Articles

Candidate and Employee Experience Still Matter

Talent Board has been measuring candidate experience for the past nine years, and we’ve been fortunate because we’ve been doing it in a growth market with many consecutive years of job growth. However, as we all know now, that’s no longer the case, and due to the coronavirus impact, it’s changing every day.

According a continuing coronavirus at work survey we’ve been running since the beginning of March, employers tell us that hiring being impacted moderately has gone up 129%, and that hiring being impacted severely has gone up an incredible 1,800% (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Is the current health crisis impacting your company’s current hiring plans?

 

Only 12% have told us they’re laying off and/or furloughing employees, but we know that will unfortunately increase. Already over 3.3 million have been laid off to date because of the COVID-19 impact. Also, 55% told us they’re still hiring (see below for examples of companies that are), but 45% told us they’re freezing hiring, and that number has been going up throughout the month of March. We’ll see how this progresses when we update the survey again in April.

We’re in uncharted waters now because of this health care crisis, and yet, we believe that candidate and employee experience will still matter more than ever because we now have millions of people laid off, with more on the way – and how we treat our candidates and employees today will define our businesses and our brands for years to come.

Many HR and recruiting leaders and their teams in our CandE community and beyond are doing what they can to mitigate this, with empathy, transparency and positive communication and action, and we thank you all.

For those organizations still hiring, we’ll keep spreading the word. That includes CVS Health, Walmart, Amazon, Sodexo, Kimberly-Clark, Sharp Healthcare, Safeway, Home Chef, Guardant Health, Trinity Health, most healthcare providers actually, and many others.

Like many others in our space, we continue to compile coronavirus resources and recommendations for organizations big and small across industries from a variety of caring sources, and you can find those here

Also, a big thank you to healthcare professionals and first responders for doing their best to keep us safe and healthy. And another big thank you to teachers everywhere who are doing their best to keep our children learning during these trying times. We’ve been homeschooling for 2 weeks now and you’ve never been more appreciated. Who wants to do Eureka math anyway? Am I right?!?

Lastly, thank you all for social distancing to help flatten the curve in order to decrease the spread of this deadly virus.

Bless you all. Be safe and keep helping each other.

Kevin Grossman
President
Talent Board

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