My inspiration for two upcoming book projects is “I Killed Pink Floyd’s Pig” by Beau Phillips. His book is an often-hilarious collection of short stories from a life spent in the music radio business. While I never drank beer from or with the late Dickie Betts nor discussed hedgehogs with Robert Plant, I enjoyed his story-telling style of brief (usually 1 to 2 pages) anecdotes. One book project is about things I’ve seen at many decades of attending and performing at rock concerts. The other is what I’ve seen or heard in job interviews, both as a hiring manager and candidate. Some of the candidate experience I’ve had don’t apply to either concept, so I’ve included a few in this post.

I was ghosted…and then hounded. In early March, I applied for a VP Marketing role at a healthcare SaaS company. Minutes later I received an autoreply email to confirm that my resume was in their system. That was the last I heard from them. Until yesterday. Yesterday morning – 4 months after I applied for their job – they sent me an email to participate in a survey about my candidate experience. I was at an offsite meeting in the morning, so I planned to complete the survey when I returned home. A few hours later they sent me a text to remind me to complete the survey. Now here’s where it gets a little obnoxious. After the text, they called me to remind me to complete the survey! Not a robocall, a real live call center agent called me. But in all these months I’ve heard nothing from them about the job, despite calling them several times to check on the status of my application. The agent who called me was apparently with their survey partner and knew nothing outside of the script. As a marketing professional who has been in the CX industry for years, I totally applaud the concept of surveying. But my candidate experience was practically nonexistent until yesterday. An email, a text, and a phone call within a few hours, to survey me on what? The company would have done better to follow up with candidates at points during the process. Opportunity squandered.

Do you have to kick me twice? Go ahead, send me a rejection email. Tell me I’m not a fit for this role. But please only tell me once. I’ve seen an increasing number of companies that send two or more rejection messages for the same role. Sending two identical emails is probably a glitch in your applicant tracking system, which is regrettable but it happens. I’ve seen Marketo, HubSpot, and Pardot do it too. But sending two different emails, sometimes a day or two apart, is just plain heartless. Come on employers, do better.

Master class in dissatisfaction. My worst application experience in years was applying to a marketing leadership role at a well-known healthcare company. Their application took more than two hours to complete. Not only did they require excruciating details such as the street addresses and phone numbers of every company I’ve ever worked for, their buggy application made me go back and re-key entire paragraphs. As I noted in a previous blog post, there are a lot of off-the-shelf Applicant Tracking systems out there now. No company should have to build their own. If it is not your core business, then work with an expert.

Bottom line – prospects and customers interact with your brand on multiple platforms. Companies have an opportunity to showcase their brand when inviting people to apply for jobs. Candidates are customers, too. Make the candidate experience so good that they’ll want to tell the world about your brand.