Welcome to the 2024 CandE Winner Case Study series.
Each year, the CandE Benchmark Research Program collects case studies from CandE Winners – the employers with above-average candidate experience ratings in our research. These CandE Winners answer the following questions:
- What recruiting and candidate experience improvements have you made?
- How did you build support and commitment to make these improvements?
- Which improvements were the most innovative?
- How will you use your CandE Award in your employer branding?
- Do you use any of your CandE data to quantify business impact?
These are the employers from our 2024 CandE Program that invested in improving their recruiting, hiring, and candidate experience, reaping the ultimate benefits of a positive business impact – candidates more likely to apply again, to refer others, to be a brand advocate, and to be a customer for consumer-based businesses.
This case study was from Alliance Technical Group. Since 2000, Alliance Technical Group has been solving the problems of environmental management and compliance for some of the foremost companies and brands in North America. From on-site testing and monitoring, to laboratory testing and regulatory strategy, they are pushing out the limits of what is possible.
If you’re interested in participating in the 2025 CandE Benchmark Research Program, you can learn more about it here.
- What recruiting processes and candidate experience key improvements have you identified and completed in the past 6-12 months? What data or evidence prompted you to make these changes? (Be as specific as possible with examples for each.)
Alliance has partnered with NAS Recruitment to create a comprehensive and appealing Careers site complete with new features for us such as a talent network and job alerts. We created and highlighted our employment value proposition and laid out our business opportunities clearly for candidates and job seekers.
In addition, we are using a full arsenal of tech support including UKG Recruitment Gateway, NAS Activate CRM, ZoomInfo, LinkedIn Recruiter, Indeed Recruiter, and Circa Diversity Catalyst. We used RippleMatch for college recruiting and determined that it was not a good fit for our needs. We currently use the free version of Handshake instead and hope to upgrade to the paid version soon. The investment in TA tech has been over $350K within the last year and we feel that it has really helped us keep applicant flow and attraction of good candidates at the forefront of our strategy.
We also took the time to evaluate the negative feedback from our candidate experience survey. The most common issue candidates reported is a lack of substantive communication during the hiring process. Many candidates pointed out that besides a “we have received your application” message, the survey was the first communication they had received from us. We also heard that this conveyed the feeling that their application was never actually reviewed.
As a result, we are very close to finalizing a new recruitment process within the recruiting gateway in UKG that will simplify the steps and stages. Also, we are creating auto messaging for most every step that doesn’t sound system generated – our system allows for mail merge type fields to be pulled into the auto messaging so it will sound like it’s personally coming from recruiters. When a recruiter moves a candidate disposition to a certain step, the message will automatically be sent and keep the candidate well informed. We are in the final building stages and will be testing shortly. We plan to initiate this new approach in December 2024 and thereafter pull weekly status reports that allow us to easily track the activities of the candidates and make sure everyone is being communicated with appropriately.
We are developing Recruiting Personas for high volume positions that we are validating with our hiring managers. This will help us really improve the approach to wooing and screening candidates to save time for all involved and in the end will create a better candidate experience. The Personas will lead us to a social media strategy that we think could be the first in our industry. This has also led us to pursue a former military recruiting strategy as we see it as a good fit for our needs. We are in the process of creating those plans as well.
- How did you build support and commitment within your team and the broader organization to make these improvements? How did you demonstrate and report on the importance of a quality candidate experience with your leadership team? (Be as specific as possible with examples.)
First, we celebrated our CandE Award win big-time! Our marketing department helped us craft a press release that was shared across the company. We have made LinkedIn posts both on our official company page as well as private team member posts to get the word out. We also placed our digital badge on our Careers site. With the win celebrated, we have also turned to analysis mode to be sure we are not resting on our laurels.
As a TA team, we have had multiple internal conversations about our survey results as well as presenting the high-level results to our executive team.
Just since talking about the feedback, we have seen increased attention to communication as a “Hawthorne Effect.” However, we won’t stop there. We have mentioned to our internal clients that we are making changes and in recent weeks have created an overall understanding of the steps and stages of the TA process with them in our bi-weekly meetings. They are supportive and have asked for more visibility for candidates within our system, which we have given with training, so they know how to navigate.
Outside of the overall candidate experience, where we were a few points higher than the benchmark during the survey collections, our highest score exceeding benchmark was the likelihood that a candidate would refer someone to our company based on their experience. This is something we shared with the TA team so they could continue to provide a referral worthy experience.
- Which of these improvements do you think are the most unique and innovative and why? How do you know that your changes are making a difference? What data or evidence validates the innovative improvements you made? (Be as specific as possible with examples for each based on your people, your processes, and your technologies, and include any candidate quotes that validate the improvements made.)
One of the most unique and innovative things we tried this year was targeted marketing campaigns. If people whose credentials matched our target audience within a certain geography were on certain social media sites, they were shown a click banner for our Careers site. Unfortunately, this did not garner any qualified candidates, but it was an innovative thing to try with our marketing partner (NAS Recruitment). Since we did not find this approach fruitful, we changed focus and ran a re-targeting campaign for people who visited our Careers site but did not click through to complete an application. This is in progress now and we hope to get better outcomes.
Our biggest improvement is still being worked on. Our entire recruiting process has been analyzed and is currently being entirely reworked. We have multiple team members pulling together to not only fix every step of the process but to also rewrite the communication that all our candidates will receive at every step along the way. We want applicants to still feel cared for, even if they are rejected due to an offer being extended to someone else. We want candidates to feel drawn to apply to our company again, even if at that point there may be better qualified applicants. We may have won the CandE Award but we recognize where candidates may feel like just another “number” and we want to ensure that we are a company they want to apply to again and again, even if they’re not offered a job, because they feel like the time they put into their application was valued.
Once we have the process solidified, we will work to maximize its effectiveness by monitoring the stages well and reacting in real time to challenges we face such as low applicant flow, poor applicant quality, and hiring manager resistance.
- Whether you’ve won your first CandE Award or multiple CandE Awards, how will you publicly use the CandE Award, and what it represents, in your employer branding and recruitment marketing? (Be as specific as possible with examples.)
This is our first CandE Award and we have proudly posted it internally on our intranet announcement site as well as featuring the win in our bi-monthly newsletter. We have also posted on LinkedIn. We are also displaying our badge on our Careers site. We want our candidates to know that it means we care about their experience, even if they are not extended an offer, because we all know that the job hunt is never fun. We also want our candidates to know that we value their feedback and want them to feel welcome to inform us of how we could have made their experience better.