Many organisations, across a wide range of sectors are facing talent shortages, hindering strategic plans due to a lack of required skills. To attract new talent in an employee-driven labour market, employers are striving to become preferred employers, emphasising benefits, well-being, flexibility, training, and career development. However, the role of technology, particularly job-seeking applications, in talent attraction is often overlooked. According to Cisco AppDynamics’ global research, individuals now utilise an average of six digital services (5 in the UK) when searching for or applying for jobs, increasing to eight in the U.S. and nine in India.
Applications have become integral to the job search process, encompassing job sites, social media platforms, employer websites, and review sites. But when these services underperform, job seekers develop negative perceptions of potential employers. Hence, business leaders must prioritise digital experience in their recruitment strategies by ensuring optimal performance of applications such as career pages, email services, and messaging platforms for candidates. Neglecting this aspect may deter the much-needed talent pool.
Employers with poor digital experiences are losing jobseekers’ interest
People now expect the applications and digital services they use when looking for and applying for a job to deliver the same level of experience they get when they’re streaming movies and music, ordering groceries, or connecting with friends online. They don’t see why they should put up with an inferior experience just because it is job or work-related.
In fact, 97% of jobseekers in the UK state that it is important the applications they use to find and apply for jobs provide a fast and seamless experience, without any delays or disruption. And significantly, 64% (67% in the UK) warn that if these applications fail to perform, it puts them off working for the employer in question.
This statistic alone should make business leaders sit up and pay attention. If their organisation’s applications and digital services aren’t performing as they should – whether that is slow run times, service disruption or downtime – then they essentially risk seeing nearly two-thirds of potential new hires disappearing out of view.
Across the board, people are simply unwilling to tolerate second-rate digital experiences and their reactions when they encounter poorly performing applications are now incredibly strong. 73% of people admit they would feel anxious and angry if the applications they were using to find and apply for a new job didn’t perform properly, and more than half claim that employers have only one shot to impress them with their digital services. The moment they have a bad digital experience, jobseekers walk away, possibly never to return. There are no second chances for employers who slip up.
Gaining the competitive edge in the talent battle through application performance
Evidently, organisations need to do all they can to ensure they are providing potential hires with fast and seamless digital experiences at every stage of the recruitment process.
However, optimising application availability and performance has become a massive challenge for many IT departments. With the shift to multi-cloud and hybrid environments, technologists don’t have the tools and insights they need to manage an increasingly fragmented and highly dynamic IT estate. Most don’t have unified visibility and a clear line of sight on applications running across on-premises and cloud native environments and this makes it very hard for them to identify and troubleshoot issues before they impact end users – in this case, potential new recruits.
To address this challenge, IT teams need an observability solution which spans across hybrid environments (bringing together on-premises and cloud native technologies) and enables them to monitor the health of key business transactions distributed across their entire technology landscape. With real-time insights from the business transaction’s telemetry data, technologists can easily pinpoint the root cause of issues and expedite resolution, so that applications are always performing at the highest level.
According to the research, 78% of jobseekers state they want to work for an employer who provides brilliant, seamless digital experiences throughout the recruitment process. So clearly, organisations that can do so can generate a significant advantage in attracting new talent into their workforce. Business leaders must therefore put applications and digital services at the heart of all their recruitment efforts. And do all they can to ensure they are providing potential hires with fast and seamless experiences at every stage of the process.
