We Applied to 140 Customer Service Roles at North America’s Largest Banks and this Is What We Learned About The Candidate Experience. What You Need to Know About Your Job Application Process
Hello,
Please enjoy our new recruiting landscape report for the finance sector.
We struggled to find current research, so we conducted our own on the candidate experience at North American banks.
To uncover meaningful results we applied to 140 jobs.
This report provides a deep dive into the recruiting process of key financial institutions in the North American market. You might be surprised by what we found.
This report summarizes examples of great candidate experience as well as areas for improvement.
Enjoy. John Dawson.
Executive Summary for Candidate Experience for Banks
As the finance sector continues to be a strong source of economic growth, recruiting for financial institutions faces a new set of challenges.
These challenges include competition for hires from tech-based companies like startups as well as the emerging fintech sector. In addition, diversity and inclusion is a priority across industries. For financial institutions, there’s an especially strong incentive for their workforces to reflect the diversity of their customer base.
Today’s candidates have a consumer mindset: they want fast and easy access to information and they want it on demand. This has placed candidate experience as a top recruiting priority.
As you know, candidate experience is a candidate’s overall evaluation of the hiring process from sourcing, screening, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding. Its evaluation is made up of subjective measures such as the ease of application and the attractiveness of your employer brand and objective measures such as time to first contact and time to fill.
Across 35 North American banks and more than 140 job applications, here are the three most significant findings:
Average candidate experience: B
Only 31% of employers send an email when the candidate has been passed over.
The average time to close a req is 24.7 days.
Competitive Analysis of Candidate Experience for Banks
Leading banks are sending an immediate reply and allowing candidates to check the status of their application. However, most are falling behind on ease of application and time to close the requisition.
CareerBuilder found that in addition to an automated reply, 84% of candidates also expect a personal email response.
Unfortunately, the volume of applicants makes this impossible. Many companies are solving this problem by employing chatbot technology that follows up with applicants with pre-qualifying questions and providing more information about the role.
The second most requested feature from job seekers is “notification if passed over.” To avoid the dreaded “black hole”, consider adding an automated email informing candidates the role has been filled and encouraging them to apply to other roles at your organization.
The lowest hanging fruit for improving your candidate experience is speeding up your recruiting process by automating time-consuming manual tasks. Recruitment automation software can help you speed up screening by using AI to learn the job requirements and then finding resumes of candidates who fit the qualifications.
With the recent hiring discrimination lawsuits in the finance sector, banks should be investing in tools to help reduce or avoid unconscious bias during their recruiting process.