How do employees judge the hiring process?
A poor interview process is costing organisations future talent and customers, according to a new report, as interviews make a comeback in the wake of rising artificial intelligence (AI) in the recruitment process.
Fresh findings from Textio and Kyle & Co revealed that a bad interview experience would stop 35% of jobseekers from buying from a company or reapplying to future roles.
The data comes amid a disconnect between how employers and jobseekers perceive the interview process.
Employers scored their own company's interview process at +48.25 on a standard recommendation scale. Job candidates, on the other hand, only gave it a +2.87 score, the very bottom of a passable employer brand.
In fact, 48% of jobseekers said their most recent interview process felt at least partly improvised, while seven per cent said their interview seemed to be "winging it."
But 88% of employers believe that their interviews are usually or always structured.
The way jobseekers perceive the interview process comes at a time when employers are bringing back the step as a measure to address the surge of applications that are assisted and generated with the help of AI.
"The way the hiring process is run has not kept pace with the volume of applications, cheating, fraud, and information overload that recruiting teams are dealing with. It also hasn't evolved to surface clear evidence about who can actually do the job," said Colleen Gallagher, CEO of Textio.
"You can't train away fraud or write a better interview guide to address all of the rising challenges and expectations being placed on talent teams."
How candidates judge interviews
The findings showed that only six per cent of jobseekers judge a hiring process on whether they got the job.
More than a third (35%) said they judge a hiring process as good based on how fair and consistent it felt, while another 31% judge it by how well the company communicated.
Only 10% of jobseekers said they judge a hiring process by how fast it moved and how respectfully they were treated, while a smaller eight per cent judge it by how honestly the role was represented.
"Candidates want more consistency and communication in hiring. They're getting thoughtless feedback or straight up ghosted instead," the report read.
Matt Charney, principal analyst at Kyle & Co, underscored the need for talent teams to distinguish between a recording and a record when it comes to interviews.
"What talent teams actually need is the ability to turn a conversation into structured, comparable evidence that holds up in a debrief, gets shared back to the candidate, and can be checked against how the hire actually performed," Charney said.
"That's the difference between a recording and a record. Our data says the organisations doing that are three times more likely to know whether their interviews work at all. Most companies have never asked."
