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Feb 24, 2016

It’s here!

The 2015 Talent Board North American Candidate Experience Research Report was published a couple of weeks ago. And if you have any interest at all in the relationship between the experience your employment candidates in the application process and your ability to actually hire the right talent, this report is a gold mine!

Written by Madeline Laurano and Kevin W. Grossman, it’s a great read and full of useful data points.

Actionable research

As far as research reports go, it’s well designed, the graphics are strong, and the data is incredibly useful. The table of contents breaks out the data into three (3) overarching categories:

  • Attract;
  • Recruit;
  • Hire.

And then within each of those three categories, each has the following sections:

  • What Candidates Want;
  • What Employers Are Doing;
  • A Candidate Experience Case Study;
  • Key Recommendations: What CandE Awards Winners Do Better.

This is a very useful structure that makes the research actionable. Case studies from CandE Award winners include Capital One, AT&T, Cumming, Hydro Québec, Comcast, and Sonos. Each of them is full of detail about what they actually do. These are among the most useful case studies I’ve seen in a long time.

Top takeaways employers need to think about

The Top 10 key takeaways from the 2015 North American CandE Research Report are:

  1. Most employers are not making a first impression with candidates.
  2. Candidates are becoming more sophisticated.
  3. Job boards are not dead.
  4. Mobile apply is still lagging.
  5. Communication with candidates is very weak.
  6. Employers do not offer enough opportunities for candidates to showcase skills, knowledge and experience.
  7. Employers are letting more candidates through the funnel.
  8. Employers are making interviewing more efficient.
  9. Employers are automating the onboarding stages.
  10. Onboarding is still a missed opportunity for the candidate experience.

Here’s a great example of the ease of getting to the useful data from the Attract/What Employers Are Doing section. It opens with this observation, “Employers often have little insight into what the candidates want and what they find valuable.” And follow it up with this chart:cand-exp-2015-2

A catalyst for change

This is pretty interesting and helpful information for organizations who are ready to step up to the challenge of being better and more effective talent attractors. There are a number of these kinds of aha! data points in the report that will not only get you thinking — they’ll get you acting.

The Talent Board is the brain child of Elaine Orler, Ed Newman and, of course, Gerry Crispin. With these three big brains behind the action, it’s no wonder this is such valuable information.

I encourage you to download the report here. I’m guessing you’ll make more than one change to your talent acquisition processes as a result.

This originally appeared on China Gorman’s blog at ChinaGorman.com.