The following transcript was taken from InSights, a staffing and recruiting podcast from Haley Marketing dedicated to providing quick-hitting takeaways on Digital Marketing and Recruitment Marketing. To listen to the episode, click play on the player above or visit the episode page [InSights] Are your phone systems killing your marketing and candidate experience?
Brad Bialy: At Haley Marketing over the last quarter, we’ve been deploying an initiative called our 21 as one campaign where we’re actively reaching out to all of our clients and past clients, to just check in and see how things are going.
Brad Bialy And while this has led to some incredible conversations, Matt, for me it’s also, and you, it’s uncovered a couple challenges. As we’re reaching out to some companies that we haven’t worked with in a couple of years, when Matt and I had a conversation last week, we knew we had to bring it to InSights.
Brad Bialy: Phone systems, in some cases, are killing the candidate experience. Matt, I’ll give you an example here. I had a call last week where I just reached out to somebody who had been in the Haley system for a while. Have I believe just website with us now. Reached out, physically couldn’t get somebody on the phone. I wanted to just chat and say, hi, see how things were going. And the phone system continued to route me down different paths. As I was trying to route to try to get to actually talk to somebody, it kept trying to push me back online to apply to a job or reach out to a contact form. And to be honest, it was incredibly frustrating. Had I been a candidate in that situation, I’m not sure I would have continued down the pipeline of going to that job board or reaching out via the contact form. I truly just wanted to talk to somebody. And Matt for sake of InSights, I think the point that I want to make here is that a lousy candidate experience at any point of the process ruins your marketing, ruins everything else that you’re doing.
You can have the best marketing in the world that is funneling thousands of applicants to your job board, to your website, whatever it might be. If at any point in that process though, there’s a gap, there’s friction. There’s something that just downright frustrates somebody. The top of the funnel, the marketing, everything else that you’re doing, doesn’t matter. It falls apart.
Matt Lozar: We joke a lot about reducing friction and about until 30 seconds ago, we only ever talked about it in an online capacity. That’s what this is exactly doing. We’re calling companies like internally Haley Marketing, we’re reaching out to our clients to try to talk to someone. And, usually, when you schedule calls with clients or people you work with, it’s scheduled and you know a phone number to call et cetera, or you do a Zoom call. It’s real simple for everyone to connect. But when you’re just reaching out out of the blue a little bit and you’re trying to call the number on the website, contact us number. And it’s playing a game of figuring out what number to push or just impossible to talk to someone, that’s increasing friction. And it was very interesting to see that challenge in being able to talk to a live person.
Brad Bialy: For us from a marketing standpoint, we’re always trying to make sure that we’re funneling the right candidates, the right prospects. Where we need to be better as an industry is making sure we’re understanding that prospects and candidates are going to apply or reach out how they want to. And regardless of the systems that you put in place that try to push people to one specific way, if I don’t want to come back to your website and I just want to talk to somebody on the phone and I can’t do that, I’m going to get frustrated. If I, Brad Bialy the applicant, only want to apply online and don’t want to talk to somebody and I can’t, I’m going to get frustrated. We need to make sure that we’re open to making sure that we’re allowing individuals to reach out how they want to on their terms. Otherwise, the process fails. If you think about a site like Amazon, you can physically buy a book in two clicks. What is your candidate experience like? Shop yourself, think through having a friend or a family member, a spouse, call you at the office one day or watch them do it and see what the process is like. Are they getting frustrated? Do they have the opportunity to speak to somebody? Do they have any friction in that process? And if so, write it down on a sheet of paper and then try to address it. Matt, I want to stress too. We’ve had hundreds of successful calls. This isn’t an industry-wide problem, but this is something that we needed to bring to InSights because we both noticed it. I know other team members noticed it. So it needs to be talked about.
Matt Lozar: It’s like the phones with a long online application. If you require six, seven, eight pages and 30, 40, 50, 100 fields to be completed for an application, you’re handicapping your chances of getting candidates. And a really bad combination would be hard to reach someone on the phone, hard to fill out an application. And your recruiters are saying, there’s no candidates. We’re not setting ourselves up for success.
Brad Bialy: So to wrap things up here, are your phone systems killing your marketing and candidate experience? It’s something that you need to look into and I would make it a Q2 initiative to think through all of the ways that a candidate or a prospect can reach out to you and go through that process and go through that flow. Can you apply to your job on mobile, on desktop? Can you apply to a job if you just call your office? Can you go through the website and navigate appropriately? If somebody is looking for you on Google for the first time, what do they see? Do you have an appropriate about us page? Do you very distinctly outline what services you offer, what jobs you offer? Is it aligned with who you are? You need to sort of audit yourself and you need to make sure that your phone systems aren’t hindering the marketing that is in place. Aren’t hindering the outreach that your recruiters or your team have in place. Make sure that everything is working for you and that there’s zero friction or at least minimal friction throughout the process.