A good candidate experience is an important strategic means to attract relevant candidates in a scarce market. The good candidate experience has a butterfly effect on the market and can attract attention from more candidates if done well through a good reputation. Therefore, we believe we should implement and formulate the concept of the “candidate journey” on equal terms with that of the costumer journey. The good costumer journey breeds costumer leads, and the good candidate journey attracts talent through a self-sufficient pipeline of candidates that generates through word of mouth. We believe that a good candidate journey is a prerequisite to attaining an operant costumer journey as businesses can only succeed by virtue of their human resources.

It is vital that we as executive search professionals and front personnel individualize our approach to candidates. We are the first people they meet. Therefore, we must attract and treat the candidates with respect and an understanding of what is important to them if they are to become curious about a particular job and company. We represent the customer’s employer brand, and our recruiting craft and methods shall always be based on a good candidate experience. The candidate experience encourages candidate commitment, and it is commitment and motivation that drive the candidate to the goal – not persuasion or oversold messages. It is the candidate that must recognize if the job speaks to their motivation and interests. Therefore, our craft as executive search professionals, is to explore the match potential between the company and the candidate and ideally to try to create candidate commitment to a company before they have even seen the job spec.