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What defines a “wow” depends on the shopper and type of store, but hassle-free customer support is at the top of the list, according to a recent study.

Young talent are not scared to navigate an all-virtual recruitment process. How can employers ensure they offer an outstanding virtual candidate experience?

Improving the hiring experience at the most painful stage of the hiring process: candidate rejection

This year will continue to bring groundbreaking challenges – but also opportunities to commit to a future of data-driven decision making.

Here's a fun story! You spend months launching an EVP, you build our comms and messaging and candidates seem to really respond to it. Recruiters are using it, talking about how collaborative you are as a culture, how supportive you are. Your words show up in the job postings, recruiter outreach, comms messaging and everything is going great! Then the candidate you've convinced to interview based on that idea of collaborative culture meets your hiring manager who stares at their phone the whole interview. your efforts have been wasted! Worse, that candidate is going to tell everyone on a rating site! This is all to say, don't forget the power your hiring manager has to adding to your employer brand. Which also means, you need to engage them and get them on board. So here are some thoughts on how to educate your hiring manager.

I'm on record as saying that candidate experience is an often-misunderstood (and over-valued) concept, that (much like EB itself) it isn't something you buy or implement, but is a reflection of who you are and how you operate. Great candidate experience should show off your values and the real experience of working there, not just be obsessed with some vague notion of "white glove service." So I love it when other publications talk about CX from the same experience.

While candidate experience is impacted by every aspect of recruiting, the number one recruiting focus for 2020 will be employer branding. In fact, 81% of all global companies we surveyed...

Not enough attention has been paid to "predictive analytics"when it comes to employer branding. Predictive analytics is the mechanics that suggests what movie you should watch next or what products you might also be interested in. Maybe not in a "you might also be interested in this job" way, but what about predicting what information and content a candidate needs to see next to make a decision on the company. By way of example, here are 7 emerging ways to use predictive analytics.

Most people still see the interview process as the means by which the company learns about the applicants, but the questions a company asks tell the candidate loads. Here's a list of 40 great interview questions you consider adding to your company's list.

Why should you think more like an anthropologist? Well, no brand can survive without feeling, sensing, and talking to their people. The anthropologist understands the development of humans in societies or cultures, which is what happens when people come together. That sounds like the sort of thing every employer brand pro should aspire to be.

Myself, I don't get too wrapped up in scripting the brand experience, mostly because I don't know how much you can really script the brand experience. But if you need to get a handle on the idea, here's a nice write-up on how to script your own.

We're reached peak-recruiting. As anyone with any real skill and a LinkedIn profile will attest, we've entered a world where recruiters can spam and annoy anyone with very little effort. It's time to pivot and reinvent your recruiting away from spamming and messaging and move towards building relationships. It's time to reinvent your recruiting.

Some interesting data from Talent Board on what candidates long for in their candidate experience. Spoiler: while most of us are focusing on sexy and cool programs when candidate really just want to feel like they've been heard.

Over at Branding Mag, there's an interesting conversation about how to create a sense of brand without a visual identity. The idea being that the experience itself is the brand. Can the experience of working somewhere be a clear brand? It's an interesting thought.

Usually, when we wonder, "why did someone apply and interview only to walk away from the offer?" we think about the question on an individual level. What was the issue with that person or interaction? But when you look more systemically, you might see that things like messaging, branding, and candidate experience timeline have just as much of an impact. CNBC asks why 50% of offers end up being rejected.

What are we getting wrong about attracting and hiring diverse candidates? That we treat them like they are special. Instead, focus on giving them a concrete and tangible reason for them to choose you. It's a pretty compelling argument.

I'm glad I finally get to link to an article on "how to enhance your candidate experience" without having to complain that there's more to candidate experience than "white glove." In this piece listing three ways to support your CX, the overarching theme is to provide and deliver more useful information to the candidate. Be it social signals, formal messaging and relationship-building.

The following will systematically assist you in building connected customer relationships. There are three parts. In the first part you need to diagnose The following will systematically assist you in building connected customer relationships.

This article over at RecruitingDaily hit on one of the reasons why focusing discussions on candidate experience always feels like a lot more promise than outcomes. They argument is that when most people talk candidate experience, they are thinking about "macro events," the big set pieces that occur in every (if not all) interview/hiring process. But when you over-index on macro experiences, you miss the power of the macro experiences and their ability to create an emotional connection with candidates.

You can't convince anyone of anything using only logic (see: reddit political forums, twitter political chats, et al). You need an emotional reaction, after which, the listener will find the logic to justify their new position. I ended up podcasting a bit about this idea, but here's a solid article if this is a subject that interests you.

interesting pieces about what employer brand really means. To Steve, the brand is the connection between the company and the employee.

This article should arm you with a better argument with tech recruiters and tech hiring managers at to why their normal way of hiring is deeeeeeply flawed. I point it out because tech recruiting is one of those places that doesn't always embrace the power of employer brand, and when you read this article, it should become pretty clear where the disconnect it.

If you are being forced to re-think your candidate experience (because you can't just have them show up to the office at the moment), here are some suggestions on leveraging human-centered design to re-invent the entire experience.

Yes, we all talk about hiring or recruiting funnels, and maybe we have heard that we're supposed to communicate different things at different stages of the funnel, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone show you what that might look like. This example over at Hubspot is more consumer focused, but it gives examples of how to communicate at the various stages of the funnel based on what someone's motivations might be.

What do job seekers care about in a pandemic? Based on multiple company's TA chatbots, it turns out that 47% of people asked what the company's response to COVID was, roughly double the number of people asking about hiring. This suggests that prospects are twice as interested in understanding who the company as they are in learning about a job. Second take: If a huge percentage of your traffic comes in via job posts (job-focused), maybe preemptively tell them about your COVID response up front?

I love talking about rejection letters (sorry... disposition messaging ...rolls eyes...) because they are deeply impactful messaging opportunities we tend to phone in. Which is why I loved this article about how Intel re-designed its rejection experience (and it is an "experience," is it not?).

PathMotion took a look at all the bot-driven conversations on its platforms to see what candidates wanted to know more about. This isn't what candidates said they wanted, it's what they asked for, so if you don't know what to add to your career site and social channels, this is a solid starting point for a content map. I will caution and say that Universum's data (day job alert!) agrees with a lot of these conclusions, they aren't equally true across the board for all audiences. Just keep that in mind.