How Keeping Open and Transparent Communication Led to PepsiCo, Inc. Winning a Candidate Experience Award

How important is feedback to your company as it relates to the candidate experience?  While your audience may not always say what you want to hear, it can give you food for thought.  As a result, a better recruitment process can be delivered, along with an experience that applicants will appreciate.

PepsiCo, Inc. is a leading global food and beverage company whose mission is to be the world’s premier consumer products company, focused on convenient foods and beverages globally.  Employing nearly 300,000 employees worldwide, PepsiCo is proud to have products available in more than 200 countries and territories with 22 of those brands generating more than $1 billion each in annual retail sales.

In addition, open and transparent communication with its candidates brought recognition to PepsiCo as 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 Chris Hoyt, Director of Global Talent Engagement & Marketing at PepsiCo, says about why his company applied for the Candidate Experience Award.

At PepsiCo we work very hard to both hire the best talent in the world and understand what’s important to career seekers everywhere.  That’s why we’ve taken part in the Candidate Experience Awards since the initial launch in 2011.  It’s never been about the “award” as much as it’s always been about the incredible opportunity to review the deep level of data collected from our own audience as well as other participating companies.

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

As a result of the feedback we’ve received from the CandE’s our teams have not only improved some of the candidate messaging communicated from our recruiters and applicant tracking systems but we’ve also revised content found on our career sites.  Additionally, we’ve changed how we curate content that targets our career seekers in social channels – addressing hot topics that were brought to light through the survey responses and that we may have otherwise overlooked.

–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.