The customer service experience is written about everywhere lately.
Not necessarily positively, either.
Cases in point:
The Twitter handle @IHateUSPS does nothing but rant about the United States Postal Service (seriously, NSFW here folks).
Chicago Transit Authority fails are posted daily.
This 2007 article recaps some of the most epic customer transgressions in the last decade.
These examples prove several things:
One) You better treat people well. If you can’t give them exactly what they want, you need to make a (really) good effort.
Two) No one is safe from a customer’s backlash. The internet makes this easier than ever.
Three) You are always being watched.
Providing a positive customer service experience is paramount to any service-based industry, but turns out it’s also essential to recruiting and retaining top talent.
The Candidate’s Experience
Think about it. Who wants to accept a job for a company after they’ve had a negative hiring experience? Like the old saying goes, ‘You never get a second chance to make a first impression.’ As much as this hold’s true for the candidate (there already has been a lot written about that), it also applies to the company doing the hiring. Here are some things that can leave a sour taste in an applicant’s mouth:
- Insanely slow communication
- Ridiculously long applications
- Internet tests that turn out to be timed AFTER the candidate has logged in
- Rude interviewers
- Non-transparent hiring practices
- Not notifying a candidate when they don’t get a position
- Illegal interview questions
As RJ Frasca, Director of Marketing and Communications at Active Screening expertly explains, candidates want to feel validated and excited about the application and interview process. “A better candidate experience will help you in many ways; whether its better word-of-mouth about working at your company, more candidates wanting to work for you, or their acceptance of your offers of employment. Ultimately there is no downside to improving the recruitment process in general,” he wrote here.
Treat Candidate’s Like a Client
If you want top talent you need to treat candidates like clients. Make them want the job as much as they need a job. As far as background screening goes that means give it a ‘KISS’ – Keep It Simple, Silly.
Like what we do with ACTivate.
ACTivate is a centralized background screening solution that serves as a platform for running a variety of checks and storing them in a user-friendly yet secure location. It’s a one-stop-shop for your screening needs, and transparent enough to keep candidates’ pleased with their background check experience. ACTivate is a single sign-on platform that can be customized to use all, or some, of these options:
Applicant Entry
Integrated payments
Clinical services
Compliance tools
E-Verify
Systems Integration
Reverified Results You Can Trust
Something Active Screening does that many other third-party screening companies don’t do, is re-verify results. We do this to ensure that we have consistent identifying qualifiers and consistent results.
We know how devastating a false result could be to a candidate. Not only does it keep a candidate from a job but it’s discouraging and makes the Consumer Reporting Agency as well as the company doing the hiring look bad.
So, next time you’re hiring make sure you have all the tools to create a positive customer or candidate experience. After all, nobody wants to end up included in a story like this.