Business leaders are all too aware of the challenges they face in finding and attracting new talent into their workforces. Across all sectors, organisations are negotiating severe skills shortages and an ever more competitive, employee-driven labour market.
In this environment, it’s critical that employers make a good first impression on potential hires. And in most cases, it means delivering a seamless and engaging digital experience.
Research by Cisco AppDynamics finds that jobseekers now use an average of six apps or digital services when looking for or applying for a new job – and this figure increases to eight in the U.S. and nine in India. From jobs sites and social media platforms through to employer career pages and review sites and email platforms, people are using applications and digital services for every element of their job search. And as their reliance on applications has increased, so too have their expectations of how these apps should perform.
Significantly, many jobseekers now report that employers have only one chance to impress them with their applications and digital services. And if these services don’t meet their expectations or perform as they should, then as many as 64% claim it would put them off working for the organisation in question. We’ve reached a stage where the entire candidate experience can be determined by the quality of somebody’s first digital engagement with a potential employer.
Digital experience is essential to create a good first impression with job seekers
The fact that almost two-thirds of jobseekers are deterred from applying for a job because of a bad digital experience brings into sharp focus the need for organisations to ensure their recruitment-focused applications and digital services are optimised at all times. Whether it’s job vacancy pages on their websites, specialist career sites or messaging and email tools to support the recruitment process, employers can’t afford any slip-ups when it comes to digital experience.
97% of employees and job seekers state that it’s important that the apps and digital services they use when looking for and applying for jobs provide a fast and seamless experience, and 69% declare it very important.
The reality is that expectations for brilliant, seamless digital experiences have skyrocketed as people have seen the incredible quality of applications that are now being offered by the world’s most innovative brands. We’ve become far more sophisticated and selective about the apps and digital services we use. We know what’s possible, and we’ve come to expect the very best every time we use an app - it doesn’t matter whether we’re streaming a movie, shopping online or applying for a job.
Worryingly for employers, reactions to bad digital experiences are now very strong. 73% of people admit that if the apps they were using to find and apply for a new job didn’t perform properly, it would leave them feeling anxious and angry. And as we’ve seen, job seekers aren’t willing to give second chances before making their minds up about a potential employer - they are totally unforgiving.
IT teams need observability to deliver the digital experiences required to attract new talent
Evidently, organisations need to prioritise application availability and performance to deliver the seamless digital experiences that job seekers value so highly. They can’t afford any disruptions or downtime; otherwise, they risk alienating a large section of their potential talent pool.
Currently, however, IT teams are facing a monumental challenge managing an ever more dynamic and fragmented IT estate. Most technologists don’t have unified visibility across hybrid environments and are unable to see a clear path for applications running across on-premises and cloud technologies. As a result, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to identify and troubleshoot issues before they impact end users - whether that be job seekers, current employees or customers. The risk of disruption to their applications is dramatically heightened, as are the chances that potential new hires will therefore be deterred from applying for a job.
This is why it’s now so critical that IT teams have full and unified observability spanning across all IT environments - both cloud native and on-premises. Technologists need a solution that gives them complete visibility of the entire application path, where application components are running across hybrid environments. They also need to be able to monitor the health of key business transactions distributed across their technology landscape so that they can rapidly pinpoint the root cause of issues and expedite resolution.
With unified observability in place, organisations can ensure that their recruitment-focused applications and digital services are operating at peak performance at all times. And in doing so, they will present a far more attractive proposition for job candidates. Indeed, 78% of people state they want to work for employers that provide brilliant, seamless digital experiences throughout the recruitment process.
In a digital world where first impressions matter so much, employers need to grasp this opportunity and focus on digital experience as a way to attract potential hires from that very first engagement.