Bryan Adams, CEO & Founder, Ph.Creative
In 2014, Virgin lost 7,500 customers as a result of direct candidate rejection or poor candidate experience. Through market research and analysis we were able to put a price on this figure: 7,500 lost customers translated to roughly £4.4m in lost revenue.
The question remains: what can brands do to tackle the widespread issue of consumer loyalty after poor candidate experience?
Marketing & Recruitment
At Ph.Creative, @phcreative we used our marketing expertise to cut to the heart of the problem. In marketing, we’re all quite familiar with the idea of a customer experience journey. Broken down into its simplest form, a customer experience journey is simply the process of analysing every step in a customer’s journey to ascertain how they feel, what they’re thinking and whether or not progression is as smooth as possible. All of this information is gathered to craft a more memorable and engaging customer experience.
This is where it gets interesting. If you change the word ‘customer’ to ‘candidate’ we have exactly the same guiding principles in play. That’s how, as a marketing agency, we have been able to apply our industry expertise and insight to shake up the world of recruitment and talent acquisition. It starts by placing the candidate at the heart of all our actions; the process only works by understanding the experience while standing in their shoes.
Hollywood Formula for Recruitment Marketing
As an avid film lover, I’ve long been fascinated by the perennial success of Hollywood stories, which continue to enchant and capture the hearts of millions worldwide. This passion led me to ask myself, “How can the success of the Hollywood script be applied to business and the candidate journey in particular?”
Throughout every sector, there seems to be some stand-out brands that are brilliant at telling stories. Every Hollywood script follows a similar process – the hero (candidate) is drawn into a journey (candidate application process) by the mentor (the brand or company). Each phase of a Hollywood film serves as a parallel to the candidate experience journey, and thinking in story helps to identify the ‘moments between the moments’. Companies need to guide the candidate on the path towards recruitment – this means being actively aware of situations that will test the candidate. Just as the heroes in our favourite films are subject to difficult moments that must be overcome, so are candidates in the recruitment process.
The Moments between the Moments
The challenge of modern recruitment, just like the customer experience journey, lies in the way we approach the problem; it’s not about candidates, customers or B2B and B2C, it’s about the basic principles of understanding people, their behaviours and what drives and influences these individuals. This is where we cross over from marketing to HR and see that both can be addressed in the same way.
Marketers have long tried to track the invisible steps in the path to purchase that are often overlooked. It’s this fundamental idea that has helped our marketing agency disrupt and drive forward change in the HR sector. Often, it takes outside-the-box thinking to identify problems and present a solution to fix them. In our dealings with different brands, we have found the answer: by using what we already know about the customer experience journey, along with the useful tools that come with Hollywood storytelling, we can help create candidate experience journeys that are much more engaging and seamless.
This fusion not only helps identify the best talent for the job, but can save brands millions of pounds in revenue, as unsuccessful candidates no longer vent their frustration by boycotting certain brands. It all returns to the seminal purpose of what we try to do as marketers: look at situations from the consumers’ perspective.
By applying this to recruitment, we’ve shown how the essential principles of marketing can impact industries far beyond our immediate scope.
