How Treating Candidates as Clients Led to The Bozzuto Group Winning a Candidate Experience Award

Does your company deliver a candidate experience that is easily understood and constantly providing a positive experience for everyone involved in the hiring process?  If not, you’re probably missing out on top talent for your business.  The last thing you want to do is leave job seekers uncertain of where they stand in the hopes of landing a new position, therefore, opening the door to criticism of your company.

The Bozzuto Group, is a privately held, integrated real estate services organization. According to Bozzuto, the company creates quality homes and extraordinary communities—some 35,000 residences to date—while maintaining the utmost respect for the environment. They pride themselves on providing outstanding service and consistent value for customers and partners.  The Bozzuto Group not only builds quality structures, but quality partnerships, and employs over 1,000 people.  In addition, the organization’s candidate experience has been recognized as a model for success in recruitment, which is why it was named a 2012 Candidate Experience Award Winner.

Now in its third year, The Candidate Experience (CandE) Awards and benchmarking program is designed to evaluate the job candidate experience companies offer through their recruitment cycles and honor those companies that implement outstanding strategies to provide a consistent and positive experience for jobseekers. The CandE Awards program consists of three survey rounds designed to capture and evaluate a company’s recruitment processes and practices that impact the candidate experience. Companies that complete the first round submission process receive a complimentary Employer Benchmark Report, and those that meet the standard for candidate experience are invited to advance in the competition.  The CandE Awards program is complimentary and confidential, and all CandE Award winners will be celebrated at the HR Technology Conference in Chicago this October.

Employers interested in competing or receiving benchmarking data must complete their applications by June 28, 2013. To learn more about the Candidate Experience Awards and the application process, please visit http://www.thecandes.org/apply.

The Candidate Experience Awards (the CandE Awards) was created by veterans of the recruiting industry to help employment candidates have a better experience when they apply for work.  Although the CandE Awards is a competition, it exists to enable any company to benchmark and improve their candidate experience.  The organization behind the CandE awards is the Talent Board, a non-profit research organization.  The Talent Board recognizes that finding new employment is inherently stressful for most job seekers and their families.  Its mission is to help employers and candidates to have a more effective, efficient, and humane exchange during the recruiting process.  The Talent Board believes that the best way to improve candidate experience is to provide corporations with research that helps them to benchmark and improve their operation.

Here is what Kristen Reese, Vice President of Talent Management at The Bozzuto Group, says about why her company applied for the Candidate Experience Award.

Aside from being a company that is deeply committed to continuous improvement (one of our core values is “Perfection as goal worth pursuing”), we also believe that employee engagement starts at the first point of contact with the company… as an applicant. In Talent Acquisition, the candidate is our customer. The candidate experience award allows us to measure “our customers” perception of the quality of their experience which is inevitably more important than our own. It also gives us tangible data to influence process improvement.

Reese also shares what makes her company unique, yet important with respect to the candidate experience.

I would say we have strived to maintain a candidate experience that is both consistent and transparent and have deployed a work-flow around hiring that yields a positive user experience, not just for candidates, but for the various people within our organization that touch the hiring process. While we may not have the opportunity to speak with or meet every applicant, we have established a variety of “touch points” to minimize the possibility of someone not being aware of their status in the consideration process.

–Article by William Frierson, staff writer for CollegeRecruiter.com, the leading niche job board used by college students searching for internships and recent graduates hunting for entry-level jobs and other career opportunities. Steven Rothberg, president and founder of CollegeRecruiter.com, is a member of the 2013 Candidate Experience Council which helps to steer the future of the CandEs awards and benchmarking program by drawing on the expertise and knowledge of the HR community’s thought leaders.