What Does Candidate Experience Even Mean? | @MarkMansour01 on The #SocialRecruiting Show

Candidate experience: we can do better!

This week on the show was very much an Australian tag-team as the super-charged, Mark Mansour joined Katrina and me for a chat about candidate experience. As Mark is a passionate advocate for the candidate, you will need headphones on to watch/listen to this show in the office – it might fail the bleep-test as swearing “comes naturally”.

For those of you not familiar with Mark, he’s a talent acquisition leader and founder of the SydRecMeetUp who started his career in recruitment hiring ‘mini Mark’s’ for a Telecoms company; fast-forward to present day and he has a wealth of experience having worked for global brands such as Macquarie, IBM and Samsung.

Mark opens with the observation that

“Recruiters really aren’t taking the time to invest in themselves” and how his “whole approach to candidate experience is through being in those shoes.”

Not impressed with his own experiences as a candidate, he decided to build his own recruitment processes “with empathy in mind”.

“A lot of recruiters are stupid!”

Focusing on the value that recruitment teams should deliver, Mark gets frustrated with in-house teams as they “get to speak to the team and understand what makes them successful” and he advises,

“You need to leverage this stuff. If you don’t, why the f@*k are you in recruitment?”

Acknowledging that “candidate experience is a hard thing to sell” because you have to decide “what’s important?…is it your talent brand, employer brand, your workflow, testing, system or interview questions”; in short Mark tells us, “everything is as important as the other”.

If that wasn’t enough, below you’ll hear Mark talk about:

• Who trains the recruiters?
• The hazards of ghosting candidates  
• Consulting with the C-Suite 
• Hiring Manager intake meeting 101
• Tips on how to revitalise your CV 
• Investing in recruitment teams