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When an employer does not give feedback to job applicants or interviewees, it can quickly lead to a negative reputation as an employer. This is often referred to as a “toxic employer brand.” This can make it far more difficult for the employer to attract top talent in the future, as job seekers may be less likely to apply to work for a company with a negative reputation. This is especially true when a company competes for a small talent pool against larger higher paying companies.
Find out how we helped a company that had created a toxic employer brand with a poor candidate feedback habit.
Video content coming soon
This company delivers contract discovery and development services to the scientific sector. The number of projects they win is growing year-on-year, so as they win new large projects, they need to recruit more scientists, typically directly from universities, to staff those projects. The recruitment is performed through relationships with several agencies, who, as is typical in agency recruitment, use blind advertising to attract candidates.
The HR Manager has received some disturbing feedback from two of the agencies – multiple candidates who have responded to blind adverts are withdrawing their applications once they discover who the company is. It seems word has gotten around that the company does not provide any interview feedback – even in the form of rejection letters.
The company is very successful, but young. They do not yet have extensive HR practices in place and admit to being lax in providing feedback. Not only is their target talent pool quite small, but the company also cannot compete with the salaries offered by larger companies that outsource projects to them. For a company whose main asset is intellectual capital, missing out on talent as early as the application stage presents a genuine business threat.
This coaching session was not formally arranged and was slotted in as an ad-hoc session at the end of a training delivery day. None the less a result was achieved with the session taking just 40 mins.
What was a powerful and debilitating trauma response was eliminated with a simple technique. Evidence through calibrating responses in the session was backed up when the coachee reported, a week or so later, that they had spontaneously volunteered to deliver a presentation and it went without a hitch.
Traumatic responses are classed as 'one time learnings' usually induced by a single intense felt experience - unlike slow burnout which typically creeps up over time. Because it is a felt experience talk therapy often doesn't work and in fact ruminating on a feeling can cause a trauma response to generalise and exacerbate a performance problem.
State based approaches to coaching focus on rewiring the neurological and physiological gateway to the felt response. If we consider state as the sum total of cognitive and physiological processing it's clear we have multiple access points to change state. Including talk therapy. But the physiological approach is not only significantly faster but also more robust.
The stand out piece, from a coaching perspective, in the feedback offered by the client is that her offer to deliver a presentation was spontaneous. Given she'd just had coaching we may have expected some deliberation and maybe tentative nerves: "I've just had coaching on public speaking... I think I'll be OK... yes I'll offer to do a presentation" - instead her offer was spontaneous and instant. This demonstrates that state is a high level driver of behaviour and performance.
This was an ad-hoc session without the benefit of planning. Ordinarily we would include some skill based coaching too. Often state based performance issues arise because of lack of competence - we don't want to make incompetent people feel great about being incompetent! Even without any planning the session delivered - demonstrating the versatility of working directly with state.
The final point to note - and it's an important one - working with state can involve very little talking about the underlying issue. In fact we can work content free which means the solution perfectly preserves confidentiality and dignity where necessary.
As a quick and confidential method of getting employees back on track state based coaching is possibly the most under-utilised performance tool used by employers.
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