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Companies and managers alike are always looking for ways to improve. Feedback conversations with employees are being held on the regular, but often they forget to utilize one group that is very important; the people who leave.

In the world of progress, nothing is as important as reflection. You need reflection to look back and see where there is room for improvement. Many managers and companies are already capitalizing on this by holding regular feedback meetings and one-to-one meetings, where both employees and managers openly speak about their experiences. If you are not doing this, then start doing it. Tomorrow. Seriously. The easiest way to improve your company is by tapping into the knowledge of your employees, so don’t let their talents go to waste. In this blog I will not pay attention to that, however. In this blog I will go into the importance of the feedback of the people who will actually leave your company and show you what you can learn from them.

Let’s start with: why?

Well, firstly, people who leave your company have nothing to ‘lose’, so they will be very forthcoming with what they think. In normal feedback meetings, employees are encouraged to be as open an up-front as possible. Although this sounds great, experience teaches us that employees can be a bit hesitant into saying everything that is on their mind in fear of retribution. This factor of retribution is not present at an ‘exit interview’, so your ex-employee will be open and honest.

Secondly, it is important to note that you can learn a lot from the reason why the employee is leaving. It might be possible that this new information helps you to prevent others from leaving for the same reasons as well. Often managers make assumptions as on why employees leave, instead of actually asking and understanding why they leave. This way they cannot effectively deal with possible problems in the internal organisation. Therefore, it is important to find out the true reasons in an exit interview.

Thirdly, it is important for your employer branding as a part of the employee experience. In an exit interview you can take up all sorts of matters which require closure before the employee leaves. Perhaps there are conflicts that need to be settled, equipment which has to be returned, or ongoing confidentiality clauses which have to be signed. Most of all it is a moment for your employee to reflect and express their thoughts and feelings. It is always good to give your employee the feeling that they are being heard, but it is even more important to actually listen (and act).

Still not convinced that it is important to have these exit interviews? Here are ten more reasons.

What to ask?

As said before, the main goal is to find out what the motivations are of the employee who leaves, but it is also good to unravel other possible problems in your organisation. So don’t be afraid to ask creative questions. Don’t make turn the interview in a acquisition and the atmosphere light-hearted to get your ex-employee to really open up. When having these exit interviews, then it is good to keep the questions uniform. Make sure that you are asking everybody the same questions, so that you can actually use the results. More on that later.

Here are some examples of questions that you might want to use:

• What is the reason you are leaving us? (obviously)
• Could you list a top three of reasons why you are leaving us?
• Is there anything we can improve as a company? Performance or cultural wise?
• Is there anything that your own department could improve?
• Is there anything that your manager can improve?
• If you would be owner of this company tomorrow, what would be the top five changes that you would make?
• If you would go back to the beginning of your time at our company, then what would you have liked to see differently during your time with us?
  

What’s next? Data.

Now that you know why it is important and which questions to ask, it is time to get to the interesting part: the data. To get an organised set of data, you will need to try and standardize the answers given by the ex-employees to get a clear picture. For example, if you ask the question “Why are you leaving us?” then you can get a very variety of answers as it is an open question. However, you can label the answers given so you can detect patterns. Answer labels for this question could include: “Atmosphere within company, Development possibilities, Prospect of better benefits, Personal reasons” etcetera.

One or two exit interviews will not give you enough information if you are dealing with possible internal problems. That is because it could just be that the couple ex-employees that you have interviewed might hold a grudge against you. However, if a certain pattern appears when more and more ex-employees point to the same problems, then you cannot hide behind the excuse of a coincidental common grudge anymore. So, volume is key here.

After having the right labels and enough volume, you are ready to analyse the data and draw the right conclusions to improve your company and tackle possible problems.

In conclusion

You should always hold exit interviews, not only because it adds to the employee experience, but you can also actually learn from them. This information can be valuable to retaining your future talent, tackle possibly hidden problems, and improve your company performance.

Do you need help with holding exit interviews, analysing the data, or implementing solutions to newly discovered problems? Get in touch with us and see what we can do for you.

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In this blog I have talked about the importance of a good candidate experience and that currently most companies are not getting it quite right. This is especially important to note as each candidate can either preach for or badmouth your brand. Therefore, it is paramount to improve the candidate experience and create future ambassadors for your brand.

In this blog I will give you some solutions towards how to improve your candidate experience and fix possible problems; to find or attract the right people and to give them the best experience of your brand.

Fixing the basics

So how do you improve your candidate experience, avoid candidate backlash and become a better employer overall? Well first, let’s look at the basics and start off with the recruitment profile. The recruitment profile is, in modern day companies, maybe one of the most recycled documents. Not only in terms of layout, but often also in terms of text. Now this in and of itself does not have to be a bad thing, but try and be specific in what you are looking for and avoid general qualities that we expect all functioning human beings to have. Remember, the recruitment profile is not only important to find the right person, but it is also a profile on which you should base your communication (more on that later).

In your recruitment profile you should be brutally honest in what you need and very specific in what you are looking for, so don’t beat around the bush. Only then can you find the right candidate and can the right candidate find you. Furthermore, this has the advantage that you can always open up your scope later on if you cannot find the right candidate initially (trust us, this is better than a general profile which attracts 50+ candidates daily).

Another point here is that you might realize that you need something different than the candidates you have seen to fit the profile so far. Then don’t be afraid to change it and keep the profile as a base for the recruitment.  

Last but not least, if you want to attract new talent, then let others review the profile as well. Their insights and criticism might be crucial for something new and revolutionary. This is especially true if you need to replace a leaving employee with a new hire. In that case, you might not want more of the same, but something new and transforming.

Communication

Secondly, let’s talk communication. Marriage counsellors, salespeople, my mom and dad, almost everybody believes that the key to a good relationship is clear communication. Communication within recruitment often comes in three forms:

1. Digital communication (emails)
2. Telephone and video calls
3. Interviews and in-person meetings

Therein there are two things very important: speed and clarity. As this blog shows, most candidates believe that their experience would have been better if the communication (from the employer) would have been better. This includes responding and giving updates when there is nothing to give an update on, for example; when you are waiting for feedback. Try to keep the candidate up to date with the knowledge you have up until that point even if that is barely more than you have informed them last time.

One way of doing so could be automatically triggered messages which get send to the candidate once something happens to the status of his or her application. The reason is simple; the candidate feels involved and heard. They feel that they are a part of the relationship and the process. So be fast and be clear. That is what candidates are longing for.

How you design you communication is dependent on three factors:

1. the recruitment profile (you might address a VP of engineering differently than an intern)
2. the form of communication (emails, phone calls or face-to-face meetings)
3. how far the candidate is in the process (you can reject somebody in the beginning stages with an email, in final stages nothing less than a phone call is acceptable)

When in contact with candidates always show apathy and understanding for your situation. Every candidate has spent at least three to four hours on his or her application and they are very invested in your company. So, try to place yourself into their situation and treat them with care and hospitality. Understand that you are not only dealing with them, but also with their private life, preferences, values, their entire situation. It could be that a candidate had a rough day and is therefore easily frustrated, so be prepared to show understanding on a professional level. Try to connect as well besides just the job role and to create a bond with the candidate. Small things could be the weather, holidays or other events of that sort. Try to avoid religion, politics and social issues as you never know what their stance or background is on that. In that sense you have to stay professional and without bias.

This shows already that it is very hard to fit a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution and that is where we want to get at. This is not going to be an easy and simple fix, but there are solutions, which brings us to our third point: personalized standardization.

Personalized standardization

In the world of messaging there are mainly two ways of sending messages, either personalized or standardized. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Personalized messaging will create a better bond but it takes time and standardized messaging is easier to execute on mass, but it makes for a less strong bond. Therefore, I would argue to take best from both worlds.

Some (parts of) messages always remain the same “Thank you for your application”, “We look forward hearing from you”, “We are reaching out to you because of your experience at XYZ” etcetera. So, feel free to use standardized messaging, but always use a small personal twist in them so the candidate feels that you are trying to establish a better bond with them and that you are not simply copying and pasting every message to each candidate. This can be small talk about their application, something specific they wrote in their letter or CV, or something completely unrelated, just remember: it needs to be easily accessible for the candidate and politically correct. Holidays are a personal favourite of mine but try and figure out what works for you.

If you find something that works, stick with it, even if it becomes repetitive for you, because what is repetitive for you is not repetitive for each new candidate you get in touch with.

Higher integration and prioritization of recruitment

For most hiring managers recruitment is a necessary means to an end. They need somebody for their team and therefore they need to go through (the mostly unwanted) process of recruiting. That attitude needs to change.

Recruitment needs to be an ongoing part of the work of a hiring manager, even if there is no urgent position to be filled right now. At Google every employee is bound to spend 20% of his or her time on hiring (read more about what we can learn from Google here) and so should your hiring managers. Only that way you can find the talent you need. Weekly recruitment meetings need to be established wherein vacancies, candidates and feedback are discussed.

Direct feedback processes need to be created wherein the feedback does not go via a recruiter but comes from the hiring manager or reviewing expert themselves. This requires some training and practice, but yields better satisfaction as the candidate is directly getting feedback from the experts and able to ask them questions directly. This takes time of your HR employee’s hands which they then can use for sourcing better candidates and to look after their needs.

Involving the team will also create a better understanding for the struggles which accompany recruitment and makes the team also more understanding if some recruitments take longer than expected. This integration and prioritization of recruitment in your organization will ultimately affect the speed by which you communicate with your candidates, and that is ultimately the best thing one can improve according to candidates themselves.

In conclusion

Candidate experience is hard to improve, but necessary. It is an important aspect of your employer branding and requires careful planning and altering. The main points you should be focussing on are:

1. setting up a precise recruitment profile;
2. clear and fast communication;
3. personalized standardized messaging, and;
4. a higher integration and prioritization of recruitment.

If you need help with any of these aspects or if you need us to take off the entire process off your hands? Get in touch with us and see what we can do for you!

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Culture, values, hiring the right people, motivating your employees, developing your employees, all these areas are hard to define and address within a company. To start of these processes it can be helpful to look how other companies have done it. So why not learn directly from the best? In this blog we will take a closer look at 7 essential HR lessons from Google set out in Laszlo Block’s book Work Rules! We will look at their successes and, maybe even more importantly, their failures. We will set apart these lessons and show you how they can help you into developing the right HR processes.

Lesson number 1: Vision, mission, transparency and voice are key to culture.

We keep repeating it and Laszlo confirms it, if you want to build a strong company culture, you need to start at the beginning. You need a clear vision, mission and connected values which describe why your company even exists. These need to be easy to identify with, ambitious and meaningful. The second aspect of their strong culture is their transparency and voice. Laszlo describes a corporate culture where everybody has access to everything in their internal systems from day one. Their CEO gives weekly Q&A sessions about what is going in in the company and they are even regularly running programs where employees can express complaints about internal policies, regulations and way of doing business (like the one in 2009 called ‘Bureaucracy Busters’).

Main takeaway: if you want to turn your departments with employees into teams with colleagues then you need a clear vision and mission, transparency and to let their voices be heard.

Lesson number 2: Hiring the best takes time, resources, (team) effort and high standards.

Within the recruitment department they’ve gone through many phases of what they perceived as the best way of hiring. First, they only admitted the candidates with the best qualifications, then they focussed more on mediocre candidates with better potential for development, in the end they are focussing now on a healthy mixture of both. Above all, they keep their standards high, which is key to the standards of their employees. Only 0,25% of all applicants gets the job. Laszlo compares that with the prestigious university of Harvard, which admits around 6,1% of all its applicants. Just so you understand how few candidates actually get the job. What’s more is that Google interviews new candidates in teams of four. These teams often consist of colleagues, managers, subordinates and one “cross functional interviewer” from an entire different department. He or she should ensure that the candidate is not solely being hired out of mere desperation.

Main takeaway: if you want to have the best teams, never lower your standard to speed up a hiring process. Hiring takes time, effort, resources and high standards. Start to improve your hiring process tomorrow by setting up hiring teams for function instead of ‘just a hiring manager and a recruiter’.

Lesson number 3: Promote autonomy and initiative by encouraging data usage and discouraging politics.

Google has a very flat internal hierarchical structure, in fact there are roughly four levels of hierarchy across all Google employees. Laszlo describes an internal culture where data trumps politics and promotion can only be made if the data shows that you are worthy of the promotion. So, for instance, you want more autonomy or you would like a promotion up the hierarchical ladder, then the data of your past performance must justify this. You must have shown in your work experience that you have a recorded history of making good decisions or leading teams/projects. Only then are you entitled to move up, the internal politics play less of a role. This also creates understanding amongst the rest of the employees why somebody is entitled to a better (paid) position within the company.

Main takeaway: hierarchical decisions need to made based upon transparent data. This has to be done in order to make the right decision, but also to gain support and understanding for the decision being made.

Lesson number 4: Study the top to improve the bottom.

Many companies look at their employees through a performance ranking system called the Bell Curve method (you can read more on that here). They use this system to decide who gets a bonus and who should be let go. Google uses this method too, but uses its results differently. They study their top performers and see what makes their performance so great. They use these results to create similar environments for their bottom performers in order to increase their performance. Project Oxygen showed that an exceptional manager is essential for a top performer. Engineers under an exceptional manager performed 5 to 18 times better than their peers. Google often evaluates the bottom 5% and offers them support to increase their performance.

Main takeaway: try and understand what makes your top performers so good and try and create similar environments for your bottom performers to improve them. Exceptional managers create top performers.

Lesson number 5: Stop looking for external teachers, use your own internal teachers.

Whenever companies feel the need to develop their employees, they often refer to external training agencies. They provide lengthy training sessions and workshops in all forms and ways. Even though this is a billion-dollar industry, the effects are often underwhelming. Laszlo notes that this is often due to ill design, lack of specific information, incorrect teachers or even that the trainings are not analysed for their effectiveness. Within Google they therefore mostly stopped with external development agencies, but are now looking inwards for qualified teachers. That means that if they need to increase sales, or address bugs faster, or find better candidates, they will look for their best sales person, bug squasher or recruiter to teach the rest of the department their tips and tricks. This reduces the training costs and brings their employees closer together in a common goal.

Main takeaway: if you want to develop your employees, look for internal teachers first before reaching out to external teachers.

Lesson number 6: Pay unequal based upon performance, award victories with experiences and encourage failures.

In a world where there are still big discrepancies in pay between gender and race, Google still chooses to pay different people in a similar position different salaries. So how do they justify this? Simple, their solution is to pay fair. If an employee out-performs their colleague by an extra 20%, then this employee will be often entitled to more benefits (in terms of stock options, bonusses and salaries). Although this in and of its own sounds fair, it does not mean that Google handles each situation as well as it ought to, which leads to the occasional salary scandal. Google often tries to increase happiness and performance as well, one of the ways of doing so is to hand out bonusses to well-performing employees. However, an internal survey showed that the employees did not necessarily became happier because if it. To address this Google started to award well-performing teams with experiences instead of individuals with money. This created a stronger sense of team and belonging amongst employees.

Finally, Google also tries to encourage all calculated risks. Google Wave in 2009 failed, but Google rewarded the team working on it anyway. Why? Because Google wants to encourage calculated risks and innovation. Even if the innovation might not turn out to be the next award-winning functionality this time, it could be just that the next time, so you need to keep your team motivated towards innovation.

Main takeaway(s): pay unequally based upon performance supported by data. Celebrate team performance instead of individual performance with experiences. Encourage calculated risks and innovation, even if the possibility exists that it could fail.

Lesson number 7: Face cultural problems, altering behaviour and the power of nudging.

Google has a company culture of transparency, as discussed under lesson number one, and even if that sounds great and has a lot of benefits, it can also backfire. One of the ways it backfires is that Google suffers one significant leak almost every year. When that happens Google announces in the entire company what has been leaked and what has happened to the employee that has caused the leak. Even though this might sounds devastating, Laszlo argues that the benefits of transparency outweigh these disadvantages. The same can be said for when Google tried to decrease some perks and benefits which was met by entitled behaviour such as scolding of and throwing food at cafeteria staff. Google published the entitled behaviour via surveys which led to staff-wide embarrassment and a drop in the level of entitlement. Google also had to deal with the fact that they wanted to change certain behaviours, such as keeping doors open for strangers, eating unhealthy food on lunchbreaks and leaving unlocked computers unattended. From their experiments it shows that restrictions and information about a better choice do not work. It is often met with anger and frustration. Their solution is to keep the freedom of choice, but nudge towards the right behaviour. For example, keep healthy and unhealthy food in the cafeteria, but keep the healthy food widely on display and easily to access while unhealthy food is more hidden and harder to access.

Main takeaway: the only way of facing cultural problems is head on and if you want to change behaviour then you should keep the freedom of choice but nudge towards the right choice.

In conclusion

The biggest insight of ‘Work Rules!’ is that data is key to many HR problems. It should be the key driver behind decision making, culture and many other aspects of HR, not only to do the right thing, but also to create understanding for why you do things. In this blog we have given you a very small taste of a must-read for any HR employee. We therefore strongly recommend that you read Laszlo’s full book, make your own analysis of what might work for your organisation and start making implementation plans to improve your business. Or you can get in touch with us and we can help you to with skipping the first two steps and directly move towards solutions to improve your organization.

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