salary levels the playing field and empowers anyone who may have been historically underpaid.
- Having diverse interview panels where possible. It helps minimise bias (everyone has their own unconscious bias, so this helps counterbalance those biases). Diversity brings a range of experiences, viewpoints, and problem-solving approaches, so a panel with diverse backgrounds can assess candidates from multiple angles, leading to more well-rounded and fair evaluations.
- Offering flexibility for anyone who needs it. We ask on application, and again at every interview stage if there are any accommodations candidates would like us to make. This is a basic one but something we only started doing in the last year!
- Putting structured hiring in place. This is something we’ve iterated on over the past few years, but last quarter is when we made the biggest and latest changes. We now have an interview questions library with the skill or competency being assessed, then questions and what good answers look like mapped to it. We rewrote our scorecards to make sure we’re assessing all candidates fairly and against the same criteria (the skills needed to be successful in the role).
- Delivering unconscious bias training. This is a huge part of the interview training we deliver, and it’s the one thing that people have said is the most useful when they give feedback on the training. It’s something that’s in all of us — it’s how our brains evolved to make quick decisions which we relied upon in the past, so being aware of our biases and not letting them make decisions for us is really important in building an inclusive hiring process.
Not stopping when the hiring process ends
Whether or not a candidate gets the job, our focus on candidate experience doesn’t end. For those joining us, we have regular catch-ups during notice periods, and again set clear, transparent expectations about what will happen next, and what the first day and first weeks will look like.
We’ve got onboarding guides, and we’ve been working on improving our onboarding process including getting feedback to enable us to keep iterating and improving on our candidate experience and onboarding process (full blog on this to come shortly so watch this space!).
The TA member that’s hired that candidate checks in with them once they’ve joined the business at two and eight weeks, to make sure they’re settling in OK and to keep that relationship going.
If a candidate doesn’t get the job but we think they’d be a great fit, we try to keep in touch. We’ve hired several people who didn’t get the job the first time around by keeping in touch and reaching back out once a job that’s a better fit becomes available.
Constant iteration and improvement
There are a lot of things we do to improve the candidate experience, and we definitely didn’t do all of these things even this time last year! It’s an evolution; constantly looking for how we can improve and make things even better for our candidates.
We always ask for feedback — at every interview stage via phone or email, and when the interview process ends via a candidate NPS survey to find out what’s going right and what’s going wrong.
We can always improve — and the good thing is that we want to improve. We care about candidates and their experiences when they interview with us — interviews can be scary and anxiety-inducing, and we understand that. We know everyone is at their best when they are comfortable and at ease — and that’s what we aim for with every candidate we speak to.
To find out more about life at Street Group, follow us on LinkedIn, see what our team are saying on Glassdoor, or visit our careers site.
