How Listening to Candidates Led to Informatica Corporation Winning a Candidate Experience Award

In a world where many people like to talk, listening is a key skill we should practice.  Companies searching for top talent can focus their recruitment efforts on this idea.  By choosing to listen to applicants, they can improve the candidate experience.

Informatica Corporation is the world’s number one independent provider of data integration software. Organizations around the world rely on Informatica to realize their information potential and drive top business imperatives. Informatica Vibe, the industry’s first and only embeddable virtual data machine (VDM), powers the unique “Map Once. Deploy Anywhere.” capabilities of the Informatica Platform. Worldwide, over 5,000 enterprises depend on Informatica to fully leverage their information assets from devices to mobile to social to big data residing on-premise, in the Cloud and across social networks.

For the professionalism of their human resources department and commitment to establishing a quality recruitment process, Informatica Corporation received recognition 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 Brad Cook, Vice President of Global Talent Acquisition at Informatica, says about why his company applied for the Candidate Experience Award.

A few things are certain, death and tax and to add to the list is ATS’s don’t make it easy on our candidates to apply for jobs. The CandE gave me insights into how horrible we all make it for everyone, and gave further insights into how we could easily address many of the challenges our talent deals with. I love this quote from a candidate we didn’t even hire “If everything else at INFA is as well thought-out as the application site and process, I am even more convinced I want to work with you all!”

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

What do we do that’s unusual: I think we listen. We survey our seekers at different steps along the process and address issues as they arise in a timely manner. Our Philosophy is to always be improving the candidate experience, whether it be the early in the apply process or during the onboarding stage or anywhere in between. I want the job seeker to feel like they are the most important person to us, and in fact that are!. They are the talent that can help us grow and prosper.

–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.