What Does Good Candidate Experience Have to Do With Good Customer Service? 

As a recruiter, you think your primary focus is on finding the right talent to do the job. Indeed it is. But while talent greatly matters, so does the person behind the talent. In other words: When choosing a candidate, culture fit matters as much as requirement fit.

How?

Great culture means great employee experience, which means great customer service.

A great culture isn’t created by hanging nice quotes on your office walls. To build a great culture, you need the right people in your company, and the right people come into your company with the right hiring. In a sense, then, recruiters are very much responsible for the service a company’s customers get — because recruiters hire the candidates who build the company culture.

Feeling dizzy? Don’t worry, we will explain how this all works and how you can make sure to hire the right people for your company. To illustrate the point, we’ll use an example from Zappos, the online shoe retailer.

How to Keep Your Culture Thriving as You Scale and Recruit

1. Filter Candidates Early

If you look at what a company’s founding team is like, you can get a pretty good understanding of what they would be looking for when recruiting new people to work with. Most people these days want to work with people who are similar-minded and easy to interact with — essentially, people who could be their friends outside of work. So the first step in keeping your culture thriving is to analyze your existing team and find out what kind of people they would like to work with. Then, bring on those kinds of people. Make sure your diversity doesn’t take a hit while doing this; hiring too many people of the same background can end up hurting the company’s performance and culture.

You can also enforce a few parameters to which candidates must adhere before you even meet them. This helps you filter candidates out of the process early on, so that you can spend time focusing on the candidates who are more likely to meet your needs. For example, let’s say your company is looking to hire more junior candidates who are newer to the field. In that case, you can set an automation rule that any candidates with more than five years of experience should be rejected.

You can automate such scenarios easily if you have an applicant tracking system (ATS) like Freshteam in place. Check out how the Freshteam ATS can help in cases like these and more.

2. Train Candidates for Your Culture

Maintaining your company culture does not necessarily mean consistently hiring people who all share the same background and career path. Instead, what you need to do is find people who will fit your culture — people who have the ability to acclimate and become a part of it. Once you have these people, you can give them a stellar onboarding experience to help them understand your culture and expectations, and they can adjust and adapt accordingly.

If you onboard your employees in a way that makes them feel like part of your team, they will feel right at home. They will value your values, see the same vision, and deliver in the way you need them to.

How to Create a Good Employee Experience

There are a number of ways to keep your employees happy: giving them useful benefits, giving them a clear role and goal, and making sure they are happy with their colleagues by engaging them as a team. When you want to give your employees a great experience, the sky is your limit when it comes to making that happen.

As a reminder, if you want to achieve a good customer experience, you need to get your employee experience right. If making customers happy and giving them “wow” moments is your dream, you have to start by delivering great experiences within your own company. Who better to practice “wow” moments on than your own employees?

Present employees with “wow” moments right from the start through great hiring and onboarding experiences. Give people an employee experience that shows them just how passionate your company is about creating “wow” moments for anybody you work with, from your employees to your customers. There is no better way to get employees to share your vision. When you deliver “wow” moments to your employees, your employees will want to turn around and deliver “wow” moments to your customers, too.

Ways to Include Your Vision in Your Onboarding Process: The Zappos Method

Each company has its own unique vision, and each company has to make sure that every one of their employees also shares that unique vision. The right way to get that vision to your employees is by starting early, during onboarding.

We can all take Zappos as an example. Zappos strives to give the absolute best service and experience to its customers. How does it get employees to also strive for the same? Zappos starts by making every single hire go through the same training program. From the accountants to the baristas — as part of the onboarding process  — every one of them learns to make a personal emotional connection (PEC) with the people they interact with.

The goal of the training is quite comprehensive: Make sure that every employee understands customers’ requirements. Therefore, anyone in the company will be skilled and knowledgeable enough to take calls in case the company is ever running short on associates. And employees will also carry the lessons from the training into their own roles. For example, when developers go through this training, they might start to notice opportunities for improvement in the systems and tools created for the call center. Ideally, the developers would finish their training, go back to their desks, and start tweaking the tools to make it easier for call center employees to do their jobs.

It is all about the art of striking a balance between the employer’s needs and employee happiness. Besides setting benchmarks and having frequent check-ins with new employees, it is also imperative to embrace each new employee’s true nature. Doing so will help bolster team dynamics.

Sounds like a lot to take in, right? Well, it is not really that tough. Sure, finding the right candidates, filtering them through various steps, giving them a stellar onboarding experience, training them for what lies ahead, and managing them to ensure the good experience continues might feel like a lot, but it is actually not when you have the right tools to help you focus on things that truly matter, like your culture and the employee experience.

1. Find the right tool to help you source and filter applications and conduct a proper hunt for candidates. An ATS would do this for you.
2. Find the right tool to create an easy onboarding journey. Onboarding software can help you make the mundane stuff paperless and quick. That way, you can get to talking about what truly matters with your new hires on day one.
3. To continue managing your employees with ease, find yourself a human resources information system (HRIS) software.

Or: Try Freshteam, all-in-one HR software that comes with applicant tracking, onboarding, employee information management, and more. Streamline your HR efforts seamlessly from a centralized single dashboard, reducing your recruiter workload by up to 80 percent. Leave all the work to Freshteam so you can focus on your employee experience and improve your customer experience by tenfold, easily.

This article by Freshteam is built on the original article that first appeared on the Freshteam blog.

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